Claudia Ulbrich Mapping The I

Mapping the ‘I’
Egodocuments and History Series
Edited by
Arianne Baggerman (Erasmus University Rotterdam

and University of Amsterdam)
Rudolf Dekker (Center for the Study of Egodocuments
and History, Amsterdam)
Michael Mascuch (University of California, Berkeley)
Advisory Board
James Amelang (Universidad Autónoma Madrid)

Peter Burke (Emmanuel College Cambridge)
Philippe Lejeune (Emeritus, Université de Paris-Nord)
Claudia Ulbrich (Freie Universität Berlin)
VOLUME 8
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/egdo

Mapping the ‘I’
Research on Self-Narratives in Germany
and Switzerland
Edited by
Claudia Ulbrich
Kaspar von Greyerz
Lorenz Heiligensetzer
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Compass rose, image detail from: Jacques Goulart, Chorographica tabula lacus Lemanni
locorumque circumiacentium, Amsterdam, Jodocus Hondius 1606 (University Library of Basel, Kartenslg
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mapping the ‘I’ : research on self-narratives in Germany and Switzerland / edited by Claudia Ulbrich,
Kaspar von Greyerz, Lorenz Heiligensetzer.
pages cm. -- (Egodocuments and history series ; Volume 8)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-28398-5 (hardback : acid-free paper) 1. Autobiography--German authors.
2. Autobiography--Swiss authors. 3. Self (Philosophy) in literature. 4. German literature--Early modern,
1500-1700--History and criticism. 5. Swiss literature (German)--History and criticism. I. Ulbrich, Claudia,
editor. II. Greyerz, Kaspar von, editor. III. Heiligensetzer, Lorenz, 1968- editor.
PT134.A88M37 2014
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2014036560
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Contents
Preface vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Introduction 1
Claudia Ulbrich, Kaspar von Greyerz and Lorenz Heiligensetzer
Part 1
Inroads
1 From the Individual to the Person

Challenging Autobiography Theory 15
Gabriele Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich
2 Observations on the Historiographical Status
of Research on Self-Writing 34
Kaspar von Greyerz
3 Swiss-German Self-Narratives
The Archival Project as a Rich Vein of Research 58
4 Private Body – What Do Self-Narratives Bring to the History of the
Body? 76
Gudrun Piller
Part 2
Approaches
5 “I will Wake the Maidens, They shall Prepare Soup for You” –
Food as a Code in the Autobiography of Thomas Platter 97
Angela Heimen
6 Autobiographical Texts: Acting within a Network

Observations on Genre and Power Relations in the
German-Speaking Regions from 1400 to 1620 118
Gabriele Jancke
vi Contents
7 Condemning Oneself to Death

The Semantics of Suicide in Self-Narratives of the German
Enlightenment 166
Andreas Bähr
8 Pitfalls in Reading Popular Self-Narratives
Biographical Reconfigurations and Self-Censure in the
Autobiography of a Pedlar, Small Farmer and Weaver
from Eastern Switzerland, Gregorius Aemisegger (1815–1913) 190
Fabian Brändle
Part 3
Cartography
9 Family and House Books in Late Medieval German-Speaking Areas

A Research Overview 209
Claudia Ulbrich
10 Autobiography in Economic History 227
Thomas Max Safley
11 Family Politics, Family Networks and the “Familial Self”
Sibling Letters in Seventeenth Century German High
Aristocracy 251
Sophie Ruppel
12 Scrabbling Mice, a Visit from Hades and Thoughts of Death
The Autobiography of Lucas Forcart-Respinger, a Merchant
from Basel (1789–1869) 267
Patricia Zihlmann-Märki
Index of Persons 293
Index of Places 298
Preface
The present volume is the fruit of almost twenty years of cooperation

between research teams at the Free University of Berlin and the University of
Basel, directed, respectively, by Claudia Ulbrich and Kaspar von Greyerz.
The common concern of both teams has been historical research on and with
autobiographies, diaries, family chronicles and related texts. The following
contributions (with one exception) are translations of German originals.
They document the discussions held within, and between, these groups.
Each article represents a certain stage of discussion and their ensemble shows
how the field concerned has evolved, changed direction, and opened up new
avenues during the decade beginning in the mid-1990’s.
Misha Kavka and Hannah Elmer have burdened themselves with the task of
translating the majority of the contributions to this volume. Sophie Häusner
and Judith Weiss have patiently transformed German footnotes into an English
format. We are grateful to them all. We would also like to include in our thanks
the editors of the series and the publishers for their help and assistance.
The editors
Berlin and Basel, February 2014
Notes on Contributors
Andreas Bähr
historian, Dr. phil., assistant lecturer at Berlin Free University, 2004–2011 mem-
ber of the dfg-Research Group “Self Narratives in Transcultural Perspective”
at Berlin Free University. Habilitation 2011. He is author of Der Richter im Ich.
Die Semantik der Selbsttötung in der Aufklärung (Veröffentlichungen des
Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, vol. 180), Göttingen 2002, and Furcht und
Furchtlosigkeit. Göttliche Gewalt und Selbstkonstitution im 17. Jahrhundert
(Berliner Mittelalter- und Frühneuzeitforschung, vol. 14), Göttingen 2013.
Fabian Brändle
historian, Dr. phil., independant researcher. He is the author of Demokratie und
Charisma: fünf Landsgemeindekonflikte im 18. Jahrhundert, Zurich 2005, and
co-editor (together with Dominik Sieber) of the autobiography of Augustin
Güntzer, Kleines Biechlin von meinem gantzen Leben. Die Autobiographie eines
Elsässer Kannengiessers aus dem 17. Jahrhundert (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit,
vol. 7), Cologne, Weimar and Vienna 2002. He also edited the life account
of Gregorius Aemisegger, Das lange Leben eines Toggenburger Hausierers.
Gregorius Aemisegger, 1815–1913 (Toggenburgerblätter für Heimatkunde, vol. 42,
2nd edn), Wattwil 2008. He is the author of many articles dealing with early
modern and nineteenth-century self narratives.
Kaspar von Greyerz

historian, Prof. em. Dr. phil, emeritus professsor of early modern history at the
University of Basel. He is the author of Vorsehungsglaube und Kosmologie.
Studien zu englischen Selbstzeugnissen des 17. Jahrhunderts (Veröffentlichungen
des Deutschen Historischen Instituts London, vol. 25), Göttingen 1990, and
of Passagen und Stationen. Lebensstufen zwischen Mittelalter und Moderne,
Göttingen 2010, and co-editor of the series “Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit”
and of the series “Selbst-Konstruktion. Schweizerische und Oberdeutsche
Selbstzeugnisse 1500–1850.”
historian, Dr. phil., deputy head of the manuscript collection, University
Library Basel, and formerly a research associate in the now completed
Amerbach correspondence. He is the author of Getreue Kirchendiener –
gefährdete Pfarrherren. Deutschschweizer Prädikanten des 17. Jahrhunderts in
ihren Lebensbeschreibungen (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 15), Cologne,
N otes on Contributors ix
Weimar and Vienna 2006, and has edited Alexander Bösch, Liber familiarium
personalium […]. Lebensbericht und Familiengeschichte des Toggenburger
Pfarrers Alexander Bösch (1618–1693), (Selbst-Konstruktion, vol. 1), Basel 2001.
Angela Heimen
m.a., historian, from 2007 to 2011 coordinator of the dfg-research group “Self
Narratives in Transcultural Perspective” at Berlin Free University. She wrote
her master’s thesis on Essgeschichten. Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel der
Autobiographie von Thomas Platter (2006/07).
Gabriele Jancke
historian, Dr. phil., assistant lecturer at Berlin Free University, 2004–2011 mem-
ber of the dfg-research group “Self Narratives in Transcultural Perspective”
at Berlin Free University. Habilitation 2012. Among her publications are:
Autobiographie als soziale Praxis. Beziehungskonzepte in Selbstzeugnissen
des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum (Selbstzeugnisse
der Neuzeit, vol. 10), Cologne, Weimar and Vienna 2002, and Gastfreundschaft
in der frühneuzeitlichen Gesellschaft. Praktiken, Normen und Perspektiven
von Gelehrten (Berliner Mittelalter- und Frühneuzeitforschung, vol. 15),
Göttingen 2013. She co-edited (with Claudia Ulbrich) Vom Individuum zur
Person. Neue Konzepte im Spannungsfeld zwischen Autobiographietheorie und
Selbstzeugnisforschung (Querelles, vol. 10), Göttingen 2005, and is co-editor
(with Andreas Bähr and Peter Burschel) of Räume des Selbst. Selbstzeugnisse
transkulturell (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 19), Cologne, Weimar and
Vienna 2007.
Gudrun Piller
historian, Dr. phil., deputy director of the Historical Museum, Basel. She is
the author of Private Körper. Spuren des Leibes in Selbstzeugnissen des 18.
Jahrhunderts (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 17), Cologne, Weimar and
Vienna 2007, and co-editor (together with Margret Ribbert) of the exhibition
catalogue Kinderleben in Basel. Eine Kulturgeschichte der frühen Jahre,
Basel 2005.
Sophie Ruppel
historian, Dr. phil., lecturer and researcher in the Department of History,
University of Basel. She is the author of Verbündete Rivalen. Geschwister
beziehungen im Hochadel des 17. Jahrhunderts, Cologne 2006, and co-editor
of “Die Natur ist überall bey uns”. Mensch und Natur in der Frühen Neuzeit,
Zurich 2009.
x Notes on Contributors
Thomas Max Safley

historian, Ph.D., Professor of Early Modern European History at the University
of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, usa, and associate member of the Berlin-based
research group “Self Narratives in Transcultural Perspective”. Among his publi-
cations are Matheus Miller’s Memoir: A Merchant’s Life in the Seventeenth
Century, Basingstoke 2000, and Children of the laboring poor: expectation and
experience among the orphans of early modern Augsburg, Leiden 2005.
He edited Die Aufzeichnungen des Matheus Miller - Das Leben eines Augsburger
Kaufmanns im 17. Jahrhundert (Reiseberichte und Selbstzeugnisse aus
Bayerisch-Schwaben, vol. 4) Augsburg 2003.
Claudia Ulbrich
historian, Prof. Dr. phil., Professor of Early Modern History and Gender History
at Free University of Berlin since 1994, and speaker of the dfg-Research Group
“Self Narratives in Transcultural Perspective” at Berlin Free University. She is
the author of Shulamit and Margarete. Power, Gender and Religion in a Rural
Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe, transl. by Thomas Dunlap (2004,
Paperback 2005), and co-editor of the series “Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit”.
She is member of the editorial board of “Egodocuments and History” and of
“L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft”.
historian, Dr. phil., is a researcher in the editorial team based at the University
of Bern working on a critical edition of the works of Jeremias Gotthelf. She is
the author of “Gott gebe das wir das Liebe Engelein mit Freüden wieder sehen
Mögen.” Eine kulturgeschichtliche Untersuchung des Todes in Basel 1750–1850,
Zurich 2010.
Introduction
Claudia Ulbrich, Kaspar von Greyerz and Lorenz Heiligensetzer
The general interest in autobiographical texts as sources of history has grown

from the 1980’s onwards. This was, of course, closely connected with the inven-
tion of new approaches such as history from below, micro-history and, more
generally, the new cultural history. With this new background, historians such
as Natalie Zemon Davis, James Amelang, Daniel Roche, Robert Darnton and
many others wrote important studies in which they worked with, and investi-
gated, sources that came to be called ‘ego-documents’ in the Netherlands and
in the Anglo-American world. Within this latter context, Peter Burke is today
considered to have been the first English historian using this new category in
an article on “Representations of the Self: from Petrarch to Descartes.”1 Mary
Lindemann, in turn, observed in an article written for the Encyclopedia of
European Social History that ‘egodocuments’ were propitious sources for
research on “agency, dignity, and texture” of common people.2
Research in this new field received a veritable boost in the early 1990’s by
a Dutch group led by Rudolf Dekker. In 1988 Dekker had already published a
useful overview of the field down to 1986/1987.3 The Dutch researchers began
their work by concentrating on inventaries of autobiographical writing in
the Netherlands.4 This, in turn, generated monographical studies and text-
editions.5 From its inception, the Dutch group revived the category of ‘ego-
documents’ in their research on Dutch personal documents from the years
1500 to 1814. They used this category in referring to autobiographies, memoirs,
diaries of a personal nature as well as travel journals. For practical reasons, the
group excluded letters from its purview, but it did include personal notes,
1 Peter Burke, “Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes,” in Rewriting the Self.
Histories from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: 1997), 17–28, 21. See also
Rudolf Dekker, “Introduction,” in Egodocuments and History. Autobiographical Writing in its
Social Context since the Middle Ages, ed. idem (Hilversum: 2002), 7–20, here 8–9.
2 Mary Lindemann, “Sources of Social History” in Encyclopedia of European Social History,
vol. 1 (Detroit: 2001), 36.
3 Dekker, ‘Egodocumenten. Een literatuuroverzicht’, Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis, 101 (1988),
161–189.
4 This is discussed in Dekker, “Egodocuments in the Netherlands from the Sixteenth to the
Nineteenth Century,” in E. Griffey (ed.), Envisioning Self and Status. Self Representation in the
Low Countries, 1400–1700 (Series Crossways, vol. 5), (Hull: 1999), 255–285.
5 Rudolf Dekker, Childhood, Memory and Autobiography in Holland. From the Golden Age to
Romanticism (London, 2000); Ariane Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker, Child of the Enlighten
ment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary (Leiden: 2009).
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004283978_002

2 Ulbrich, von Greyerz and Heiligensetzer
which were limited in time and focussed on a specific event, as for example on
a family quarrel. In reviving the category of egodocuments they adopted a
notion created by Jacques Presser in the early 1950’s.6
By the 1990’s, Winfried Schulze wanted to encourage German researchers to
emulate the Dutch. In 1992 he ran an international conference in this field at
Bad Homburg and, on this occasion, created the German version of the notion
of egodocument. On the one hand, he adopted Presser’s category, on the other,
however, he widened the category considerably so as to include also court
records, even those which carried the marks of coercion. In the end, Schulze’s
category did not prevail. Self-narrative (Selbstzeugnis) rather than Egodokument
became the common currency adopted by germanophone research during the
following years.7 This was especially the case in research on early modern doc-
uments. The 1990’s and the beginning of the new century also witnessed the
creation of series such as Selbstzeugnisse des Mittelalters und der beginnenden
Neuzeit,8 Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit 9 and Selbst-Konstruktion. Schweizerische
und oberdeutsche Selbstzeugnisse, 1500–1850.10 These series have since reflected
the state of the art and the changes it underwent. Publishing activities were
accompanied by large research projects aiming at the inventary of sources and
at the systematic development of the field. These attempts were embedded in
major research projects under the direction of Kaspar von Greyerz and Claudia
Ulbrich at the universities of Basel and Berlin.
Kaspar von Greyerz began work in the field concerned here in the early
1980’s. His first contribution to it appeared in 1984.11 He initiated in 1996 an
inventarization of self narratives in major archives and libraries of germano-
phone Switzerland which resulted in an open access database.12 In following
6 Dekker, Introduction, 7f.

7 Kaspar von Greyerz, Ego-Documents: The Last Word?, in German History 28 (2010),
273–282.
8 Sabine Schmolinsky, Jörg Hillmann and Markus Späth, Selbstzeugnisse des Mittelalters
und der beginnenden Neuzeit, vol. 1 (Bochum: 1999).
9 Alf Lüdtke, Hans Medick, Claudia Ulbrich, Kaspar von Greyerz and Dorothee Wierling
(eds.), Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit , vol. 1 (Berlin: 1993), vol. 7ff.: Cologne, Weimar and
Vienna: 1999-); http://www.boehlau-verlag.com/Selbstzeugnisse_der_Neuzeit.htm.
10 Kaspar von Greyerz and Alfred Messerli (eds.), Selbst-Konstruktion. Schweizerische und
oberdeutsche Selbstzeugnisse, 1500–1850, vol. 1ff, (Basel: 2001-).
11 Kaspar von Greyerz, Religion in the Life of German and Swiss Autobiographers (Sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries), in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–
1800, ed. idem (London: 1984), 223–241.
12 The database is currently being extended by a research team directed by Danièle Tosato-
Rigo (University of Lausanne) to cover also material from the French and Italian-speaking
Introduction 3
the Dutch example, the Swiss team working at the University of Basel decided
to base their research on new bibliographical tools which they established in
digital form. This commitment to investigations on self narratives eventually
resulted in major contributions by the doctoral students Lorenz Heiligensetzer,
Sebastian Leutert, Gudrun Piller and Patricia Zihlmann-Märki, of whom
Lorenz Heiligensetzer joined the editorial team of this volume on account of
continuing his involvement in research on self narratives to this day, particu-
larly as a co-editor of the Amerbach-Korrespondenz.13
Claudia Ulbrich joined the field about a decade ago.14 She has been the mas-
termind behind the creation of the Berlin research group, in operation since
2003 and funded by the Deutsche Forschungsmeinschaft.15 Some of the salient
ideas which the comparative and transcultural work of the Berlin group is
committed to, were developed by her and Gabriele Jancke while organizing a
section for the bi-annual convention of German historians held in 2000 in
Aachen.16 It must be added that this was strongly inspired by methodological
conceptions Gabriele Jancke had developed already in the early 1990’s when
she began to look at early modern autobiographical writing as a social act
strongly linked to patronage and networking. We have included her contribu-
tion referred to here, because it has influenced the approaches chosen by the
Berlin research group in a major way. In Berlin, too, inventary projects were
launched. The most important among them is Gudrun Wedel’s Handbuch,
an encyclopedia which covers 6000 published autobiographical texts written
by women within the Germanic world during the nineteenth century.17
Comprehensive inventaries, as they exist today for the Netherlands and for
German-speaking Switzerland during the early modern period, have not yet
parts of Switzerland. In future, it will be hosted by the University of Lausanne and will go
online in 2015: www.egodocuments.ch.
13 Die Amerbachkorrespondenz, vol. I–XI (Basel: 1942–2010).
14 Claudia Ulbrich, „Zeuginnen und Bittstellerinnen. Überlegungen zur Bedeutung von Ego-
Dokumenten für die Erforschung weiblicher Selbstwahrnehmung in der ländlichen
Gesellschaft des 18. Jahrhunderts“ in Ego-Dokumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in der
Geschichte, ed. Winfried Schulze (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 2), (Berlin: 1996),
207–226.
15 dfg Research Group: Self-Narratives in Transcultural Perspective (http://www.geschkult.
fu-berlin.de/e/fg530/).
16 See Kaspar von Greyerz and Claudia Ulbrich, “Selbstzeugnisse in transkultureller
Perspektive,” in Eine Welt – Eine Geschichte?, Berichtsband 43. Deutscher Historikertag in
Aachen 2000 (Munich: 2001), 48–55.
17 Gudrun Wedel, Autobiographien von Frauen. Ein Lexikon (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna:
2010).
materialized in Austria and Germany. Given the geographical size of Germany,

and the concomitant number of archive and library holdings which would
have to be covered, this lacuna is not at all surprising. To date, in the case of
Austria, there is a selective survey, established by Harald Tersch for the years
1400 to 1650,18 and for Germany Benigna von Krusenstjern has composed a
very useful compendium of published texts from the period of the Thirty Years
War.19 Gabriele Jancke has expanded this extensively for the period 1400 to
1620 by creating an online data-base in 2007.20
Research on Selbstzeugnisse has been in a process of transformation for
some time. In German-speaking research this was initiated by the discussion
of the concept of individualisation. This discussion only gradually gained in
strength. During the 1990’s, even on an international level, the idea of individu-
alisation still was the dominant conceptual tool of research. Autobiographies,
diaries, family chronicles, and other related documents were generally consid-
ered to offer a useful historiographical perspective on this macrohistorical
phenomenon. The prevalence of this concept was confirmed by a major inter-
national conference held at the Monte Verità (Ticino, Switzerland) in October
1998.21 However, many contributions delivered there substantiated the histo-
riographical usefulness of first-person writing from different thematic angles,
such as emotions, body experience, religion, urban context. An international
workshop held in Munich in June 2004 marked a kind of intermediate stage in
the transformation in question especially in relativising the macrohistorical
significance of individualisation (in the singular) by highlighting the multiplic-
ity of such processes in the early modern world.22 In more recent research, the
concept of the person and of personhood has now clearly begun to inspire the
18 Harald Tersch, Österreichische Selbstzeugnisse des Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit
(1400–1650), (Vienna: 1998).
19 Benigna von Krusenstjern, Selbstzeugnisse der Zeit des Dreissigjährigen Krieges: Besch
reibendes Verzeichnis (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 6) (Berlin: 1997).
20 Gabriele Jancke, Selbstzeugnisse im deutschsprachigen Raum – Autobiographien, Tage
bücher und andere autobiographische Schriften, 1400–1620. Eine Quellenkunde. Unter
Mitarbeit von Marc Jarzebowski, Klaus Krönert und Yvonne Aßmann (August 2008), http://
www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/jancke-quellenkunde.
21 The proceeedings were published in Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich.
Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500–1800), (Selbstzeugnisse der
Neuzeit, vol. 9), ed. by Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans Medick and Patrice Veit, (Cologne,
Weimar and Vienna: 2001).
22 Kaspar von Greyerz (ed.), Selbstzeugnisse der Frühen Neuzeit. Indivdualisierungsweisen in
internationaler Perspektive (Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien, vol. 68),
(Munich: 2007).
Introduction 5
majority of investigations in the field.23 This has finally replaced the idea of
invidualisation as a guiding theme and has resulted in a systematic effort “to
relate individual autobiographical endeavors to broader cultural traditions of
writing as well as to distinct social identities and roles.”24
Inroads, in terms of bringing transcultural perspectives into ongoing research,
were thus prepared. They were tested at two consecutive conferences organized
by the Berlin research group and held in 2006 and 2010.25 Among their most
important results was the insight into the extent to which many authors posi-
tion their selves simultaneously in different cultural settings. As a result, the
research in question was transferred into new contexts of global history, where
questions of hybridity and entanglement are of considerable importance.
Recently, this new transcultural perspective has also informed research
outside the Germanic world, notably the new international network of schol-
ars promoted by the French historian François-Joseph Ruggiu.26 During
the last ten years, he has been instrumental in bringing together researchers
in the field on an international scale. The basis of this effort was an initiative
spearheaded by Ruggiu to encourage research on, as well as the systematic col-
lection of, relevant source material in France.27 In 2008 he organized an explor-
atory workshop held in Bordeaux with participants from twelve countries on
the possibility of creating a European network. A follow-up workshop orga-
nized by Naomi Segal successfully connected the international focus with a
decidedly interdisciplinary and transcultural perspective.28
Research on self narratives is inherently marked by two agendas. On the one
hand, the texts are being analyzed in an attempt to investigate specific themes
23 See Vom Individuum zur Person. Neue Konzepte im Spannungsfeld von Autobiographie-
theorie und Selbstzeugnisforschung (Querelles. Jahrbuch für Frauen- und Geschlechter
forschung, vol. 10), ed. Gabriele Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich (Göttingen: 2005).
24 James Amelang, “Transcultural Autobiography, or The lives of Others,” in Selbstzeugnis
und Person. Transkulturelle Perspektiven, ed. Claudia Ulbrich, Hans Medick and Angelika
Schaser, (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 20), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2012),
77–100, here 81.
25 For the 2006-conference see Räume des Selbst. Selbstzeugnisforschung transkulturell, ed.
Andreas Bähr, Peter Burschel and Gabriele Jancke (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 19),
(Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2007); for the 2010-conference see above n. 24.
26 See François-Joseph Ruggiu, ed., The Uses of First Person Writings. Africa, America, Asia,
Europe […], (Brussels etc.: 2013).
27 Documented by the series Les écrits du for privé en France de la fin du Moyen-Âge à 1914.
See http://www.ecritsduforprive.fr/.
28 The title of the workshop was First-person writing, four-way reading. Most papers are
accessible online: http://www.esf.org/?id=8674.
and questions. Next to treating concepts of the person and of personhood and
the place of individuality within this context, self narratives are able to convey
insights into an almost unlimited field of aspects. Time, space and memory are
only some of the most important such aspects, which have been favoured by
recent research.29 On the other hand, the texts themselves continue to inspire
investigations into questions of genre and practices of writing, including writ-
ing about the ‘I’, in the context of a global history which intends to remain
conscious of, and critical vis-à-vis, its methods.
***
The present volume documents many years of a fruitful cooperation between

researchers concerned with self narratives of the German-speaking world in
the early modern period and the long nineteenth century based in Basel and
Berlin. The Berlin-Basel cooperation was a follow-up on the first international
conference in the field, in which both organizers participated. The conference,
mentioned above, took place on the Monte Verità in October 1998.30 A section
on “Self-narratives in transcultural perspective” followed at the Deutscher
Historikertag in Aachen in 2000. An important impact encouraging further
international cooperation came from Rudolf Dekker, who, in the wake of a con-
ference held in Rotterdam in 2002 in connection with the Huizinga Institute,
launched a project of internationalisation on the theme of Egodocumenten,
zelfreflectie en culturele verandering: Nederland, Zwitzerland en de europese
context, 1600–1900, which was financed by the nwo. This involved planning
additional conferences in order to establish a network of researchers . The first
workshop was organized in Berlin in November 2003, in which researchers
from the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany met for an exchange of expe-
riences and to discuss the major projects then going on in all three countries in
an attempt to establish inventaries of the relevant sources.31 This exchange was
continued in a workshop held in Basel, organized by Kaspar von Greyerz under
29 See for example (amongst many works) Rudolf Dekker, Family, Culture and Society in
the Diary of Constantijn Huygens Jr., Secretary to Stadholder-King William of Orange,
(Egodocuments and History, vol. 5), (Leiden and Boston: 2013); Giovanni Ciapelli, ed.,
Memoria, famiglia, identità tra Italia ed Europa nell’ età moderna, Bologna 2009; Ulrike
Gleixner, Pietismus und Bürgertum. Eine historische Anthropologie der Frömmigkeit:
Württemberg, 17.–19. Jahrhundert, (Göttingen: 2005).
30 See now Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans Medick and Patrice Veit (eds.), Von der dargestellten
Person zum erinnerten Ich. Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500–1850),
(Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 9), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2002).
31 For a conference report, see http://www.h-net.org/mmreviews/showrev.cgi?path=636.
Introduction 7
the title “Early modern autobiographical testimony. Categories, limits, research

in progress.” The final conference of this series of meetings, organized by
Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker, met in Rotterdam: “Controlling Time
and Shaping the Self: The Rise of Autobiographical Writing since 1750.”32
The Berlin-Basel cooperation also included teaching, such as a seminar in the
spring and summer of 2002 bringing together Berlin and Basel students entitled
“From the person to the subject. Ways of early modern individualisation.”33 A
repeat performance was launched in the spring and summer of 2007, this time
focussing on “Friendship, love and marriage in early modern self-narratives.”
These events generated a number of ma-theses, as well as doctoral dissertations.
This collective volume is divided into three parts. “Inroads” should indicate
that we want to begin by displaying the variety of self narratives of the early
modern and modern Germanic world both in terms of the methodological
sophistication their analysis requires, as well as in terms of the enrichment of
our historical knowledge their analysis holds in store for us. “Approaches” is
meant to document different angles from which the texts in question can be
looked at. They offer themselves likewise to studies of nutritional habits, of social
patronage, of the semantics of historical representations, of the self-perception
and its textual construction in so-called popular autobiography. “Cartography,”
finally, encapsulates an attempt to point at the boundaries of the field, not least
in terms of the varieties of genre, which the notion of self narratives covers.
The contributions which follow are chiefly intended to serve the documen-
tation of the development of the Basel-Berlin cooperation referred to above.
The collection of essays assembled in this volume begins with the introduction
to the collective volume Vom Individuum zur Person (2005), edited by Gabriele
Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich. It is a comprehensive account of the concept, on
which the Berlin research group based its work. This concept developed from
the observation that writing about one’s own life has been widespread already
for a considerable time in many non-European countries. However, the occi-
dental narrative centered on the development of individualism and its gen-
dered and class limitations have, for a long time, obscured the self-writing of
persons who are not male, urban, Christian, white and European. The authors
advocate a new approach that privileges the concept of the person in order to
get beyond this impasse. The first part of the contribution is devoted to a criti-
cal assessment of research on autobiographical writing to date. The authors go
32 Arianne Baggerman, Rudolf Dekker, Michel Mascuch (eds.), Controlling Time and Shap
ing the Self. Developments in Autobiographical Writing since the Sixteenth Century
(Egodocuments and History Series, vol. 3) Leiden 2011.
33 “Von der Person zum Subjekt. Individualisierungsweisen in der frühen Neuzeit.”
on to propose the replacement of the notion of the individual, which is strongly

influenced by the German nineteenth-century history of ideas, by a histori-
cally and culturally oriented concept of the person inspired by the writings of
Marcel Mauss.
Kaspar von Greyerz looks at five seventeenth-century texts which stem
from different urban and rural social backgrounds, belong to different reli-
gious and confessional worlds and were written by men and women. The focus
is on the self narratives of the Hessian peasant Caspar Preis (?-c. 1667), the
Franconian prophetess Anna Vetter (1630–1703), the Alsatian pewterer
Augustin Güntzer (1596-c. 1657), the Ulm architect Joseph Furttenbach (1591–
1667) and the Jewish tradeswoman Glückel von Hameln (1645–1724). The aim
of the article is to illustrate the historiographical bonus inherent in a close
study of such documents, for example in that they highlight the apocalyp-
tic climate associated with the experience of the Thirty Years War and bring
home the great significance the authors attached to foreboding signs as divine
messages. Likewise, the author argues, research on seventeenth-century self-
writing can offer us a deeper understanding not only of the perception of ill-
ness and the body in contemporary society, but also of the hybridity of the
process of confessionalization.
While the essay by Gabriele Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich at the beginning of
the present collection focuses on the work of the Berlin research group, Lorenz
Heiligensetzer’s contribution is a report about some results of the major inven-
tory-project covering unpublished self-writing in early modern German-
speaking Switzerland. He concentrates in particular on the genristic variety of
writing about oneself, which one encounters in the archives on the basis of an
open search strategy. In spite of their heterogeneity the texts in question do
not resist typology. We are able to distinguish three major categories of genre
(diary, family chronicle and autobiography) which the author examines in
looking at three miniature samples. The three texts he has chosen to discuss
represent peculiarities within the genre they belong to. Heiligensetzer specifi-
cally looks at the diary of a young woman of 15 years of age in revolutionary
Paris (Barbara Bansi [1777–1863] from the Grisons), a family chronicle from
Solothurn, which actually turns out to represent a Hausbuch, and the auto-
biography of the Bernese Reformed minister Johannes Erb (1635–1701), which
is written in the form of a dialogue. A closer examination of these texts offers
some general insights into the different ways of early modern self-writing.
This is followed by Gudrun Piller’s contribution who summarizes her work
on the eighteenth-century history of the body as mirrored by self-narratives.
The main question she is exploring is the place of body history based on
the analysis of self narratives between a history of personal experiences
Introduction 9
(Erfahrungsgeschichte) and the history of discourse. She concludes that a his-

tory of the body relying on the study of self narratives is necessarily part of a
history of discourse, but adds that the authors in question were far from being
prisoners of prevailing discourses because they created their own new dis-
courses. This is how self narratives offer us a glance at personal and, at times,
idiosyncratic ways of perceiving and articulating aspects of corporeality. Piller
demands that as historians we should perceive autobiographical writing in all
its formal, textual and cultural variety. However she is also adamant about the
pitfalls inherent in the notion of experience: it should by no means lead us into
approaching the texts in question with a desire to discover authenticity.
Thomas Platter’s (1499?-1582) autobiography probably is one of the most
widely known autobiographical texts of the sixteenth century – at least in
Western historiography. The central axis of his story is his social rise from goat-
herd in the Valais to headmaster in Basel and the basic hinge of it is the early
adherence he claims for himself to the Reformation of Huldrych Zwingli in
Zurich. Angela Heimen offers the first reading of the references to food which
are all pervasive in Platter’s text. While doing so, she concentrates not so much
on Platter’s account of his childhood and youth, when he was wandering
around a good part of Europe from one school to the next − an experience
marked with begging and hunger −, but rather on the way Platter relates his
adulthood. Food-references in this part of his self-narrative, Heimen explains,
are a kind of code which throws additional and new light on episodes related
to Platter’s alleged early partisanship in favour of the Reformation, his relation-
ship to his mother and to his wife and on his attempt to portray himself as
an esteemed and valuable member of the community.
In her article, which originally appeared in 1994, Gabriele Jancke discusses
methodological issues. This is based on her investigation of 200 autobiographi-
cal texts which were written within the German-speaking area during the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries. She proposes to shift the focus of our attention
from individuals to persons in their relationships and their specific contexts,
organizing their lives and practices according to their own concepts of person-
hood, sociality, action, which they consider to be meaningful. This approach
involves questions regarding the writing situation, the readership intended by
the author, the genre and the functions of the text. Jancke considers the kind of
writing involved to be an act of communication in which agency and relation-
ships express themselves. She addresses in detail the cases of Josel von Rosheim
(ca. 1478–1554), Katharina Zell (1497/98-1562) and Jacob Andreae (1528–1590)
in an attempt to demonstrate the great variety of writing situations, as well as
forms and strategies of arguing, and shows how the three authors tried to inter-
vene in the secular and ecclesiastical relations of power of their own time.
Andreas Bähr’s essay, which follows, is committed to different methodologi-

cal precepts. His main subject is the semantics of suicide in the German
Enlightenment. He particularly looks at two cases of suicides, one in 1754, the
other sometime before 1800, which are attested to by self-narratives written
by the persons who committed suicide immediately before killing themselves.
He notes that contemporary theologians, philosophers and others tirelessly
emphasized the fact that suicides violated religious and social duties. However,
instead of trying to explain these, and by extension, other suicides of the
Enlightenment in a causal way, Bähr makes a case in favour of a historically-
semantic analysis while criticizing causal explanations for their essentialist
assumptions. The suicides in question followed the voice of their conscience,
which was morally correct, but, at the same time, committed an act which was
considered morally reprehensible. The author argues for the semantic unity
of the moral legitimation of allowing the inner voice of conscience and the
prohibition of the act of self-killing: “The moral prohibition of ‘self-murder’
appears as the semantic condition of the possibility for moral hopelessness.”
Gregorius Aemisegger’s (1815–1913) autobiography, with which Fabian Brän
dle is concerned, is a relatively rare case of an account written by a member of
the lower classes. Aemisegger held many professions during his long life. He
was a weaver, at one point even an overseer at a hospital in St. Gall, but his
main occupation was that of a pedlar. In his autobiographical account he
stresses the fact that on numerous occasions he was a benefactor to others in
distress, that he entertained a very special relationship with animals and that,
on the whole, he was keen to emulate the mythical William Tell who was fre-
quently seen at that time as a benefactor to those in need and distress. Brändle
admits that, for lack of additional information, it is difficult to assess critically
the self-portrait of the pedlar, excepting one aspect: An obituary reveals that
in 1845 and 1847 he had actively participated in military campaigns against the
Catholic conservatives of Lucerne and that references to this act of belliger-
ence against Catholicism fall prey to the author’s self censure. The case is a
salutary reminder that we should be cautious in interpreting such texts.
There is a tradition in the German history of ideas which strongly connects
the inception of autobiographical writing with the advent of the consciousness
of the individual, and which claims that this spread across the urban culture of
the occident. Claudia Ulbrich takes issue with this interpretation, combining
medieval research on gender and family history with the history of early auto-
biographical writing. The author argues that the late medieval process of life
and work acquiring a primarily familial mode was an important starting point
for writing about oneself. The genealogical passages in house and family chron-
icles not only served as a basis for putting the family and parenthood on stage
Introduction 11
and to accumulate prestige, they were above all a forum where gender and
power relationships were negotiated. The connection between patriarchy and
the keeping of family chronicles must be seen as a phenomenon that was inter-
woven with the creation of lignages legitimating patrilinear geneaology. This
new definition of social roles also brought about a new evaluation of the house.
The autobiographical accounts written by the Augsburg merchants Caspar
Koch (1576–1620), Matthäus Miller (1625–1685) and Philipp Höchstetter (1579–
1635) provide the basis for Thomas M. Safely’s reflections on the value of the
research on self-narratives for economic history. The two fields of research
have so far remained largely unconnected. Historians of the economy accord
only a limited attention to individual actors while research on self-narratives
privileges the personal perspective, the individual creation of meaning and
cultural values rather than the material bases of life. However, the three
Augsburg texts that the author investigates demonstrate the large extent to
which economic thinking and acting influenced the persons concerned. To be
sure, such personal writing necessarily implies a microeconomic perspective
regarding production, exchange and consumption. But for the kind of eco-
nomic history that wants to integrate the microhistorical level into its narra-
tive, autobiographical accounts clearly represent important sources.
Historical investigations of early modern self-narratives of the last decades
have rarely looked at correspondence. Sophie Ruppel deals with this neglected
group of sources, more precisely with the courtly letters of the seventeenth
century, that is, the correspondence between nobles at territorial courts of the
Holy Roman Empire. This is based on her dissertation on relations between
noble siblings in the Palatine, Hannoverian and Brandenburg electorates, as
well as in the Landgraviate of Hessen-Kassel. She compares this correspon-
dence with that of the urban middle classes as examined in studies concen-
trating in particular on the eighteenth century. In contrast, the courtly letter is
embedded in the ceremonies of court life and, as regards postal address, intro-
duction and signature, it adheres to courtly hierarchy. It is at once political
correspondence, business message, as well as a document of friendship and
family concerns. This is connected to the fact that many members of princely
families married into other dynasties and, thus, resided or held functions at
other courts. As a result, they played an important role in transmitting infor-
mation, in representing the interests of their own dynasty and in building up a
network.
Like Fabian Brändle’s essay, Patricia Zihlmann-Märki’s contribution focuses
on the first half of the nineteenth century. It deals with an extraordinary auto-
biography: the account written by the Basel merchant Lucas Forcart-Respinger
(1789–1869). The son of an affluent family (although temporarily threatened
by bankruptcy), he belonged to the socially and politically conservative part

of well established Basel families who are today considered to have been
the backbone of the late-Pietist and “awakened,” “pious Basel.” The author’s
detailed, unpublished autobiography is dominated by accounts of, and
thoughts on, death and dying and the after-world. They concern not only the
deaths of others, notably of his wife and two sons who died within the space of
only two years, but also his own yearning for death, after having survived a
dangerous decease. This survival creates a dilemma for Forcart-Respinger. His
reflections on the after-life reveal that he thought “that in addition to heaven
and hell there was at least one other place in the beyond where souls saved
from hell resided and which could facilitate interaction between the living and
the dead.”
Part 1
Inroads
∵
From the Individual to the Person
Challenging Autobiography Theory1
Gabriele Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich
The history of the discovery of the individual is one of the master narratives of
Western modernity, although in the course of globalization this narrative has
increasingly been put into question. The concept of the individual no longer
sits particularly well with the experiences and expectations of people who are
used to thinking and acting in terms of networks. Even when it comes to pro-
cessing daily experiences, it is of little help to think of oneself as an individual
with a singular, narratable story. Instead of speaking of a crisis of the individual
in second modernity,2 in this essay we would like to work with the more open
concept of the person.
Up to now, numerous literary and historiographical studies have presumed
that the development of individuality, autobiographical writing and so-called
Western culture are closely intertwined. Martin Danahay, for instance, begins
his article “Individualism and Life Writing” by remarking, “The histories of
life writing and individualism in Western culture have moved in parallel.”3
Ultimately, this assessment is based on a series of binaries, all of which
are constructed as oppositions: West vs. non-West, individuality vs. holism,
modernity vs. tradition, rationality vs. spirituality. Frequently, this is associ-
ated with a mythologization of Western experience, which “denies Western as
well as non-Western societies their history.”4 Alongside such a one-dimensional
and linear viewpoint, however, there are other, broader perspectives. Dipesh
Chakrabarty, for instance, in discussing India of the nineteenth century, is
critical of the correlation between the modern nation-state, the modern
1 This essay is an only slightly revised version of the introduction to a volume edited by
the authors, Vom Individuum zur Person. Neue Konzepte im Spannungsfeld von Autobiographie
theorie und Selbstzeugnisforschung (Querelles. Jahrbuch für Frauen- und Geschlechterfor
schung, vol. 10), (Göttingen: 2005). The text was translated by Misha Kavka and
Hannah Elmer.
2 Reinhard Sieder, “Die Rückkehr des Subjekts in den Kulturwissenschaften,” in Die Rückkehr
des Subjekts in den Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Reinhard Sieder (Wien: 2004), 15–59.
3 Martin A. Danahay, “Art. Individualism and Life Writing,” in Encyclopedia of Life Writing.
Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, 2 vols., ed. Margaretta Jolly (London and Chicago:
2001), 466f., here 466.
4 Shalini Randeria, “Geteilte Geschichte und verwobene Moderne,” in Zukunftsentwürfe. Ideen
für eine Kultur der Veränderung, ed. Jörn Rüsen, Hanna Leitgeb and Norbert Jegelka (Frankfurt
a.M. and New York: 2000), 87–96, here 90f., cit. 91.

16 Jancke and Ulbrich
individual and the development of literary genres “that help express the mod-
ern self” – namely, “the novel, the biography, the autobiography and history.”5
Of course, there have also been other “constructions of self and community,”
but these could “never enjoy the privilege of providing the meta-narratives
or teleologies (assuming that there cannot be a narrative without at least an
implicit teleology) of our histories.”6 Chakrabarty emphasizes the close corre-
lation between the concept of the modern individual and the nation-state:
the individual is always thought of as a citizen, anchored in the structures
and ideas of the nation-state. He also points out that it was British rule which
“put in place the practices, institutions, and discourse of bourgeois individual-
ism in the Indian soil,” all of which were closely tied with the project of Indian
nationalism.7
Studies of self-narratives in non-European societies repeatedly draw on a
paradigm that correlates individuality with autobiographical writing, a para-
digm which then acts as a measure for assessing autobiographical writing in
these societies.8 This approach prevents one from seeing how the self and
autobiographical writing have developed in non-Western societies; rendering
such developments invisible, it shapes discussion in terms of the deficits and
delays supposedly prevalent in other societies by comparison. Implicitly, this
model takes as its basis a singular Western modernity, which is presumed to be
equally applicable to non-European societies.9 An advance on this, from our
perspective, is represented by approaches that take up a number of interwo-
ven modernities from different societies while remaining open to the study of
transcultural and/or transnational reciprocal relations.10 Such approaches
place the concept of Occidental individualization fundamentally in question.
A possible starting point for revision of the individualist model is offered by
historical Selbstzeugnisforschung, which focuses in part on the early modern
period. Largely independent of the discussions developed in literary studies
5 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

(Princeton and New Jersey: 2000), 34.
6 Ibid., 37.
7 Ibid., 33.
8 See for instance the articles on the keywords “Arabic Autobiography,” “Indian
Subcontinent,” “Japan,” “Turkey,” “Religious Autobiography,” in: Jolly, ed., Encyclopedia of
Life Writing.
9 Randeria, Geteilte Geschichte, 90.
10 Randeria, Geteilte Geschichte; cf. Public Spheres and Collective Identities, ed. Shmuel N.
Eisenstadt, Wolfgang Schluchter and Björn Wittrock (New Brunswick and London: 2001);
as well as Multiple Modernities, ed. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (New Brunswick and London:
2002), with a focus on the various non-European characteristics of modernities.
From The Individual To The Person 17
and history about the crisis of the individual and about different modernities,
this internationally expanding field of research has challenged the close links
between individuality and written thematizations of the self.11 It becomes
apparent that indviduality is simply one particular concept of the person
which exists alongside other such concepts that have yet to be thoroughly
studied.12
At the same time, this again raises the question of which texts should be
considered autobiographies. To take just one example, up until several years
ago, scholars in the fields of Islamic literature and/or history were of the opin-
ion that the genre of ‘autobiography’ barely existed – except for a few, carefully
noted exceptions – in Islamic literature in general and Arabic- or Turkish-
language literature in particular. More recent studies, however, working with
a more open understanding of the genre, have rediscovered a tradition of
autobiographical writing which stretches back a thousand years. A group of
us American scholars were able to substantiate the existence of 140 auto
biographical texts written in Arabic between the ninth and the twentieth
centuries.13 They found texts matching this basic description in places left
unconsidered by the proponents of classical autobiography theory: many nar-
ratives were part of biographical dictionaries, family narratives, or prefaces
and postscripts to other works. Thus, autobiographical writing, at least in some
parts of the Arab-speaking world, was a well-known, accepted and acceptable
11 Gabriele Jancke, Autobiographie als soziale Praxis. Beziehungskonzepte in Selbstzeugnissen

des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit,
vol. 10), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2002).
12 Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject. Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-
Century England (Baltimore and London: 1989); Eva Kormann, Ich, Welt und Gott.
Autobiographik im 17. Jahrhundert (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 13), (Cologne, Weimar
and Vienna: 2004).
13 Kristen E. Brustad, Michael Cooperson, Jamal J. Elias, Nuha N.N. Khoury, Joseph E. Lowry,
Nasser Rabbat, Dwight F. Reynolds, Devin J. Stewart and Shawkat M. Toorawa, Interpreting
the Self. Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition, ed. Dwight F. Reynolds (Berkeley,
Los Angeles and London: 2001), 9. – A departure from the narrow, genre-oriented
approach to autobiography can be found in Benigna von Krusenstjern, “Was sind
Selbstzeugnisse? Begriffskritische und quellenkundliche Überlegungen anhand von
Beispielen aus dem 17. Jahrhundert,” Historische Anthropologie 2 (1994), 462–471, which
locates autobiographies in the broader field of self-narratives. See also Sidonie Smith and
Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis,
London: 2010, 2nd edn.), who introduce 60 autobiographical types in the appendix of this
important book (253–286); and Cultura escrita y Sociedad 1,1, (2005) (“De la autobiografía
a los ego-documentos: un fórum abierto,” ed. James Amelang).
practice, in which the religious, ethnic and political borders within the Arab-
speaking domains played little part.
While the classical definition of autobiography usually includes only those
texts in which the development of a life is described retrospectively14 –
mostly in closed form – Selbstzeugnisforschung works with a more open
understanding of sources and genres. Aside from diaries, memoirs, and auto-
biographies, numerous other text types can count as self-narratives, such as
letters, chronicles, family histories, travelogues, biographical dictionary
entries or diplomatic reports. When one gives up autobiography as the basis
for canon-formation and introduces a concept of text types oriented around
practices (of writing and communication), then there are notably fewer dif-
ferences between Western and non-Western, modern and premodern writing
practices. For historical research focused on Western European countries,
this has opened up an almost inexhaustible reservoir of sources. Inventory
projects, like those carried out in Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria,
Switzerland and Germany, have since helped to introduce a large number of
texts that can be considered self-narratives.15 By now there is little doubt
14 Georg Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, 4 Bde. in 8 Teilbänden, (Bern: 1949; Frankfurt
a.M.: 1950–1969); Die Autobiographie. Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung,
ed. Günter Niggl (Wege der Forschung, vol. 565), (Darmstadt: 1989; 2nd expanded edn:
1998, with supplementary bibliography and afterword to the new edition); Günter Niggl,
Geschichte der deutschen Autobiographie im 18. Jahrhundert. Theoretische Grundlegung
und literarische Entfaltung (Stuttgart: 1977); Bernd Neumann, Identität und Rollenzwang.
Zur Theorie der Autobiographie (Athenäum Paperbacks Germanistik, vol. 3), (Frankfurt
a.M.: 1970). Cf. also Michaela Holdenried, Autobiographie (Stuttgart: 2000).
15 Harald Ilsøe, 555 danske Selvbiografier og Erindringer. En kronologisk fører med referater til
trykte selvbiografier forfattet af personer født før 1790, (Kopenhagen: 1987); Egodocumenten
van Noord-Nederlanders van de zestiende tot begin negentiende eeuw. Een chronologische
lijst, Samengesteld door Ruud Lindeman, Yvonne Scherf en Rudolf M. Dekker, (Rotterdam:
1993); Gosse Blom, Repertoarium fan Egodokuminten oangeande Fryslan (Ljouwert: 1992);
Harald Tersch, Österreichische Selbstzeugnisse des Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit
(1400–1650). Eine Darstellung in Einzelbeiträgen (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: 1998), individ-
ual studies with bibliographic information on 62 male authors and 2 female authors; on
this, see also: idem, “Das autobiographische Schrifttum Österreichs in der Frühen Neuzeit –
ein Projektbericht,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtswissenschaft
102 (1994), 409–413; for the 17th century: Benigna von Krusenstjern, Selbstzeugnisse der
Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges. Beschreibendes Verzeichnis (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit,
vol. 6), (Berlin: 1997), information on the self-narratives of 226 male writers and 9 female
writers; since several writings are not considered here, the following is also important:
Inge Bernheiden, Individualität im 17. Jahrhundert. Studien zum autobiographischen
Schrifttum (Literarhistorische Untersuchungen, vol. 12), (Frankfurt a.M., 1988), with an
that writing about one’s own life has also long been practiced in many non-
European cultures.16
Regardless of these new approaches, however, the idea of a connection
between individuality and autobiography has proven exceptionally difficult to
unseat. Literary as well as historical scholarship still relies mostly on selective
autobiographical sources, which are often limited in number, and ignores many
of the recently discovered texts and findings. This is due in part to methodologi-
cal problems which have yet to be solved, such as how and whether one can
derive patterns from and discern processes in individualized life stories that
allow for inferences beyond the single case. The analysis of individual texts still
offers the clearest opportunity for discussing difficult questions such as whether
and at what point it is possible to grasp experiences and especially feelings,
whether writing about one’s own life is a matter of conscious self-representation
index of 127 authors of autobiographical texts; on diaries, see the older compilation by
Magdalena Buchholz, Die Anfänge der deutschen Tagebuchschreibung (Reihe Tagebuch,
vol. 1), (Diss. Königsberg: 1942; Münster: n. d. 1981); regarding Tersch and von Krusenstjern,
cf. the extensive review by Gabriele Jancke, “Die Quellengruppe der Selbstzeugnisse
in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. Zwei quellenkundliche Handbücher zum
deutschsprachigen Bereich,” Herold-Jahrbuch nf 3 (1998), 41–51. – For the project on Swiss
self-narratives, see Kaspar von Greyerz, “Deutschschweizerische Selbstzeugnisse (1500–
1800) als Quellen der Mentalitätsgeschichte. Bericht über ein Forschungsprojekt,” in Das
dargestellte Ich. Studien zu Selbstzeugnissen des späteren Mittelalters und der frühen
Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Arnold, Sabine Schmolinsky and Urs-Martin Zahnd (Selbstzeugnisse
des Mittelalters und der beginnenden Neuzeit, vol. 1), (Bochum: 1999), 147–163; and
Sebastian Leutert and Gudrun Piller, “Deutschschweizerische Selbstzeugnisse (1500–1800)
als Quellen der Mentalitätsgeschichte. Ein Forschungsbericht,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift
für Geschichte / Revue Suisse d’Histoire / Rivista Storica Svizzera 49 (1999), 197–221. In the
context of these bibliographic projects, the concept of self-narratives is given further con-
sideration, as in Leutert/ Piller, Deutschschweizerische Selbstzeugnisse, 200–206, and in
Tersch, Das autobiographische Schrifttum. – For the Middle Ages, cf. Sabine Schmolinsky,
“Selbstzeugnisse finden oder: Zur Überlieferung erinnerter Erfahrung im Mittelalter,” in
Self-Fashioning. Personen(selbst)darstellung, ed. Rudolf Suntrup and Jan R. Veenstra
(Medieval to early modern culture / Kultureller Wandel vom Mittelalter zur frühen
Neuzeit, vol. 3), (Frankfurt a.M.: 2003), 23–49; urls: http://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/
jancke-quellenkunde/; http://www.egodocuments.ch; http://www.egodocument.net/.
16 For instance in Japan. See, amongst others, Richard J. Bowring, “The Female Hand in
Heian Japan: A First Reading,” in The Female Autograph. Theory and Practice of
Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century, ed. Domna C. Stanton (Chicago:
1984), 49–56; Petra Buchholz, “Das Tagebuch in der japanischen Schreibkultur,” in Vom
Individuum zur Person. Neue Konzepte im Spannungsfeld von Autobiographietheorie und
Selbstzeugnisforschung, ed. Gabriele Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich, (Querelles. Jahrbuch für
Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, vol. 10), (Göttingen: 2005), 241–246.
or a direct expression of oneself, and whether such texts are not in fact expres-
sions of an imagination or of projections.17 Generalizations on the basis of a few
texts are as unreliable and ungrounded as the history of the discovery of the self.18
In numerous studies, researchers have concentrated on autobiography as a
genre19 or on a particular group of people, such as scholars.20 In part, autobio-
graphical texts have also been analyzed in terms of a particular subject, such as
childhood, illness or bodies.21 In practice, such selectiveness overlooks mar-
ginal and non-middle-class groups like aristocratic, uneducated, rural, Jewish,
17 On imaginations cf. Judith Schlehe, “Einleitung. Lebenswege und Sichtweisen im Übergang:

Zur Einführung in die interkulturelle Geschlechterforschung,” in Interkulturelle
Geschlechterforschung. Identitäten – Imaginationen – Repräsentationen, ed. eadem (Frankfurt
a.M. and New York: 2001), 9–26; here 10f., who points out that imagination and imaginary
contexts also play an important part in people’s ways of life and modes of thought.
18 Cf. for example, Richard van Dülmen, Die Entdeckung des Individuums. 1500–1800
(Europäische Geschichte), (Frankfurt a.M.: 1997); Entdeckung des Ich. Die Geschichte der
Individualisierung vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Richard van Dülmen (Cologne,
Weimar, Vienna: 2001), as well as the review of the latter by Gabriele Jancke, L’Homme
Z.F.G. 13,2 (2002), 297–300.
19 As Stephan Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellung in deutschsprachigen
Autobiographien des 16. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zur Historischen Psychologie (Literatur
– Imagination – Realität, vol. 6), (Trier: 1993), eight authors, among which three aristo-
crats; and Hans Rudolf Velten, Das selbst geschriebene Leben. Eine Studie zur deutschen
Autobiographie im 16. Jahrhunder (Frankfurter Beiträge zur Germanistik, vol. 29),
(Heidelberg: 1995). Velten lists writings by 76 male and female authors but also works only
with texts by eight male authors.
20 Jancke, Autobiographie als soziale Praxis, ch. 2: “Abhängig sein: Gelehrte Männer in
Patronageverhältnissen. Rekonstruktion einer Gruppenkultur,” 75–166; cf. also Anette
Völker-Rasor, Bilderpaare – Paarbilder. Die Ehe in Autobiographien des 16. Jahrhunderts
(Rombach Wissenschaft. Reihe Historiae, vol. 2), (Freiburg: 1993); with an index of 35
autobiographies and short biographies of the – male – authors.
21 Christoph Lumme, Höllenfleisch und Heiligtum. Der menschliche Körper im Spiegel autobi
ographischer Texte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Münchner Studien zur neueren und neuesten
Geschichte, vol. 13), (Frankfurt a.M., Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris and Vienna: 1996), with
an annotated bibliography on the persons and autobiographical texts of 46 male authors,
among which eight were noblemen; Ralph Frenken, Kindheit und Autobiographie vom 14.
bis 17. Jahrhundert. Psychohistorische Rekonstruktionen (PsychoHistorische Forschungen,
vol. 1), 2 vols., (Kiel: 1999), with individual studies on 18 male authors, among which one
was a nobleman. – These works almost exclusively consider Christian and male authors;
for a study that addresses male and female Jewish authors, cf. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Fame
and Secrecy: Leon Modena’s Life as an Early Modern Autobiography,” in The Autobiography
of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi. Leon Modena’s Life of Judah, ed. and transl. by
Mark R. Cohen, (Princeton: 1988), 50–70; and eadem, Women on the Margins. Three
black and/or non-European writers, male and female, thus producing an image
of exclusively male, urban, educated, Christian, white, European individuals.
This creates the impression that individuality and autobiographical writing are
socially located here and nowhere else. In fact, few studies to date have ana-
lyzed the specifically male, urban, educated, Christian, white or European
aspects of this focus.22 There have been and continue to be numerous objec-
tions to this gender-, culture- and class-bound conception of the person, which
is often held to be universal, but nonetheless it remains the implicit and
explicit reference point. In the disciplines of literature and history, unlike soci-
ology, the individual has been understood as autonomous, so that social rela-
tions have appeared only as ‘fetters’.23
Social historians and literary scholars specializing in women’s studies and
gender studies have taken the gender blindness of established research on
autobiography as an opportunity for discussing questions about feminine writ-
ing, feminine identity and the female subject.24 At the same time, new and
thorough searches began to uncover texts by women, which often served as a
starting point for a fundamental critique of the traditional conceptions of
autobiography and selfhood.25
Seventeenth-Century Lives, (Cambridge, ma and London: 1995); see also Frauen in der
Stadt. Selbstzeugnisse des 16.-18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Daniela Hacke (Stadt in der Geschichte,
vol. 29), (Ostfildern: 2004); Lotte C. van de Pol, “Research on egodocuments in the
Netherlands. Some thoughts on individuality, gender, and texts,” in Jancke / Ulbrich, ed.,
Vom Individuum zur Person, 233–241.
22 Völker-Rasor’s 1993 study on the perspectives of non-aristocratic men is an exception. –
On urban texts see Fabian Brändle et al., “Texte zwischen Erfahrung und Diskurs. Prob
leme der Selbstzeugnisforschung,” in Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich.
Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500–1850), ed. Kaspar von Greyerz,
Hans Medick and Patrice Veit (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 9), (Cologne, Weimar and
Vienna: 2001), 3–31, here 27–31; Pierre Monnet, Les Rohrbach de Francfort. Pouvoirs, affaires
et parenté à l’aube de la Renaissance allemande (Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance,
vol. 317), (Genève: 1997); idem, “Ville réelle et ville idéale à la fin du moyen âge: une géo
graphie au prisme des témoignages autobiographiques allemands,” Annales hss 56, 3
(2001), 591–621; and, above all, Hacke, ed., Frauen in der Stadt.
23 See for example Flavia Kippele, Was heißt Individualisierung? Die Antworten soziologischer
Klassiker (Opladen: 1998), on Marx and Engels, Tönnies, Simmel, Durkheim, Weber, Elias.
24 For a comprehensive discussion of research, see Daniela Hacke, “Selbstzeugnisse von
Frauen in der Frühen Neuzeit: Eine Einführung,” in eadem, ed., Frauen in der Stadt, 9–39;
and Smith / Watson, Reading Autobiography, esp. ch. 5 and 6, 111–163.
25 Gudrun Wedel, Lehren zwischen Arbeit und Beruf. Einblicke in das Leben von
Autobiographinnen aus dem 19. Jahrhundert (L’Homme Schriften, vol. 4), (Vienna, Cologne
and Weimar: 2000).
The classical notion that autobiography is closely related to individualiza-

tion has a clear historical frame of reference, around 1800. While European
autobiographical writing of the eighteenth and to some extent the seventeenth
centuries has enjoyed ongoing scholarly attention and respect since about the
beginning of the twentieth century, especially in literary studies,26 the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries have largely been ignored. This stems not least from
the simple fact that the European eighteenth century produced several auto-
biographical writings that literary scholars and historians have considered as
exemplary.
The humanities disciplines usually consider this century to be a point of
reference for the study of autobiography. According to a developmental per-
spective, the structure, function, and acceptance of autobiography as a genre,
as can be observed in this period, became normative for writing such texts as
well as for the scholarly concepts attached to them.27 Autobiography in earlier
epochs, by contrast, is anachronistically taken to be either a deviation from or
a precursor to this standard. With such progressivist approaches to history, one
is practically forced to construct traditions that draw on a narrow source base
or on one-sided observations, without making these assumptions and their
consequences clear. This becomes especially problematic when generaliza-
tions come to be made on this basis. Christian, non-aristocratic, educated,
white, European men, often authors of a literary work, thus become the trend-
setters along with their texts: their activities, topics and worldview are taken to
26 See Niggl, ed., Die Autobiographie; Niggl, Geschichte der deutschen Autobiographie;
Neumann, Identität und Rollenzwang; Bernheiden, Individualität im 17. Jahrhundert; on
English literary history, see additionally Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject; Michael
Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self. Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1581–
1791 (Cambridge: 1997).
27 As in Brändle et al., Texte zwischen Erfahrung und Diskurs, 4, 20–24 (psychologizing in the
18th century as a decisive milestone in the history of constituting the self). – For a discus-
sion of these progressivist notions in autobiography scholarship in German, with refer-
ence to the example of Glikl bas Judah Leib (“Glückel von Hameln”), see Gabriele Jancke,
“Die ‫( זכרונות‬sichronot, Memoiren) der jüdischen Kauffrau Glückel von Hameln zwischen
Autobiographie, Geschichtsschreibung und religiösem Lehrtext. Geschlecht, Religion
und Ich in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Autobiographien von Frauen. Beiträge zu ihrer
Geschichte, ed. Magdalene Heuser (Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte,
vol. 85), (Tübingen: 1996), 93–134; here 99–102, 118ff.; for research in English that reaches
similar conclusions, see Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject, in particular the litera-
ture review, 1–10. Regardless of Nussbaum’s apposite criticism of these progressivist con-
structions and without any discussion thereof, Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self,
applies the very same concept that was criticized by Nussbaum (the construction of a
paradigmatic model and a prehistory that leads up to it).
represent an entire epoch. The power relations remain invisible, as does the
question of who had which opportunities to write down his/her life story, who
had access to publication and whose voice was even heeded. Nonetheless, it is
precisely here that the gender- and class-specific mechanisms of inclusion and
exclusion become most relevant.28
In particular, the questions about individuality, self-consciousness and the
constitution of the self (with traditions stretching back to Jacob Burckhardt
and forward to the present) smuggle in, largely invisibly, normative construc-
tions about the period, place and persons. Such questions ask whether a par-
ticular stage of consciousness or personality has or has not yet been reached,
whether an author has become independent of traditions as well as of reli-
gious and social relations, what significance is accorded to a person’s “inner
life,” and the degree to which a self-representation reveals self-reflective intel-
lectualization. Hans Medick has referred to historical constructions such as
‘individualization’ as having a “centrist” perspective, rightly criticizing them on
the grounds that historical processes are reduced to a single feature, stripped
of their autonomy and otherness so as to become a pre-history of our own,
contemporary relationships.29
In this article, we decided to work with the notion of person. In historical
scholarship this term is less burdened than terms like individual, self, and sub-
ject, which operate on the basis of unspoken assumptions.30
Our goal is not to historicize concepts of individuality, as Martin Scheutz
and Harald Tersch have recently called for,31 but to suggest a fundamental shift
28 In The Autobiographical Subject, Nussbaum has extensively analyzed the gender-specific

mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in England; see also Kormann, Ich, Welt und Gott,
for the German-speaking areas, additionally see the article by Hülya Adak, “Gender-in(g)
Biography: Ahmet Mithat (on Fatma Aliye) or the Canonization of an Ottoman Male
Writer,” in Jancke/ Ulbrich, ed., Vom Individuum zur Person, 189–204.
29 Cf. Hans Medick, “Entlegene Geschichte? Sozialgeschichte und Mikro-Historie im
Blickfeld der Kulturanthropologie,” Soziale Welt. Zeitschrift für sozialwissenschaftliche
Forschung und Praxis. (Special issue 8: Zwischen den Kulturen? Die Sozialwissenschaften vor
dem Problem des Kulturvergleichs, ed. Joachim Matthes) (1992), 167–178; here, above all,
167; cf. also idem, “‘Missionare im Ruderboot’? Ethnologische Erkenntnisweisen als
Herausforderung an die Sozialgeschichte,” in Alltagsgeschichte. Zur Rekonstruktion histo
rischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen, ed. Alf Lüdtke (Frankfurt a.M. and New York: 1989;
first ed.: 1984), 48–84. Medick’s hermeneutic concept of the otherness of historical socie
ties is especially helpful (“Entlegene Geschichte,” 168; “Missionare im Ruderboot,” 50).
30 Dagmar Günther, “‘And now for something completely different’. Prolegomena zur Auto
biographie als Quelle der Geschichtswissenschaft,” Historische Zeitschrift 272 (2001), 25–61.
31 Martin Scheutz and Harald Tersch, “Individualisierungsprozesse in der Frühen Neuzeit?
Anmerkungen zu einem Konzept,” Wiener Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Neuzeit 2 (2001),
in how such research projects are designed.32 Basically, the idea is to embrace
self-narratives in their particular contexts and to avoid the kinds of conflations
brought about, for example, by reference to Burckhardt’s notion of the birth of
the individual. One way to do this would be to shift the emphasis from the
individual to relationships, such as has been suggested in postmodern studies
of autobiography.33 If we avoid taking the individual as a reference point, then
the questions we ask change, and hence so do the answers.
The following example is a case-in-point. It seems that in 1657 Augustin
Güntzer, an Alsatian pewterer, wrote his work Kleines Biechlin von meinem
gantzen Leben.34 This work offers a particularly nice illustration of the insights
that arise when autobiographical texts are opened up to their relational con-
text. Güntzer’s preface begins with the following address:
38–59. In this important contribution, Scheutz and Tersch draw attention to two central
points: first, that self-narratives are not the only sources – and, for reasons of text type,
not even necessarily the most propitious ones – for questioning individuality and indi-
vidualization, and second, that up to now no sustainable findings have been put forward
about processes of individualization, because the criteria for the existence of individual-
ity and/or individualization have either not been determined at all or have been deter-
mined only from an intellectualistic perspective. Thus, they open the field for a
historicization that goes beyond traditional humanities approaches.
32 In the dfg Research Group “Selbstzeugnisse in transkultureller Perspektive” [Self-
narratives in transcultural perspectives], historians, literary critics, and specialists in
Turkish Studies and Japanese Studies have worked together, cf. homepage: url: http://
www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/fg530/.
33 Cf. Joseph Fichtelberg, “Introduction,” in True Relations. Essays on Autobiography and the
Postmodern, ed. G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg (London: 1998), 1–9; see also in
that volume primarily the article by Paul John Eakin, “Relational Selves, Relational Lives.
The Story of the Story,” 63–81. Now that autobiographical self-representation within social
relations has been observed in women’s studies and understood to be characteristic of
female authors (see for example, Susan Stanford Friedman, “Women’s Autobiographical
Selves: Theory and Practice,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie
Smith and Julia Watson (Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography), (Madison: 1998;
first ed.: 1988), 72–82), male autobiographers are also being included in the relational per-
spective (without, however, this always being reflected on in terms of gender, as was pre-
viously the case with research focused on women, and without making reference to the
work done in women’s studies).
34 Augustin Güntzer, Kleines Biechlin von meinem gantzen Leben. Die Autobiographie eines
Elsässer Kannengießers aus dem 17. Jahrhundert, ed. and with commentary by Fabian
Brändle and Dominik Sieber, in collaboration with Roland E. Hofer and Monika Landert-
Scheuber (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 8), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2002).
Gracious Reader, should my simple contribution, this Biechlin, come into

your hands, I beg you not to hold me in contempt. I did not write it from
arrogance or with the ambition that many people should read it but
rather only so the heirs whom I leave behind could see how I have spent
my poor life on earth in fear and want.35
In this dialogue he begs the reader of his Kleines Biechlin not to spurn his text.
His first step, then, is to establish a relationship and engage with the presup-
positions of this expected and welcome reader. While he imagines the finished
text as a means of communication with other people in his social world, he
simultaneously describes his living and writing situation as one of deep-seated
isolation: “I am also given and subjected to a melancholic nature and for that
reason I prefer to be alone rather than in the company of many people… But so
that I, too, can have some joy on this earth, I write and read as much as my craft
permits.”36
His desire to be alone, as he discusses it in many passages of his Kleines
Biechlin, was a serious social problem for him, since sociability, or participa-
tion in convivial occasions and “banquets” (“Gastereyen”), was a highly valued
engagement that others demanded of him and were even prepared to bring
about by violence.37 For a craftsman like him, unlike for educated men,38 it was
not readily accepted that he should withdraw from social occasions and busy
himself with reading and writing. For this reason, just as many women writers
35 [“Großginstiger Lesser, so dihr mein einfeltiges Schreiben, dißes Biechlin, fihrkompt zu

leßen, so bite ich dich, mihr solches nicht zu verachten. Ich habe es nicht geschriben
zume Pracht oder auß Fihrwitz, daß vill Leidt lessen sollen, sonder nuhr allein die meini-
gen hinderlaßen Erben, darin sie sehen, wie ich mein armes sindliches Leben mit Angst
undt [Not] zugepracht habe auff Erden.”] Ibid., 80. Many aspects of the source text unfor-
tunately have been lost in translation, as we are well aware.
36 [“Auch bin ich der melancolischer Natduhr zugethan und underworffen, derohalben ich
gern alein bin, nicht gern bey vilen Leudten… Darmit ich aber auch etwaß Freide hab auff
Erden, so thue ich schreiben undt leßen, wafern ich mießig wehr von meiner
Handtarbeidt.”] Ibid., 81.
37 Cf. Anne Meneley, Tournaments of Value. Sociability and Hierarchy in a Yemeni Town
(Anthropological Horizons, vol. 9), (Toronto, Buffalo and London: 1996, repr.: 2002), for
more on a society in which sociability is also highly valued and in which one tries to avoid
and inhibit being alone.
38 Cf. Gadi Algazi, “Gelehrte Zerstreutheit und gelernte Vergeßlichkeit,” in Der Fehltritt.
Vergehen und Versehen in der Vormoderne, ed. Peter von Moos (Norm und Struktur,
vol. 15), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2001), 235–250; idem, “Scholars in Households:
Refiguring the Learned Habitus 1480–1550,” Science in Context 16 (2003), 9–42.
did across the centuries, he stresses that he only writes when he does not need
to be working and that he is even doing something useful by writing: “For that
reason, gracious reader, I beg you not to mock me. It is better to spend one’s
leisure writing something useful than to spend one’s time gorging and swilling,
gambling, splurging, and other such things, or with witchcraft and idolatry.”39
It is not only the direct social relation – such as to the reader – but also the
condition of being alone and writing, which is after all the classical situation of
the autobiographical individual, that is presented in Güntzer’s text as being
filled with imaginings and projections, social expectations and demands, expe-
riences and conflicts to be parried or fulfilled, sought or evaded. Social rela-
tionships, other people and the social rules of life and interaction are palpable
for Güntzer even in his distanced position as a writer and they must be negoti-
ated as such.
The individual who writes about her/himself is not a decontextualized
abstraction but a concrete person in a particular situation: in this case, he is a
widowed, impoverished craftsman with no household of his own and in a pre-
carious material situation, who is dependent on his daughter and son-in-law,
earns his subsistence as an itinerant peddler, and has to justify the demise of
the inheritance which he himself received but lost and thus cannot pass on to
his children. When Güntzer addresses the “heirs whom I leave behind” in the
introduction as the readers of his text, this is not just the modesty of someone
who has “not written from arrogance or with the ambition that many people
should read it.”40 Rather, it is about what he now has to offer his heirs, male and
female, namely “how I have spent my poor, sinful life in fear and want upon the
earth,” so that they may “note my state of well- and ill-being, to commit it to
memory for me and mine.”41 Since the material possessions were eaten up and
lost through the Thirty Years’ War, emigration, multiple moves and religious
marginalization, the text is the only remaining inheritance, in which Güntzer
chronicles the story of the material inheritance which is no longer there.
39 [“Darum, ginstiger Lesser, bite ich dich, du wollest mich hierin nicht verspotten. Es ist ja
beßer fihr den Mießiggang, etwaß Nutzliches zu schreiben und die Zeit hinzupringen, als
daß man die Zeit vertreibet mit Freßen undt Sauffen, Spillen, Praßen undt dergleichen
andern ubigen dingen, zauberischen Kinsten oder Abgo(e)tterey.”] Güntzer, Kleines
Biechlin, 81.
40 [Der] “es nicht geschriben [hat] zume Pracht oder auß Fihrwitz, daß vill Leidt lessen sol-
len.” Ibid. 80.
41 [“wie ich mein armes sindliches Leben mit Angst undt [Not] zugepracht habe auff
Erden… meinen Wolstandt und Ubelstandt auffzumercken, mihr undt den Meinigen zur
Gedochtnuß.”] Ibid.
Augustin Güntzer’s will to integrate himself into a lineage is certainly an

important motivation, but it is by far not the only subject in his Kleines Biechlin.
He also narrates his own life extensively, as organized into four sections: “First,
my bitter youth and apprentice years; then my travels and wandering over
water and land, how I fared in foreign countries: fourth [sic], how I fared in my
marriage and housekeeping, my happiness and unhappiness up to my final
end.”42 The striking principle of organization and orientation here is the
household. In the first phase of his youth and apprenticeship years, he belongs
to the household of his parents or masters; during his travels he is present as a
guest or journeyman only briefly in the households of his hosts or employers,
so for him this is rather a phase of not belonging to a household; as a married
man he has his own household, of which he is also the master; eventually, as a
widower he loses this status and finally lives in the household of his daughter
and son-in-law.
For him, however, this story of failures and defeats is more than just his per-
sonal, individual story:
In particular when my God afflicts me with a cross to bear, affliction, per-

secution, illness and other misfortunes because of my sins, then in my
need I will strive to call upon God again for help, with words that are
spoken as well as written, because he who seeks shall find, and he who
knocks, for him the door shall open, and if my God has helped me out of
want, I will strive to thank him accordingly.43
God plays an active role in the events of Güntzer’s life, and everything that
befalls him is understood to be directed and caused by God – and therefore
cannot be traced back to Güntzer’s own wrongdoing. His text is not simply to
be understood as an interaction with readers in his family, but also as a conver-
sation with God, a prayer of pleas and thanks, which leaves its mark on large
42 [“Zum ersten mein pleyete Jugent undt Lehrjahren; zum andern meine Reißen undt
Wanderschafft zu Wasser und Land, wie es mihr in fro(e)mpten Landen ergangen ist; zum
firtten [!], wie es mihr in meinem Estandt und Haußhaltung ist ergangen, mein Klick undt
Ungklick biß an mein leßtes Ende.”] Ibid.
43 [“Sonderlichen wan mich mein Gott um meiner Sinden willen heimsuchete mit Chrietz,
Triebsal, Vervolgung, Kranckheiten und anderen Unklicke werde heimsuchen, so wolle
ich mihr vorno(e)hmen, in meiner Nodt Gott widerumb um Hilff anzuruffen mindlich
undt auch schrifftlich, dan wehr suchet, der findet, und wehr anklopffet, dem wirdt auff-
getahn, undt so mihr mein Gott geholffen hat auß No(e)dten, ebenmo(e)ßig i[h]m auch
zu dancken.”] Ibid. 80f.
parts of Güntzer’s Kleines Biechlin. In these passages, with God, he negotiates

his experiences, desires, disappointments and fears.
To read Güntzer’s text as a conversation or interaction is to gain completely
different insights into his lifeworld than if one were only to focus on the degree
and type of individualization it represents. The point here is much more about
a notion of connectedness than autonomy.44 For this reason, it is also worth
asking whether it helps to evaluate the text according to the parameters of
individualization, as is done by Fabian Brändle, who brilliantly edited the
absorbing life story of Güntzer together with Dominik Sieber. As Brändle
emphasizes, Augustin Güntzer is “not the heroic individual in Burckhardt’s
sense, who has been able to free himself from all social constraints and as a
consequence can act autonomously.” Brändle points out that individualization
“in the case of Augustin Güntzer and other authors of popular self-narratives
[was] experienced as painful.”45 But Güntzer’s text can also be read very differ-
ently. In his life story he creates relationships with the reader, with his sur-
roundings; he speaks about his friends and enemies, his family, his heirs, and
not least he speaks with God. This integration into horizontal and vertical rela-
tionships is the operative principle of autobiographical writing in the early
modern era. As Natalie Zemon Davis points out, “Virtually all the occasions for
talking or writing about the self involved a relationship: with God or God and
one’s confessor, with a patron, with a friend or a lover, or especially with one’s
family and lineage.”46 Davis goes on to argue
that the exploration of self in sixteenth-century France was made in con-

scious relation to the groups to which people belonged; that in a century
in which the boundary around the conceptual self and the bodily self was
not always firm and closed, men and women nonetheless could work
out strategies for self-expression and autonomy; and that the greatest
44 Natalie Zemon Davis, “Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France,” in
Reconstructing Individualism. Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed.
Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna and David E. Wellbery with Arnold I. Davidson, Ann
Swidler and Ian Watt (Stanford: 1986), 53–63, 332–335; cf. also Randeria’s concept of inter-
wovenness and relationality (Randeria, Geteilte Geschichte, 2000); further, especially
Mechal Sobel, “The Revolution in Selves: Black and White Inner Aliens,” in Through a
Glass Darkly. Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman,
Mechal Sobel and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill and London: 1997), 163–205.
45 Fabian Brändle, “Gemeiner Mann, was nun? Autobiographie und Lebenswelt des
Augustin Güntzer,” in Güntzer, Kleines Biechlin, 3–27; both citations 26.
46 Davis, Boundaries, 53.
obstacle to self-definition was not embeddedness but powerlessness and

poverty.47
Against the universalizing notion of Western individualism, this introduces a

social history in which “individuals… are taken seriously as contextual users of
their repertoires.”48
A brief look at the powerful construct of marriage may explain, however,
why it is not enough to shift one’s perspective from the individual to the con-
cepts of social relations. Amongst the narratives associated with the individ-
ual is that of the bourgeois marriage based on love. This is either explicitly or
implicitly the yardstick against which pre-modern and non-Western mar-
riages are measured. Although several generations of scholars in women’s
studies have addressed this institution, exposing its power relations and
denouncing the notion of separate spheres that is bound up with it, the cen-
trality of marriage to research on social relationships has not lost any of its
attractiveness. Bourgeois marriages were contracted between an “autono-
mous” male individual and a dependent female, with autonomy and connect-
edness understood as mutually exclusive notions, correlating to separate
public and private spheres. As Martina Kessel has shown, bourgeois society
recognizes two “interlocking schemas of male individuality,”49 which were
associated with particular modes of speaking. The first discursive mode
makes a separation between private and public, to which can be attributed
the gendered dichotomy between rational masculinity and emotional femi-
ninity. The political appears as political-masculine only through the existence
of an excluded other. This exclusion is glossed over in the second mode of
speaking, which appears as gender-neutral:
The idea of someone who has mastered the art of life [der Lebenskünstler]
connected all the central elements of being human, elements which were
divided by binary gender codification into masculinity and femininity.
This wholeness grounded the right to independence as a core of mascu-
linity, an independence which in turn served to authorize masculine
power.50
47 Ibid.
48 Randeria, Geteilte Geschichte, 94.
49 Martina Kessel, Langeweile. Zum Umgang mit Zeit und Gefühlen in Deutschland vom
späten 18. bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: 2001), 160.
50 Ibid.
Connections, with their far-reaching intersections with social structures, thus

disappear from view. They are veiled, pushed into the private arena, which is
the arena of marriage and family. In order to overcome such binary construc-
tions, the individual itself must be thought differently.51
This kind of approach can be found in anthropological studies of the con-
cept of the person. Of course, here too some of the research is marked by euro-
centric, one-sided social and gender models, as can be seen in Marcel Mauss’
1938 historical evolutionary sketch, “Une Catégorie de l’Esprit Humain: La
Notion de Personne, Celle de ‘Moi’.” Similarly, binary concepts such as the
‘egocentric’ versus the ‘sociocentric’ concept of the person are also still to be
found in anthropology.52 But Mauss’ claim that the ‘person’ should be seen as a
cultural and historical category is seminal in itself and has since precipitated a
number of works in anthropology which have reached much more sophisti-
cated conclusions.53 The important lesson for literary and historical studies,
whether involving European or non-European, modern or premodern con-
texts, is the diverse ways of understanding ‘person’ in a society and in his/her
world as well as of transforming them into concepts practiced in life. One can-
not thus assume that a person is the same, always and everywhere. Not every
51 A fundamental problem of the social sciences is that both the objects as well as the sub-
jects of research are human beings; cf. Norbert Elias, Involvement and Detachment
(Oxford: 1987), with a new introduction by the author, translated from German by
Edmund Jephcott from Engagement und Distanzierung (Frankfurt a.M.: 1983).
52 Marcel Mauss, “Une Catégorie de l’Esprit Humain: La Notion de Personne, Celle de ‘Moi’,”
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 68 (1938), 263–281; English translation:
“A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self,” in The Category
of the Person. Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins and
Steven Lukes (Cambridge: 1985), 1–25; again in: Identity: A Reader, ed. Paul du Gay, Jessica
Evans and Peter Redman, (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: 2000), 325–345; con-
cepts of person in the egocentric-sociocentric dichotomy are discussed by Richard A.
Shweder and Edmund J. Bourne, “Does the concept of the person vary cross-culturally?,”
in Culture Theory. Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion, ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A.
LeVine (Cambridge: 1984), 158–199, without, however, putting into question binary think-
ing as such and without taking class and gender systematically into consideration. The
implicit gender assumptions of the concept of the egocentric individual were discussed
in the Kohlberg and Gilligan debate in the 1980s; cf. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice:
Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, ma: 1982); cf. the recent
work by Janet Carsten, After Kinship (New Departures in Anthropology), (Cambridge:
2004), esp. ch. 4: “The Person,” 83–108.
53 Cf. among others, Ute Luig, “Dynamische Konstrukte: Vorstellungen zu Person, Selbst und
Geschlecht in afrikanischen Gesellschaften,” in Jancke/Ulbrich, ed., Vom Individuum zur
Person, 29–50.
human being will necessarily be seen as a person; the beginning and end of
personhood is not necessarily equivalent to a lifespan; ‘person’ does not have
to retain the same meaning across the course of a whole life; and social and
gender differences have a big part to play.54 We have to take into consideration
that our sources will confront us with representations of personhood that we
are not familiar with55 and which we thus painstakingly have to reconstruct.
Self-narratives are not theoretical texts and therefore are not necessarily
capable of presenting new insights about philosophical and theological con-
cepts of the person.56 Whether and how the authors have absorbed such theo-
ries, whether and how these theories have affected social reality, whether and
how they have affected the sorts of self-representation undertaken: these are
questions that specifically have to be addressed and which will probably be
met with many different answers. Self-narratives are texts in which people
describe themselves – at least in parts – and thus they above all illuminate how
concepts of person are represented and practiced, that is, in the context of the
social, bodily person and his/her actions.57
The category of the ‘person’ raises numerous questions for Selbstzeugnis
forschung. Which aspects of the person do authors highlight in their texts?
54 Cf. the articles by J.S. La Fontaine, “Person and individual: some anthropological reflec-
tions,” 123–140 and Godfrey Lienhardt, “Self: public, private. Some African representa-
tions,” 141–155 and Mark Elvin, “Between the earth and heaven: conceptions of the self in
China,” 156–189, all in The Category of the Person. Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed.
Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins and Steven Lukes (Cambridge: 1985); Leslie Peirce,
Morality Tales. Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley, Los Angeles and
London: 2003), ch. 4: “Gender, Class, and Social Hierarchy,” 143–175; cf. also ibid. 130.
55 Charles Taylor emphasizes the historical differences amongst concepts of the person and
points out that earlier conceptions of the person are almost fully incomprehensible from
the perspective of the modern, Western concept of person; see Charles Taylor, “The per-
son,” in Carrithers / Collins / Lukes, eds., The Category of the Person, 257–281; here 280.
Understanding such a foreign concept of the person is thus for him comparable to learn-
ing another language and becoming familiar with a foreign lifestyle (ibid., 270).
56 That this is possible as well is shown in the article by Sara Heller Mendelson, “Are Married
Women Persons? The ‘Rational’ Arguments of Anne Dormer,” in Jancke/Ulbrich, ed., Vom
Individuum zur Person, 128–144.
57 Cf. Alexis Sanderson, “Purity and power among the Brahmans of Kashmir,” in Carrithers /
Collins / Lukes, eds., The Category of the Person, 190–216; he distinguishes between meta-
physical theories and “social personhood” and again makes an important differentiation
for the latter: “We must also go beneath the surface of philosophical and theological
abstractions to the theory and prescription of social roles and, beneath this level, to mate-
rials whose aim was not to prescribe the construction of social personhood but to describe
it or expose its presuppositions.” (ibid., 190).
What are the roles played by the body, objects, relationships, bonds and places?
Do people construct themselves according to ideal-typical models (and hence
tell us something about the values of their era), or do they imagine their lives
as counterpoints to the existing order? Do they create a world in their writ-
ing which is far removed from their own reality? Which gender systems, group
cultures and inclusion/exclusion mechanisms become visible? Where exactly
is the dividing line between the sexes/genders? To what extent are the con-
cepts of person, as articulated in self-narratives, dependent upon situation
and context? Or is it necessary to speak of a historically specific type of person-
hood, i.e. of a uniform model of personhood that stretches beyond class and
gender? What are the possibilities for investigating these questions through
samples of self-writing, and what other sources would need to be included?
How does one work with one or two sources in order to address such broad
questions? How can individual texts be read to make structures and patterns
visible? What criteria should be used for putting together samples? What
insights about social possibilities can be gained from individual and special
cases?
The category of the person and the question of personhood open up a broad
field of research. David Sabean, in his seminal exploration of “The Produc
tion of the Self during the Age of Confessionalism” situates the self within
the context of church and authority structures, and points out that it is pre-
cisely through these constraints – for instance, in the context of the Protestant
sacrament – that the self essentially originated. His considerations suggest
that early modern individualities and ideas of the self are accessible only in
small part, if at all, through autobiographical sources, whereas contributions
from a range of other source types may well lead further.58
However, self-narratives can also provide clues to the person, even if they in
no way directly reflect the writer. The constructions and narrative structures of
58 David Warren Sabean, “Production of the Self during the Age of Confessionalism,” Central
European History 29.1 (1996), 1–18; cf. also Claudia Ulbrich and David W. Sabean,
“Personkonzepte in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Etablierte Wissenschaft und feministische
Theorie im Dialog, ed. Claudia von Braunmühl (Wissenschaft in der Verantwortung),
(Berlin: 2003), 99–112; here 102 (referencing “that a ‘person’ is constituted in a matrix of
social relationships”); additionally, see Andrea Griesebner and Christina Lutter,
“Geschlecht und ‘Selbst’ in Quellen des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Jancke/
Ulbrich, ed., Vom Individuum zur Person, 51–70; as well as Eva Schlotheuber, “Der Mensch
am Scheideweg. Personkonzeptionen des Mittelalters,” in ibid., 71–96. – On the historical
value of early modern self-narratives as primary sources, see also Kaspar von Greyerz,
“Vom Nutzen und Vorteil der Selbstzeugnisforschung für die Frühneuzeithistorie,”
Jahrbuch des Historischen Kollegs (2004), 27–47.
these texts, after all, do not offer immediate access to the person, his/her expe-
riences or memories.59 Rather, as one of the Arabic terms for self-narrative
writing suggests, these texts are interpretations or translations (of life as expe-
rienced physically and psychically), transferred into another medium, that of
(verbal) language and writing.60
This does not mean, however, that the real people are ephemeral and there
can (or must) be no more talk of them. Rather, the people allow themselves to
be directly observed in their practices of writing and in their acts of autobio-
graphical communication: what they do, how they create a resource by fash-
ioning their person, the repertoire of actions this allows them to dispose of,
and which social spaces are available for doing so.61 From this perspective, per-
sons become visible in their historical contexts – through their possible actions
and decisions, through their potential as agents interwoven “within the web of
context.” In this way, “the choices that were actually available to men and
women can be discerned, even if not necessarily as universal, widespread pat-
terns.”62 To make persons visible in this way as agents and actors, however,
means to see them as closely interwoven with their networks, contexts and
social structures.
59 Cf. Thomas M. Safley, “‘So lang mir Got das Leben verlihen’. Personkonzepte aus
Selbstzeugnissen der schwäbischen Kaufleuteschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in: Jancke/
Ulbrich, eds., Vom Individuum zur Person, 108–127.
60 Reynolds, ed., Interpreting the Self, 2f., 42.
61 On this, cf. for example, Sobel, The Revolution in Selves; and the contributions of Adak,
Mendelson, Ezli, and Sparling, in Jancke/Ulbrich, eds., Vom Individuum zur Person.
62 Gabriele Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich, “Einleitende Bemerkungen,” in Natalie Zemon
Davis, “Heroes, Heroines, Protagonists,” in L’Homme Z.F.G. 12,2 (2001), 322–328; quotations
323, 322.
Observations on the Historiographical Status
of Research on Self-Writing1
Kaspar von Greyerz
Introduction
Early modern self-narratives – that is, autobiographies, diaries, family chroni-

cles and the like – may be considered to represent a social act. The authors in
question practically never compose their texts for themselves only, as much
as they might claim to do so.2 Among the authors whose texts are discussed
below, the peasant Caspar Preis (? –c.1667) and the prophetess Anna Vetter
(1630–1703) explicitly wanted their accounts to be read by others. However, the
same can also be assumed for the records left by the pewterer Augustin Güntzer
(1596–c.1657), the architect and city councillor Joseph Furttenbach (1591–1667)
and the tradeswoman Glückel von Hameln (1645–1724), whose works are like-
wise the object of this contribution. They almost certainly did not write exclu-
sively for the benefit of their descendants, as they claimed to do. In all likelihood,
they more generally wrote for posterity, whether consciously or not. It is illu-
sory to assume that anybody who composes a diary or any other self-narrative
is writing strictly for him- or herself. Even the diarist writing a supposedly
secret text consistently writes for an imagined readership.3
Self-writing of the German speaking realm from the fifteenth to the seven-
teenth centuries does not only represent a social act. Simultaneously, it more
or less explicitly documents social networks. These, in turn, refer to connec-
tions of patronage and clientele.4 Patronage and clientele are the glue holding
1 The following is a thorougly revised and extended version of my article “Vom Nutzen und
Vorteil der Selbstzeugnisforschung für die Frühneuzeithistorie,” in Jahrbuch des historischen
Kollegs (2005), 27–47.
2 See the instructive comments on the audience actually intended by the sixteenth-century
authors of self-narratives in Hans Rudolf Velten, Das selbst geschriebene Leben. Eine Studie
zur deutschen Autobiographie im 16. Jahrhundert (Frankfurter Beiträge zur Germanistik, vol.
29), (Heidelberg: 1995). For a brief overview of the primary motives of early modern authors
of self-narratives, see Kaspar von Greyerz, Vorsehungsglaube und Kosmologie: Studien zu eng-
lischen Selbstzeugnissen des 17. Jahrhunderts (Veröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen
Instituts London, vol. 25), (Göttingen: 1990), 18–22.
3 See Peter Boerner, Tagebuch (Sammlung Metzler, vol. 85), (Stuttgart: 1969), 25 f.
des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 10),
(Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2000).

Observations on the Historiographical Status of Research 35
together the early modern society of estates, in monarchies as well as

republics.
In the Germanic world, scholarly interest in the kind of personal writing
discussed here, arose for the first time under the influence of Johann Gottfried
Herder (1744–1803). He inspired the Schaffhausen theologian and teacher
Johann Georg Müller (1759–1819) in the 1790’s to publish three volumes of
Bekenntnisse merkwürdiger Männer von sich selbst, a series which found its suc-
cessor in the Selbstbiographien berühmter Männer, edited by the Württemberg
theologian David Christoph Seybold (1747–1804), which was likewise inspired
by Herder.5 A renewed phase of scholarly preoccupation arose in the later
nineteenth century. Whereas Johann Georg Müller did not mind publishing
the self-narratives of authors from a low social background, such as the remi-
niscences of Heinrich Bosshard (1749–1815), the late nineteenth-century focus
on first-person writing was definitely more elitist. A case in point is the excel-
lent, but also exceedingly partial Geschichte der Autobiographie, which Georg
Misch presented to the Prussian Academy in four volumes in 1904. For Misch,
Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit represented the apogee of all autobiographi-
cal writing since the Renaissance; it also provided a measuring stick according
to which he included or excluded earlier self-narratives.6 Due to this approach,
a large number of interesting texts, especially of the seventeenth century, were
excluded from the canon that earned Misch’s and his disciples’ blessing.
However, for the historiographic focus on self-narratives, which has flour-
ished since the 1980’s, literary aesthetics cannot be a decisive criterion of selec-
tion. Rather, we historians are interested in the “view from the middle of
society in both directions” which early modern self-writing offers in a very
revealing manner.7
5 On Johann Georg Müller see Hans Ulrich Wipf, “Müller, Johann Georg,” in Neue Deutsche
Biographie 18 (1997), S. 319–320 [online: http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd117592684
.html]. On David Christoph Seybold see Thomas K. Kuhn, Religion und neuzeitliche
Gesellschaft. Studien zum sozialen und diakonischen Handeln in Pietismus, Aufklärung und
Erweckungsbewegung (Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, vol. 122), (Tübingen: 2003), 93–97.
6 The posthumously published second half of the fourth volume is relevant: Von der
Renaissance bis zu den autobiographischen Hauptwerken des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, arr. by
Bernd Neumann (Frankfurt a.M.: 1969). See also Michael Jaeger, Autobiographie und
Geschichte. Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Misch, Karl Löwith, Gottfried Benn, Alfred Döblin (Stuttgart
and Weimar: 1995) especially 71–132, where Jaeger deals with Wilhelm Dilthey’s intellectual
legacy in the work of his son-in-law Georg Misch.
7 The phrase was coined by Hartmut Lehmann, “Grenzen der Erklärungskraft der Konfession
alisierungsthese,” in Interkonfessionalität – Transkonfessionalität – binnenkonfessionelle
Pluralität. Neue Forschungen zur Konfessionalisierungsthese, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz, Manfred
36 Greyerz
What is self-writing? Self-writing refers to texts in which the “author him or

herself (…) appears in action or in suffering,” or more or less explicitly refers to
him or herself.8 We thereby think of autobiographies, diaries, letters and pos-
sibly travel accounts. For pragmatic reasons, I will explicitly exempt letters
from the following. Even though this removes the heterogeneous mass of early
modern correspondences from our project, it does not help to specify the
genre. The development of specific genres of writing about oneself was still in
process before the eighteenth century. Autobiographies and diaries, for
instance, were not clearly separate forms of writing, because diary notes often
formed the basis for writing an autobiography. An urban chronicle or, in par-
ticular, a family chronicle could all of a sudden become a text in which the
writer suddenly began to refer to himself in one way or another, for instance in
connection with acute familial or political crises.9
The following is divided into two parts, offering first a description of a num-
ber of representative texts and then the analytical insights that can be gained
from looking at such texts as sources of early modern history. The focus of
both parts is on the Holy Roman Empire. The first section is mainly descrip-
tive, concentrating on five self-narratives written in the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. The second part is more analytical. In it, I will address
four important aspects of early modern history highlighted by the texts in
question.
Five Texts
The five self-narratives to be introduced here are the autobiography of the

Alsatian pewterer Augustin Güntzer, the autobiographical records of the chief
Jakubowski-Tiessen, Thomas Kaufmann and Hartmut Lehmann (Schriften des Vereins für
Reformationsgeschichte, vol. 201), (Heidelberg: 2003), 242–249, here 247.
8 This is a slightly broadened perspective borrowed from Benigna von Krusenstjern, “Was
sind Selbstzeugnisse? Begriffskritische und quellenkundliche Überlegungen anhand von
Beispielen aus dem 17. Jahrhundert,” Historische Anthropologie 2 (1994), 462–471, here 463.
9 This is the case, for example, in Matthias Lauberer’s (father and son) Colmar family chroni-
cle from the years 1657–1699 (no linear chronology): “Mathias Lauberer, Vater und Sohn,
Mein haußbiechlin. Schreibende Schumacher im 17. Jahrhundert,” ed. Fabian Brändle and
Sebastian Leutert (Selbst-Konstruktion, vol. 2), (Basel: 2005). A similar shift occurs in the
unpublished Basel chronicle of the Handmann family, in which the urban revolt of 1691 occa-
sioned a detailed personal report by Johann Handmann (1634–1703), who was then a mem-
ber of Basel’s small council: Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, Privatarchiv 587 A: Handmannsche
Familienchronik, 1662–1936, final section.
architect (Stadtbaumeister) of Ulm Joseph Furttenbach, the Stausebach chron-

icle written by Caspar Preis, the self-narrative of the Lutheran prophetess Anna
Vetter from Ansbach, and finally the so-called “Memoirs” of the Jewish mother
and tradeswoman Glikl bas Judah Leib, better known as Glückel of Hameln.
The order is not coincidental. It reflects the time of composition of the indi-
vidual texts.
Augustin Güntzer’s autobiography is amongst the relatively few first-person
narratives written by seventeenth-century craftsmen known to us.10 The
author was born in 1596 in the Alsatian imperial town of Oberehnheim (today
called Obernai), directly south of Strasbourg, as the son of Reformed parents in
a town with a Catholic majority.11 The impression left on him by his early expe-
riences as a member of a confessional minority seems to have been an essen-
tial reason for the later composition of his reminiscences, which Güntzer
began in 1645 at the earliest.12 Another important motive is that Güntzer
wanted to justify his rapid social decline beginning in the 1620’s to his two
daughters, who were to outlive him. Whereas the young Güntzer, during his
two long journeys which took him to Italy and later to Latvia and Lithuania
along the Baltic coast and from there by ship to England, does not always dem-
onstrate confessional steadfastness, it is his confessional staunchness in later
years that leaves him increasingly lonely and impoverished. He spent his final
years poverty-stricken as a resident without citizenship (Hintersasse) in Basel.
He could not come up with the sum necessary for acquiring citizenship. The
autobiography ends abruptly with entries to the year 1657. Shortly after that
Güntzer will have died. His exact date of death is not known.
As in many other self-narratives from the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries, exact observations of extraordinary celestial phenomena are also to be
10 Cf. James S. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus. Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe
(Stanford, ca: 1998); James S. Amelang, “The Dilemmas of Popular Autobiography,” in
Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich. Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als histo-
rische Quellen (1500–1850), ed. Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans Medick and Patrice Veit
(Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 9), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2001), 431–438;
Fabian Brändle, “‘Darmit ich aber auch etwas freide hab auff erden, so thue ich schreiben
und Leßen’. Populare soziale Außenseiter des 17. Jahrhunderts als Selbstzeugnisautoren,”
in ibid., 439–457.
11 On Güntzer see the introductory essays by Fabian Brändle and Dominik Sieber, in
Augustin Güntzer, Kleines Biechlin von meinem gantzen Leben. Die Autobiographie eines
Elsässischen Kannengießers aus dem 17. Jahrhundert, ed. idem (Selbstzeugnisse der
Neuzeit, vol. 8), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2002), 3–58.
12 Cf. for example ibid., 87. On the period of composition, see the introduction by the edi-
tors, ibid., 63 f.
38 Greyerz
found in the records of the Alsatian pewterer. He continuously interprets them

as foreboding signs of divine punishment. Güntzer’s observations on the
comet of 1618 are paradigmatic of contemporary beliefs, in hindsight, that the
comet heralded the Thirty Years’ War as a punishment from God. His observa-
tions are contained in one of the four preserved pen drawings, which the
author added to his text.13 The tail of the comet predicts a divine punishment
for the whole of southern Germany, from Munich and Augsburg (in the left
upper corner of the picture) as far as Strasbourg (in the right lower corner of
the picture). Penned on the back of the drawing are the words: “I saw this
comet in Tyrol every morning at 5 o’clock for one hour, 14 days in succession
before Christmas 1618 in December. The Lord, our God, may have mercy upon
us, for he indicates great punishment and calamity to us men because of sin in
the German lands.”14 This popular conception of God of the late sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, which is especially strong in the belief that comets are
instruments of warning from the God of the Old Testament, is a recurring ele-
ment in numerous contemporary self-narratives.
Although it is generally agreed that imminent divine punishment can only
be averted by individual and/or collective moral improvement, the case of ill-
ness, which could easily be understood as God’s punishment, nonetheless
presents an exception. Although it is normally perceived to be caused by God –
if not by black magic15 –, people are still allowed to call upon medical or other
help to seek healing. One time, Güntzer is treated successfully after a long
illness by a Jewish doctor named Lazarus of Dambach, on another occasion
by the medically skilled wife of the executioner of Oberehnheim. This woman,
Güntzer writes, “prescribed me lard from humans and dogs and other medi-
cines, the woman treated me for half a year. At last I got well again through
the power of God.”16 One may be inclined to see Güntzer’s many elaborate
references to physical and mental borderline experiences simply as a narra-
tive construction in the pewterer’s writings. However, the vividly articulated
13 Reproduced ibid., 148 f.

14 Ibid., 150: “Dißen Cometstern habe ich zu Schwe[tz] im Thiroll alen Morgen um 5 Uhr
gesehen eine Stundt lang, 14 Tag nacheinander vohr Weinachten ano 1618 im Decembris.
Der Her, unßer Gott, wole unß genödig sein, dan er zeigt unß Menschen große Straff undt
Unglick an um der Sinden willen im deitschen Landte.”
15 See the analysis of the autobiography of Hieronymus Wolf by Vera Jung, “Die Leiden des
Hieronymus Wolf. Krankengeschichten eines Gelehrten im 16. Jahrhundert,” Historische
Anthropologie 9 (2001), 333–357, especially 341.
16 Güntzer, Kleines Biechlin, 108 (concerning Lazarus of Dambach) and 96: “[…] verordnet
mihr Menschen- und Hundtsschmalz und andere Metecumenten, welches Weib ein hal-
bes Jahr mich curieret hat. Wirdt entlichen durch Gottes Macht widerumb gesundt.”
memory of the pain suffered indicates that this is much more than mere narra-
tive convention. In one (admittedly extraordinary) place, the pain caused by
the mental illness of his married daughter Agnes even brings the pious author
to reproach God for having brought it about: “Oh, most holy Lord, strong hero
helping the people on earth in need, help my daughter in her great need and all
other people, who suffer in innocence on earth. Lord, you alone in heaven and
on earth can do everything, no one can be compared to you […]. Therefore
behold the great woe of my daughter, who cannot serve you now in her imbe-
cility. Oh Lord, she is the work of your hands […].”17
His statements of belief in the foreboding character of extraordinary natu-
ral occurrences and his urge to document his experiences of illness and pain
represent two fundamental aspects of the narrative of his life which the
Alsatian craftsman has left us. A third characteristic feature lies in the trans-
gression of the confessional dividing line, which I have already mentioned. As
a Calvinist, Güntzer is imprinted from his childhood onwards by the experi-
ences of being a confessional outsider within a predominantly Catholic and
later – in Colmar – Lutheran environment.18 His autobiography contains an
extensive Calvinistic statement of belief. Nevertheless, his curiosity drives him
to visit the chapel consecrated to Mary in Loreto and St. Peter in Rome, where
he tries to protect himself against confessional suspicion by carrying along a
rosary. Above all, in Siena he has his feet washed by a bishop together with 150
other people and on the journey home from his second voyage around Lyon in
1621, he saves himself from dangerous harassment by Catholic soldiers by mak-
ing the sign of the cross.19
The autobiography of Joseph Furttenbach, citizen of Ulm, acquaints us
with Lutheran confessional culture. Furttenbach was a direct contemporary
of Güntzer, as he was born in 1591 in Leutkirch to evangelical parents, but
his self-writing represents substantially different social circumstances. After a
17 Ibid., 297: “Ach du alerheiligster Gott, du starcker Helt zu helffen den nodtleidet(e)n
Menschen auff Erden, hilff auch meiner Dochter in ihrer großer Nodt undt auch al andern
Menschen, die um Unschult leiden auff Erden. Herr, du bist doch der alein im Himel undt
auff Erden, der ales kann undt vermag, niemandt ist dihr zu verkleichen […]. Darum siee
an dass große Elendt meiner Dochter, welche dihr dißmallen nicht dienen kann in ihrer
Pledheiptigkeidt. Ach Herr, sie ist deiner Hendten Werck […].”
18 Cf. Dominik Sieber, “Calvinistische Passionen, konfessionalisierte Körper. Zur Auto
biographie des Zinngießers Augustin Güntzer (1596–1657?),” Sozialwissenschaftliche
Informationen 24 (1995), 5–11, especially 9–11; Dominik Sieber, “Erlesenes Leid und selbst-
bewusste Gesten. Die religiösen Leitbilder Augustin Güntzers,” in: Güntzer, Kleines
Biechlin, 28–58.
19 Güntzer, Kleines Biechlin, 196 and 144 (on Siena).
40 Greyerz
long stay in Italy, where he acquired his practical skills as an engineer and
architect as well as a pyrotechnician, he established himself professionally as
the administrator of a trading house in Ulm in 1621. There, he acquired citizen-
ship two years later and married Anna Katharina Strauss, a city councillor’s
daughter.20 In 1631 he was appointed chief architect of the city and five years
later he obtained a place on the city council. Whereas administrative work in
trading remained his principal source of income, Joseph Furttenbach kept
himself busy as a writer, penning amongst other things an unpublished chron-
icle of Ulm in the Thirty Years’ War and a two-volume autobiography, of which
only the second volume is extant. The autobiography was probably composed
in the form of yearly entries.21 An important aspect of these entries is the list-
ing of all the visitors to the renowned Furttenbach cabinet of curiosities.22 The
visitors belonged to the upper levels of urban society, the nobility, and every
now and again the ranks of imperial princes. They came from all regions of
the Holy Roman Empire, as well as from Denmark, the Low Countries, France,
England, Switzerland and Italy.
Three years after ending his personal record, Joseph Furttenbach died in
1667 at the then very old age of 75. None of his seven children outlived him; five
of them even died before the middle of the century. During the terminal illness
of the last child still alive, Joseph Furttenbach, Jr., who died on the 8th of March
1655, the Lutheran pastor Johann Jacob Manner, as the confessor of the sick
son, was repeatedly a guest at the house of the Furttenbachs.23 In November
1654 the father notes the following: “…during the ongoing illness of Joseph
Furttenbach the younger, but in 3/4 of a year’s time, I, Joseph Furttenbach the
20 For this and the following see Margot Berthold, “Joseph Furttenbach von Leutkirch,
Architekt und Ratsherr in Ulm (1591–1667),” Ulm und Oberschwaben 33 (1953), 119–189.
21 For an edition of this important document, see now: Joseph Furttenbach, Lebenslauff,
1652–1664, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz, Kim Siebenhüner and Roberto Zaugg (Selbstzeugnisse
der Neuzeit, vol. 22), (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: 2013).
22 Such cabinets (Wunderkammern or Kunstkammern) were a forerunner of the modern
museum. Cf. for example Kunstkammer, Laboratorium, Bühne. Schauplätze des Wissens im
17. Jahrhundert, ed. Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte and Jan Lazardzig, especially the
contributions by Beket Bukinowská and Robert Felfe, (Theatrum Scientiarium, vol. 1),
(Berlin and New York: 2003), 199–264.
23 Furttenbach, Lebenslauff, ed. von Greyerz, Siebenhüner, Zaugg, for example 168 f. and
180 f. On Lutheran confessional practice in seventeenth-century Ulm, see Oliver Kaul,
Undankbare Gäste. Abendmahlsverzicht und Abendmahlsausschluß in der Stadt Ulm um
1600 – ein interkultureller Prozeß (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische
Geschichte Mainz, vol. 202), (Mainz: 2003) 121–156. Kurt Aland outlines the history of
the private confession practice in German Lutheranism from the beginnings of the
Reformation to the Berlin Beichtstuhlstreit in the 1690s and its consequences: Kurt Aland,
elder (to console my son with the word of God), have read the whole Holy
Bible, and excerpted over 150 sheets of paper full of sayings. But said Joseph
Furttenbach the younger still lay in bed with his five ulcers (out of which lots
of blood and refuse flowed, causing great pain); he could not walk, nor stand,
nor sit, nor even lie properly […].”24 In February 1655 the author reads “the
Augsburg confession sermons, first and second part, as preached and explained
by Mr. Johann Conradt Göbelin, after reading the whole Bible” to his sick son.25
In 1657, two years after the death of young Joseph, he has the sermons given
to him by pastors of Ulm “bound into two thick volumes.”26 In short, the
older Joseph Furttenbach presents himself as a person entirely integrated
into the Lutheran confessional culture fostered by the social elite of Ulm.27
Interconfessional adventures, as we know them from Augustin Güntzer’s writ-
ings, do not occur in his autobiography. However, Furttenbach’s strong and, for
all we can assume, uncompromising attachment to Ulm’s Lutheran culture
notably contrasts with the fact that he spent ten years of his earlier life in
Counterreformation Italy and that in his day he consciously remained Ulm’s
chief representative of Italianate baroque culture.
Just like most of his Christian and Jewish contemporaries, Furttenbach
believed in the immanence and interventionist presence of a beneficent, as
well as punitive, God in individual and collective daily life – except that in his
case God’s punishment strikes personal opponents to an extent that I have
“Die Privatbeichte im Luthertum von ihren Anfängen bis zu ihrer Auflösung,” in

Kirchengeschichtliche Entwürfe, ed. idem (Gütersloh: 1960), 452–519.
24 Furttenbach, Lebenslauff, ed. von Greyerz, Siebenhüner, Zaugg, 175: “[…] under wehren-
der Joseph Furttenbachs des jüngeren so langwiriger Kranckheit, aber jnner 3/4 Jarzeit, so
habe ich Joseph Furttenbach der Elter (dem gedachten meinem Sohn auß Gottes wort zu
trösten) die gantze Bibel heiliger Schrifft außgelesen, beneben über die 150 Bögen lautter
kernsprüch herausgeschriben. Aber besagter Joseph Furttenbach der Jünger lage noch
alleweil an seinen 5 geschweren (daraus ein grosse menge verstockhet bluett und unrath
mit grossem schmerzen geflossen) zu bette, er könnte nicht gehen, nit stehen, nit sitzen,
auch nicht recht liegen […].”
25 Ibid., 177–179: “Nach vollendter Bibel, auch deß herren M: Johann Conradt Göbelin gepre-
digte unnd außgelegte augspurgische Confessions Predigten, den ersten und andern
Theil.” Reference to this paragraph in Norbert Haag, Predigt und Gesellschaft. Die
lutherische Orthodoxie in Ulm, 1640–1740 (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische
Geschichte Mainz, vol. 145), (Mainz: 1992), 266.
26 Ibid., 244: “in 2 tomi einbinden.”
27 Cf. Monika Hagenmaier, Predigt und Policey. Der gesellschaftspolitische Diskurs zwischen
Kirche und Obrigkeit in Ulm, 1614–1639 (Nomos Universitätsschriften Geschichte, vol. 1),
(Baden-Baden: 1989); Haag, Predigt und Gesellschaft; Kaul, Undankbare Gäste.
42 Greyerz
otherwise seen in such concentrated form only in writings of seventeenth-

century English Quakers.28 The main victim of godly retaliation in
Furttenbach’s autobiography is his business partner Johann Kohn, who in
January 1655 began to present him with difficulties arising from – as Furttenbach
believed, downright excessive – interest receivables.29 Long after a settlement
was finally reached with Kohn, and he had formed new partnerships, Johann
Kohn’s physical suffering from gout and other ailments, as well as his failures in
business, remained a favourite topic recorded by the chief Baumeister of Ulm,
and these episodes and anecdotes are regularly associated with God’s punitive
intervention. What makes such entries look fairly offensive from a present-day
perspective is the egocentricity with which they are stated.30
On the other hand, Furttenbach’s occupation with extraordinary natural
phenomena as signs of divine providence already exhibits a quality which his-
torians of science would term naturalistic. This becomes especially clear in his
description of lightning striking near Ulm on the 26th of July, 1654, which
missed a farmer, his wife and their servant by only a narrow margin:
Their bodies were burnt in many places on the back (indicating snakily
twisting lightning or a shooting beam), on the belly and the legs. The
woman had black shoes with brass buckles on, the buckles were melted
and in the place where each buckle was, a small hole was burnt in the
foot. She had a silver ring on her finger, the ring started to melt in two
places, but nothing happened to the finger. It is to be learnt from this that
the beam does not have a bodily substance (since it managed to get into
the exceedingly narrow space between the clothes and the body of
humans so quickly), but is solely a massive fire blaze in which God’s
power and omnipotence is manifest. One should therefore daily behold
the glory of the Almighty with ultimate wonder. All 3 people nevertheless
got away alive.31
28 Cf. amongst others Kaspar von Greyerz, Vorsehungsglaube und Kosmologie, 78 ff.
29 Joseph Furttenbach, Lebenslauff 1652–1664, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz, Kim Siebenhüner
and Roberto Zaugg (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 22), 176 f.
30 See for example ibid., 74.
31 Ibid., 59 f.: “Ire leiber an vilen ortten am ruggen (wie eine schlangen zwitzerendter blitz
oder schiessender straal), bauch vnd schenckheln verbrändt, allß ob es mit einem Feür
oder heissem wasser geschehen were. Das weib hatte schwarze mit messenen hafften
habende schuch an, da wurden die hafften verschmeltzt vnd beÿ jeder hafften ein Löchlin
jn den Fuoß gebrändt. Sie hate einsilbern ring an jrem Finger steckhen, derselbige fienge
an zweÿ ortten an zu schmeltzen, aber dem finger geschache nichts. Hieraus nun zu ver-
spüren, das der straal kein corpus nit habe (sintemalen er zwischen den klaidern vnnd ob
The Stausebach chronicle, written by Caspar Preis (? –ca. 1667) and covering
the years 1636–1667, is a peasant’s village and family chronicle, in which the
deprivations and horrors of the Thirty Years’ War are accorded much space.
Stausebach is a village in North Hessia near the town of Amöneburg. It was an
enclave whose spiritual and secular lord was not one of the Hessian landgraves,
but the prince-elector and archbishop of Mainz. Caspar Preis was a Catholic.
However, his religious orientation, as well as confessional matters more gener-
ally, are addressed only relatively rarely in his writing. He occasionally men-
tions some priests in connection with the post-war years and, towards the end
of his text, the construction of a high altar in the local church in the year 1663,
which a few years later occasioned the transformation of a village farmhouse
into Stausebach’s first vicarage.32 When recounting the violent death of
Andreas Keiser, the husband of his deceased brother’s daughter in 1666, he
notes that his killing followed an argument between Keiser, who was Catholic,
a Lutheran and a Calvinist. The assailant who killed Kaiser with an axe was a
Calvinist named Hans Caspar Hägelich, a powdermaker from Heskem and son
of a saltpetre-manufacturer. The latter trade was dangerous and unhealthy,
and thus largely the preserve of people on the lower rungs of the social ladder.
Perhaps there was an economic aspect to the argument between the three
men. Caspar Preis, in any case, does not indicate whether the death of his rela-
tive was a direct and/or exclusive result of confessional strife.33
The Stausebach chronicle ends with references to the year 1667. The last
entry reads: “The truth has been predicted to me that in the year 1667 I will die.
God knows this, I do not. I leave everything to Almighty God. He will deal
with me as He pleases.”34 Based on the study of additional sources, the editors
assume that the author actually did die in the same year.35 His date of birth is
der menschen leiber in so engem spatium, in solcher geschwinde herumber gefahren ist)
sonder das es allein ein über die massen gewaltiges feürflämlin darinnen der grosse Gewaldt
vnd Allmacht Gotte steckhet. Seie(?), das mann hierbeÿ mit höchster verwunderung die
herrligkeit deß allerhöchsten wol vndt täglichen betrachten sole. Alle 3: Personen aber
seind mit dem Leben daruon kommen.” On the broader context, see Heinz D. Kittsteiner,
Die Entstehung des modernen Gewissens (Frankfurt a.M. and Leipzig: 1991), 31–100.
32 Bauernleben im Dreissigjährigen Krieg. Die Stausebacher Chronik des Caspar Preis, 1636–
1667, ed. Wilhelm A. Eckhardt and Helmut Klingelhöfer (Beiträge zur hessischen
Geschichte, vol. 13), (Marburg a.d. Lahn: 1998), 95 and 102.
33 Ibid., 100.
34 Ibid., 103: “Die Warheyt ist mir gesagt worden, im 1667. Jahr da wert ich in sterben. Das
weys Gott, ich weys aber nit. Gott dem Almechtigen sey ales heimgestelt. Er machts mit
mir, wies im gefelt.”
35 Wilhelm A. Eckhardt, Einleitung, in Eckhardt/Klingelhöfer, eds., Bauernleben, 21–34, here 26.
44 Greyerz
unknown. His notes only reveal that his wife Gerdraut was born in Wittelsberg
in 1596 and that they married in 1621.36
In some ways Caspar Preis’s text can be compared with the chronicle of the
Swabian village shoemaker Hans Heberle (1618–1672).37 Preis’s notanda throw
a glaring light on many of the events of the Thirty Years’ War from the perspec-
tive of a villager, as country people were much more exposed to the horrors of
war than city dwellers. In looking back at their experiences of war, both authors
admit at one point that what they have seen and experienced lies beyond their
verbal capacity to express.38
However, unlike Heberle’s reminiscences, Preis’s text naturally privileges
the view of the full-fledged peasant, who repeatedly loses most of his livestock,
portable property and everything that can be more or less easily removed from
his house, stable and barn – even his fruittrees, which the marauding soldiers
cut down as firewood. It is true that, like Heberle, he does not really distinguish
between officially “friendly” troops and those of the enemy because at the level
of the village “friendly” soldiers can be just as dangerous as enemy troops.
Nonetheless, it is the troops of the Calvinist landgrave of Hessen-Kassel who
most frequently descend upon the region of Amöneburg, as in the year 1636:
In that year not a single bushel of wheat got into this village, everything
having been cut down and consumed by the troops when they moved on
to Hanau, only to return. Four regiments of cavalry lodged in the village
of Stausebach for 6 days and nights. It was a very sad time. Nobody could
allow themselves to be recognized or seen, for they had little respect for
human life. Whomever they encountered, if he managed to come away
alive, it was a miracle. The people had to take refuge in town as much
as they could. O, the many married and young unmarried women that
were violated, the many people who got killed. During this time all live-
stock was driven away to Hessian territory,39 whatever they managed to
encounter in the Darmstadt region and within the district of Amöneburg.
36 Eckhardt/Klingelhöfer, eds., Bauernleben, 35, n. 35.

37 Der Dreissigjährige Krieg in zeitgenössischer Darstellung. Hans Heberles ‘Zeytregister’
(1618–1672). Aufzeichnungen aus dem Ulmer Territorium […], ed. Gerd Zillhardt
(Forschungen zur Geschichte der Stadt Ulm, vol. 13), (Stuttgart: 1975).
38 For Preis, Eckhardt/Klingelhöfer, eds., Bauernleben, 64. For Heberle, see ibid., for example
151: “In sum, I cannot adequately describe the misery which then prevailed” (“In suma, ich
kann den jamer nicht groß gnug beschreiben, der damall geweßen ist.”).
39 Caspar Preis here refers to the Calvinist landgraviate of Hessen-Kassel as being distinct
from the Lutheran landgraviate of Hessen-Darmstadt.
Before this time, the Hessians [Preis means the soldiers of Hessen-Kassel]
stole the church bells. They behaved as savagely in the churches as wild
boars, and if they had been able to take with them even the churches,
they would have done so.40
Going beyond the description of the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War by many
other authors, Caspar Preis here, as well as in other places, explicitly refers to
the apparent frequency of women being raped by soldiers.41
Horses in the possession of the peasantry were a very rare sight during the
war years, as they were regularly confiscated or stolen by passing troops.
Whenever the danger of being killed decreased, Caspar Preis, along with his
servant and his young farm-hand, together pulled the harrow accross some of
the arable land.42 Before they went out into the fields they dirtied their boots
with manure to prevent their theft.43 Passing troops regularly stole every-
thing from the peasantry they encountered outside their villages, including
their shoes.
Although this above all provides an incisive and disturbing report about the
experiences of war on the village level, Caspar Preis’s Stausebach chronicle is
also an important document with regard to the reconstruction and the gradual
stabilization of agricultural production during the decades immediately fol-
lowing the end of the war in 1648. The sections of the chronicle covering these
years of hard-won peace – up to 1667, when the text, as we have seen, comes to
an abrupt end – are much more regularly punctuated than the earlier ones
with observations about the weather and exceptionally low or high annual lev-
els of the cost of living. They are also marked in more than one place by the
author’s comments on the difficulties of hiring servants and maids (Gesinde),
who were rare and consequently expensive in those days. In his entry about
the year 1654 we find the following passage:
40 Eckhardt/Klingelhöfer, eds., Bauernleben, 36 f.

41 See also ibid., 42 and 48 (cases of rape during the year 1640). For a bibliographical study of
Germanic self-narratives from the period of the Thirty Years’ War, see Selbstzeugnisse der
Zeit des Dreissigjährigen Krieges. Beschreibendes Verzeichnis, ed. Benigna von Krusenstjern
(Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 6), (Berlin: 1997).
42 This is a makeshift practice confirmed during the most miserable war years by the South
Hessian parson Johann Daniel Minck in his notanda in the church records of Gross-
Bieberau: “M. Johann Daniel Mincks Chronik über den 30jährigen Krieg nach den
Aufzeichnungen vom Gross-Bieberauer Kirchensaalbuch,”ed. Wilhelm Krämer, Beiträge
zur Hessischen Kirchengeschichte 2 (1903): 1–38, here 24.
43 Eckhardt/Klingelhöfer, eds., Bauernleben, 47 f.
46 Greyerz
This year and, roughly speaking, during the last ten years, God has
imposed a great calamity and particular punishment upon this land in
connection with the Gesinde, that is servants, young farm-hands and
maids. Among those tending arable land, not even every tenth man has
been able to hire some Gesinde. As a result much land has remained
untilled. The way things were going in this land was pitiful and unbeliev-
able. Whoever managed to hire a servant had to pay him whatever the
latter wished, 25 Reichstaler, or even more, and to a young farm-hand 10
Reichstaler, even though he knew no more than how to drive on two or
three horses. And even then most men could not hire anybody. I will say
again, that this is a great punishment imposed on this land for our sins by
our Lord God.44
With that we come to the fourth of the five texts that I would like to introduce
here. The writings of the Lutheran prophetess Anna Vetter from the late seven-
teenth century hauntingly document the memory of physical suffering and
pain. They belong to the category of autobiographical texts by women, which
are rare in the Germanic world before the end of the seventeenth century.
However, considering the current state of research, it has to remain an open
question whether the rare occurrence of female autobiographical texts in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is due to anything more than the mere
coincidence of preservation.45
44 Ibid., 79: “In diesem Jahr und etliche Jahr zuvor ungefähr in zehen Jahren ist ein großes
Ungluck und ein sonderliche Straff von unserm Herr Gott uber diß Land verhenget von
wegen des Gesinds, als Knecht und Jungen und Mägte. Es hatt kaum der zehende Man, als
nemlich die Ackerleuth, ihr Gesind bekommen könen, das auch viel Land ist ungebauen
bliepen, und es ist zu erbarmen geweßen und ist unglaublich, wie es ergangen ist in die-
sem Land. Wer ja einen Knecht bekomen kond, der must im geben, was er haben wolt,
funfundzwantzig Reichstaler, auch wol mehr, einem Jungen zehen Reichstaller, der noch
nichts gethun kond, dan 2 oder 3 Perd treiben, und kont sie doch der meinste Man nicht
haben. Ich sage noch, das es eine große Straff ist von unserem Herren Gott uber diß Land
verhänget wegen unserer Sünden.”
45 On female self-narratives of the seventeenth century, see, amongst others, Daniela Hacke,
Frauen in der Stadt. Selbstzeugnisse des 16.-18. Jahrhunderts (Stadt in der Geschichte, vol.
29), (Ostfildern: 2004); Eva Kormann, Ich, Welt und Gott. Autobiographik im 17. Jahrhundert
(Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 13), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2004); Eva Kormann,
“Haus, Kirche, Stadt und Himmel. Geschlechter-Räume in Autobiographien des 17.
Jahrhunderts,” in: Geschlechter-Räume. Konstruktionen von “gender” in Geschichte,
Literatur und Alltag, ed. Margarethe Hubrath (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2001), 69–85;
Autobiography by Women in German, ed. Mererid Puw Davies, Beth Linklater and Gisela
The writings of Anna Vetter date from the early 1690s. The original text is not
known. The Pietist Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714) included it in his Impartial
history of churches and heretics from the beginning of the New Testament until
the year of the Lord 1688, which was published at the turn of the eighteenth
century in four parts in Frankfurt am Main.46
Anna Vetter was born the daughter of a blacksmith in Kattenhochstatt near
Weissenburg in 1630.47 Her father was so severely attacked by plundering sol-
diers that he died soon thereafter, and her mother had problems making ends
meet for herself and her children, at least until her remarriage to a baker in
Shaw (Oxford, Bern and Berlin: 2000); Autobiographien von Frauen. Beiträge zu ihrer
Geschichte, ed. Magdalene Heuser (Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte,
vol. 85), (Tübingen: 1996).
46 Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzergeschichte vom Anfang des neuen Testaments bis auf
das Jahr Christ[i] 1688. The four parts of the “Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie” published in
1699/1700 by Thomas Fritsch in Frankfurt a.M. are divided into two volumes. The writings
of Anna Vetter are located in volume two at the end of the third part. The text of the auto-
biography can be found ibid. 272–284. With regard to the time of composition, according
to Arnold, Anna Vetter predicted the Palatine war (1688–1697) of Louis XIV of France 28
years in advance (ibid. 263). If we take the year 1662 (the beginning of the prophecies of
Anna Vetter) as a starting point, then this information refers to the year 1690. Anna
Vetter’s statement in an epistle that the town of Ansbach had been recommended to her
in sacred marriage for 30 years (ibid. 266) refers to the year 1692, as does a sentence of the
prophetess, cited by Arnold in a commentary, that for 30 years she had to be “a swineherd
for those/ who wallow in sin” (“eine Sauhirtin seyn deren/ die sich in den suenden welt-
zen,” ibid. 268).
On Gottfried Arnold see Martin Schmidt, “Arnold, Gottfried,” Theologische Real-
Enzyklopädie IV (1979): 136–140; Johannes Wallmann, Der Pietismus (Göttingen: 2005),
151–160. On Arnold’s edition see also the comments of Eva Kormann, “‘Es möchte
jemand fragen, wie ich so hoch von Gott geliebt bin worden, und was mein junger
lebens = lauff gewesen’: Anna Vetter oder Religion als Argumentations- und Legitima
tionsmuster,” in Heuser, ed., Autobiographien von Frauen, 71–92, here 76.
47 For the biographical information not included in the “Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie”
see Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach, “Die Ansbacher Visionärin und Prophetin Anna
Vetter,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Kirchengeschichte 45 (1976), 26–32, in addition Martin
Stern, “Die Visionen der Anna Vetter. Ein Frauenschicksal des 17. Jahrhunderts,” Pietismus
und Neuzeit 18 (1992), 81–94; Eva Kormann, Haus, Kirche, Stadt und Himmel, here 74–78;
Eva Kormann, Es möchte jemand fragen…; Kaspar von Greyerz, “Erfahrung und
Konstruktion. Selbstrepräsentation in autobiographischen Texten des 16. und 17.
Jahrhunderts,” in Berichten, Erzählen, Beherrschen. Wahrnehmung und Repräsentation in
der frühen Kolonialgeschichte Europas, ed. Susanna Burghartz, Maike Christadler and
Dorothea Nolde (Zeitsprünge. Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit 7, no. 2/3), (Frankfurt
a.M.: 2003), 220–239, especially 232–238.
48 Greyerz
Wedelsheim near Weissenburg. As a result, the author spent a childhood

and youth marked by substantial privation. Around the 21st year of her life,
Anna Vetter married the mason Johann Michael Vetter from Ansbach, who
from 1656/57 onwards became the castle guard of Ansbach. They had seven
children. Of these children only the son Veit, born in 1652, outlived the
father, who died in 1688, and the mother, as far as we know.48 Anna Vetter died
in 1703.
Even more than Augustin Güntzer’s, Anna Vetter’s text is deeply marked by
the experience of physical pain. Without being able to specify the background,
it may be assumed that heavenly visions as a liberation from physical distress
made Anna Vetter a prophetess – a prophetess who made it her duty to bring
about a moral reversal in the sinful town of Ansbach, directly menaced by
God’s wrath, and who would not be swayed from the pursuit of this objective
in spite of social marginalization, mockery, beatings, imprisonment and sexual
humiliation.49 In an especially memorable passage in her report of visions, the
narrator – apparently following the apocalypse of John – communicates in
birth metaphors:
At last I saw the town [of Ansbach– KvG] as a big pregnant woman/
whose time had come/that she should give birth/and her childbed maids
all sat around her/and they could not make her give birth to the child,
and were about to let mother and child die and decay eternally; there
I thought/I cannot let this woman go dead with the child like this/and I got
up close to the woman, and gave birth to a little boy with her/I brought
him to God; I had to suffer as great a pain/as the woman giving birth/with
great clamour […]; this birth is nothing else than the suffering and dying
of God’s son/as I have to become identical to his image/his mockery and
judgement/martyrdom and pain/has been accomplished through me
again […]. But in this boy all souls of all people in the whole town are
bound together […].50
48 Kantzenbach, Die Ansbacher Visionärin, 27 and 29.

49 Anna Vetter’s demeanor is not an isolated phenomenon; within the scope of early radical
Pietism in the last two decades of the seventeenth century, other women also experi-
enced ecstatic visions. See Jeannine Blackwell, “Gedoppelter Lebenslauf der Pietistinnen.
Autobiographische Schriften der Wiedergeburt,” in: Geschriebenes Leben. Autobiographik
von Frauen, ed. Michaela Holdenried (Berlin: 1995), 49–60.
50 Arnold, Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie, 175 ff. “Endlich sahe ich die stadt (a reference to
Ansbach – KvG) als ein grosses schwangeres weib/ deren zeit herbeygekommen/ daß sie
gebaeren solt/ und ihre ammenweiber sassen alle um sie herum/ und sie kunten das kind
nicht mit ihr gebaeren, und musten mutter und kind sterben und ewig verderben lassen;
Vividly, Anna Vetter articulates her fear of the divine punishment from which
she wants to protect those in her surroundings. From the day of her conversion
onwards, this protection is part of her prophetic mission and tightly linked
with apocalyptic ideas. In her vision of Judgement Day a celestial fire over-
comes her, “and I became full of the holy ghost/my mouth was full of fire and
heavenly blessing, praised Jesus Christ and his holy name; and when I regained
control/I had to write this story/whereas before I could not write one single
letter.”51 Undoubtedly, the boundary between autobiographical vision report
and hagiography becomes quite porous here.52
Although most known seventeenth-century prophets and prophet-
esses of the German-speaking realm belonged to Lutheranism, the phe
nomenon can also be observed elsewhere at the same time, as with the
French Camisards, who in English exile at the turn of the eighteenth century
became the French Prophets, as well as in contemporary Judaism. The autobio-
graphical writings of Glückel of Hameln, who was born in 1645 and died
in 1724, eloquently bear witness to that. The self-writing of this Hamburg Jewess
is written in Yiddish language with Hebrew characters. The text was pro-
duced in the years 1691–1699, with its last two parts (“books”) written between
1715 and 1719. It is the first known autobiographical text by a Jewish woman.53
da gedacht ich/ ich darf diß weib nicht so verderben lassen samt dem kind/ und machte
mich zu dem weib, und gebahr mit ihr ein knaeblein/ das bracht ich zu GOtt; ich muste
so grosse schmertzen leiden/ als das weib in der geburt/ mit großem geschrey (…); es ist
diese geburt nichts anderes als des Sohnes Gottes leiden und sterben/ da ich seinem bild
muss gleich werden/ sein spott und gericht/ marter und pein/ ist wieder an mir vollbracht
worden (…). Dieß knaeblein aber sind alle seelen der menschen in der gantzen stadt
zusammen verbunden (…).” On the transcription: The elevated “e,” marking an umlaut is
depicted as “ae,” “ue” or “oe,” i.e. put after the assigned vowel. On birth metaphors in the
apocalyptic prophecies of Rosamunde von der Asseburg (1672–1712) see Blackwell,
Gedoppelter Lebenslauf, 55.
51 Arnold, Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie, 274, left column “und ich wurde des H. Geistes voll/
mein mund wurde voll feuer und himmels preiß, lobete Jesum Christum und seinen hei-
ligen namen; und da ich zu mir selber kam/ da muste ich diese geschicht schreiben/ da
ich vorher keinen buchstaben schreiben kunte.”
52 On the parallels to hagiography see Amelang, The Flight of Icarus, 118 and 390, n. 7. He
refers to the contemporary Beata Lucia de Jesus of Madrid, amongst others, who ascribed
her sudden alphabetization to a miracle. Earlier illustrious examples of the Catholic hagi-
ographic tradition are Catherine of Siena and Angela Merici.
53 Gabriele Jancke, “Die …(Sichronot, Memoiren) der jüdischen Kauffrau Glückel von
Hameln zwischen Autobiographie, Geschichtsschreibung und religiösem Lehrtext.
Geschlecht, Religion und Ich in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Heuser, ed., Autobiographien von
Frauen, 93–134, here 95. On the time period of composition see ibid. 101. On Glückel see
50 Greyerz
In what follows, I will work from the German translation by Bertha

Pappenheim.54
The main reason for Glückel’s writing was the death of her first husband.
She writes in order to demonstrate that her actions in economically difficult
and mentally stressful times correspond to the prescriptions of the Torah. Her
text therefore becomes a tale of moral instruction for her descendants. At the
same time, it also strikingly documents a process of acquiring and shaping
identity. In an often cited passage, we find an astonishing echo of the messi-
anic prophet Sabbatai Zewi, whose message of the early coming of the Messiah
agitated Judaism from the eastern Mediterranean to the Atlantic coast. As
Glückel writes,
At the same time, talk started about Sabbathai Zewi. […] We hoped like a
woman sitting on the birthing chair spending her labour day with great
pain, and thinking, after all this pain and labouring she will be delighted
with her child [...]. Not only that we were not worthy to see the child, we
made such an effort for, even though we got so far that we held ourselves
in security, and then we unfortunately got stuck. […] Some even sold
everything, house and yard, and hoped to be saved every day. My father in
law – may he rest in peace – lived in Hameln. He gave up his apartment
there and left his yard and his house and his furniture […] and everything
and moved to the town of Hildesheim. He sent us two large barrels with
all kinds of linen. […] Because the good man – may he rest in peace –
thought, we would just ride from Hamburg to the holy land.55
This passage hints at both the imminent expectation of the Messiah and the
author’s consciousness of her sins. The awareness of the inseparable connec-
tion between sin and God’s punishments pervades the whole text. But in the
lifeworld of Glückel of Hameln, fateful events seen as divine punishment do
also Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins. Three seventeenth century Lives
(Cambridge: 1995); Monika Richarz, ed., Die Hamburger Kauffrau Glikl. Jüdische Existenz
in der Frühen Neuzeit (Hamburger Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Juden, vol. 24),
(Hamburg: 2001).
54 Die Memoiren der Glückel von Hameln, aus dem Jüdisch-Deutschen übersetzt und heraus-
gegeben von Bertha Pappenheim (1910) (Weinheim: 1994).
55 Ibid. 74 ff. Cf. also Elisheva Carlebach, “Die messianische Haltung der deutschen Juden im
Spiegel von Glikls ‘Zikhroynes’, ” in: Die Hamburger Kauffrau Glikl, ed. Richarz, as well as
Gershom Sholem, Sabbatai Sevi. The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (Princeton, nj: 1973).
On the situation in Hamburg 1666: ibid., 588–591.
not have a paralyzing effect. On the contrary, they are seen as opportunities.
The crisis becomes a situation of learning for her, out of which the autobio-
graphical self is able to evolve.56
I will end here my brief overview of five representative texts of the seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries. I have deliberately kept it in a descrip-
tive vein. In the following section, the focus shall be placed on analysis.
Insights to be Gained
Let me take up the thesis again that self-writing offers us a view from the mid-
dle of early modern society “in both directions.” The author of this thesis is
Hartmut Lehmann.57 He wants to underline the fact that the extant early mod-
ern self-writing predominantly comes from the middle strata of contemporary
society. In addition, in regard to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we
are speaking above all about the urban middle strata. Peasant self-writing does
not increase in numbers until the eighteenth century; in the seventeenth cen-
tury it is still rare.58 Isolated autobiographical texts from members of the lower
classes only exist from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards.
As for the period we are chiefly concerned with here, we are dealing with a
predominantly male and mostly Protestant view from the middle of society.
The debates of the last two decades between historians about the particular
character of the early modern period can be subsumed under the keywords
“linearity” and “alterity.” Advocates of linearity have focused predominantly on
those aspects of the period which prefigured the constitutional, political and
social characteristics of modernity in one way or another, from the disciplining
efforts of state and church to the rise of the spirit of capitalism. Under the label
of alterity, on the other hand, aspects that appear strange and unfamiliar to the
modern observer have been placed at the center. I certainly to not want to
reignite the conflict, now hopefully resolved, between these two approaches,
nor do I wish to join those who have polemically hypostatised the dichotomy.
However, this section of my contribution is about the advantages of research
on self-writing for the history of early modern Europe. It thus concentrates
on the ways in which historical research of autobiographical documents can
56 See the perceptive analysis of Jancke, “Die…Sichronot, Memoiren,” 120 f.

57 Cf. above note 7.
58 See the anthology of Jan Peters, ed., Mit Pflug und Gänsekiel. Selbstzeugnisse schreibender
Bauern. Eine Anthologie (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 12), (Cologne, Weimar and
Vienna: 2003).
52 Greyerz
contribute to historiographically sharpening the profile of the early modern

age.59 Hence, I will mainly focus on aspects of alterity.
Based on the previous presentation of five texts which I hold to be impor-
tant and representative, the following observations concentrate on four points
which I regard to be especially noteworthy.
1. The most obvious common denominator between the five texts consid-
ered here is the apocalyptic belief that the end of the world is near, which
reveals the influence of a popularized version of the Protestant theology of
salvation (Heilsgeschichte) in three of the five narratives. As these are ideas
whose basic characteristics can be traced back to Jewish origins, it is not sur-
prising that we find similar notions in the reminiscences of Glückel of Hameln.
The apocalyptic expectation applied to one’s own time is in fact also a main
feature of a general perception of the world prevailing in the seventeenth cen-
tury in Germany. In the context of the Thirty Years’ War this was marked by
deeply disturbing if not even existentially traumatic experiences, which were
interpreted eschatologically wherever they indicated an apparent rupture in
the collective experience. In the Protestant texts in question this applies in a
very particular way to the entry of Gustav Adolf of Sweden into the Thirty
Years’ War in 1630.60 Even if one should be careful of interpreting historical and
religious phenomena from an all too one-sided macrohistorical perspective, it
is no exaggeration to speak of the seventeenth century as a period of crises:
catchphrases like the Thirty Years’ War, climate deterioration, the climax of the
early modern plague epidemics and the witch craze will have to suffice here.61
59 Etienne François, one of the pioneers of current historical research on self-writing, has
pointed out the relevant interpretive potential of German self-writing from the later
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, for instance in his attempt to sum up what in
his point of view are the downright fatalistic aspects of the Protestant religiousness of the
respective authors: Etienne François, Mémoires et chroniques familiales dans l’Allemagne
d’entre la Paix d’Augsbourg et la Guerre de Trente Ans (Images familiales et religieuses),
unpublished Mémoire d’Etudes supérieures d’histoire (Paris: 1967).
60 Thomas Kaufmann, Dreißigjähriger Krieg und Westfälischer Friede (Beiträge zur histo-
rischen Theologie 104), (Tübingen: 1998), 60 f.; Silvia Serena Tschopp, Heilsgeschichtliche
Deutungsmuster in der Publizistik des Dreißigjährigen Krieges. Pro- und antischwedische
Propaganda in Deutschland 1628 bis 1635 (Frankfurt a.M.: 1991). A typical appreciation of
the hero-king by a contemporary Protestant can be found in the Hessian pastor’s Johann
Daniel Minck’s notanda. See Mincks Chronik, 12–15.
61 Hartmut Lehmann, “Frömmigkeitsgeschichtliche Auswirkungen der ‘Kleinen Eiszeit’,”
in Volksreligiosität in der modernen Sozialgeschichte, ed. Wolfgang Schieder (Göttingen:
1986), 31–50; Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen, ed., Krisen des 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen:
1999).
If we turn to the apocalyptical thinking of this critical time, we are indeed

dealing with a predominantly Protestant phenomenon. There is no compara-
ble Catholic apocalyptic thinking in the seventeenth century, neither in the
history of theology nor in the broader history of religion.62 It would be risky,
however, to use the absence of such thought in the Stausebach chronicle of the
Catholic peasant Caspar Preis as a confirmation of this. Arguing from apparent
lacunae in the texts at hand is a method which historical research on self-writ-
ing should studiously avoid. Although explanations for Jewish Sabbatianism,
whose beginnings Glückel of Hameln documents, are located exclusively in
the realm of religious experiences and expectations by authorities such as
Gershom Scholem,63 the historiography of early modern Judaism is domi-
nated by associations of Jewish messianism with the emergence of crises
within Judaism.64 In more recent historiography, however, and in conscious
opposition to Scholem, the beginning of Sabbatianism in eastern and central
Europe has also been linked to the exceedingly traumatic experience of the
Chmelniecki-massacres in Ukraine and Poland.65
2. A similar reservation in confessional history in a certain sense also applies
to the belief that extraordinary natural phenomena function as divine signs.
The dissemination of the contemporary belief in foreboding signs, in the form
of pamphlets and broadsides, corresponded in particular to the miracle books
on the Catholic side.66
The belief in foreboding signs became most apparent in observations on
comets, and also survived the longest in this form. The early Enlightenment
62 Cf. Andreas Holzem, “Zeit – Zeitenwende – Endzeit? Anfangsbeobachtungen zum

deutschen katholischen Schrifttum um 1700,” in: Jahrhundertwenden. Endzeit- und
Zukunftsvorstellungen vom 15. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen et
al. (Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, vol. 155), (Göttingen:
1999), 213–232.
63 Sholem, Sabbatai Sevi, especially 7: “If there was one general factor underlying the patent
unity of the Sabbatian movement everywhere, then this factor was essentially religious in
character and as such obeyed its own autonomous laws, even if today these are often
obscured behind smokescreens of sociological verbiage.”
64 See especially Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750
(Oxford: 1985), 207–236, who links his description with the term “spiritual crisis,” although
he fails to explain this in any detail.
65 Friedrich Battenberg, Das Europäische Zeitalter der Juden. Zur Entwicklung einer
Minderheit in der nichtjüdischen Umwelt Europas (Darmstadt: 1990), part II, 36.
66 Rebekka Habermas, “Wunder, Wunderliches, Wunderbares. Zur Profanisierung eines
Deutungsmusters in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in: Armut, Liebe, Ehre. Studien zur historischen
Kulturforschung, ed. Richard van Dülmen (Frankfurt a.M.: 1988), 38–66.
54 Greyerz
criticism of Pierre Bayle or Jacob Bernoulli could hardly dent it and on the
popular level it also proved to be immune to the academic criticism of the later
eighteenth century.
But the high time of pamphlets about comets was definitely the seventeenth
century, which indicates the close connection of the belief in signs with the
prevalent concept of God.67 Foreboding signs were understood, as we have
seen, as a divine hint of imminent punishment in the form of epidemics, war
and hunger. With the gradual change in the concept of God in the later seven-
teenth century, the belief in the divine origin of signs in this form also lost
its currency.
For us, although not for the people in question, this belief finds itself in curi-
ous tension with contemporary apocalyptic thought. In one case, we are pre-
dominantly dealing with a populist theology of small stages of improvement.
Ultimately, this did not transcend the traditional and widespread cyclical
understanding of history. In the other case, we are dealing with a basically
nominalistic theology of the end of time, which in its messianic understanding
of history refers to the timelessness beyond history.
3. The normally detailed description of experiences of illness is a fundamen-
tal aspect not only of the texts introduced here, but of a great number of early
modern self-written documents from the German-speaking world. The physi-
cal suffering that some, and probably even many, early modern men and
women had to sustain clearly goes beyond our modern limits of imagination.
For instance, when Augustin Güntzer wanted to board a ship to England in
Riga, the sailors at first did not want to take him aboard because they thought
he was syphilitic.68 His body, as he writes, was covered with big pus marks and
his legs were dotted with big holes.69 Certainly, the unbalanced or inadequate
diet typical of early modern scarcity and frequent dearth contributed to such
illnesses. But Joseph Furttenbach’s meticulous description of the terminal
sufferings of his son, plagued by ulcerous abscesses amongst other things,
suggests that diet alone does not provide us with an entirely satisfactory
67 Hartmut Lehmann, “Die Kometenflugschriften des 17. Jahrhunderts als historische

Quelle,” in Literatur und Volk im 17. Jahrhundert. Probleme populärer Kultur in Deutschland,
ed. Wolfgang Brückner et al. (Wolfenbüttler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung 13),
(Wiesbaden: 1985), 683–700. See also Rosmarie Zeller, “Wunderzeichen und Endzeitvor
stellungen in der Frühen Neuzeit. Kometenflugschriften als Instrumente von Warnung
und Prophezeiung,” Morgen-Glantz. Zeitschrift der Christian Knorr von Rosenroth-
Gesellschaft 10 (2000), 95–125.
68 Güntzer, Kleines Biechlin, 188.
69 Ibid., 187.
explanation, as Furttenbach was a man of much higher social station. Without

being able to address the problem in detail here, I want at least to point out
that illness and death in the early modern period were not only socially but
also culturally conditioned.70
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries no particular profession or
group held a monopoly on medical treatment. Not only did doctors, surgeons
and barbers compete with each other, but the executioner and the knacker
also had a word to say on the medical market. In addition, some women of the
nobility participated in medical practice. Caspar Preis mentions Margreta, the
widow of Johan Rottenhausen of Kirchhain, a “compassionate, dear woman,”
who readily assisted people of all walks of life with her medical knowledge.71
Another contemporary noblewoman who occasionally acted as a medical
practitioner in the Swiss Grisons was Hortensia von Salis (1659–1715).72
Augustin Güntzer also reminds us of the varieties of treatment on offer, when
he mentions that in his youth he was treated by the wife of the executioner
with human and dog lard. Another artisan and autobiographer, the glazier
Jacques-Louis Ménétra (1738–1803?) in Paris, had himself treated by Henri
Samson (1740–1793), the maître des hautes oeuvres and executioner of Paris
in the late eighteenth century, after a spa cure did not result in healing.73
Moreover, the pharmaceutical use of human corpse parts documented by
Güntzer was not a particularity of early modern executioner medicine. Town
apothecaries were regularly supplied with such ingredients by the execution-
ers themselves, such as was carried out in Munich in the early seventeenth
century by the executioner Hans Stadler.74 In the Lebenswelt of people up to
the early eighteenth century, healing was not seen as disjunct from the defa-
mation and pollution inherent to the body of an executed person. For instance,
70 See Sebastian Leutert, Geschichten vom Tod. Tod und Sterben in Deutschschweizer
und oberdeutschen Selbstzeugnissen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Basler Beiträge zur
Geschichtswissenschaft, vol. 178), (Basel: 2007); Gudrun Piller, Private Körper. Spuren des
Leibes in Selbstzeugnissen des 18. Jahrhunderts (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 17),
(Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2007).
71 He does so in connection with her death in December, 1666: cf. Eckhardt/Klingelhöfer,
eds., Bauernleben, 101.
72 See Hortensia von Salis, verw. Gugelberg von Moos, Glaubens-Rechenschafft, Conversations-
Gespräche, Gebät, ed. Maya Widmer (Schweizer Texte, Neue Folge, vol. 19), (Bern, Stuttgart
and Vienna: 2003), editor’s introduction, 17.
73 Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal de ma vie, ed. Daniel Roche (Paris: 1982; new edition Paris:
1998), 216 f., as well as 157, n. 161.
74 Kathy Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts. Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early
Modern Germany (Cambridge: 1999), 158 and 180.
56 Greyerz
in 1714 a new edition of a treatise by the physician Christian Franz Paullini, first
published in 1697, appeared in Frankfurt am Main under the title: Newly
enlarged medicinal dirt apothecary, how to cure nearly all […] illnesses […] with
faeces and urine […].75
4. Early modern self-writing demonstrates how hybrid the process of con-
fessionalization conducted by state and church in the early modern era could
be in individual cases. Undoubtedly an “invisible boundary” developed in the
context of local biconfessionality, to adopt the suggestive term coined by
Etienne François while working on Augsburg’s bi-confessional society of the
late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.76 On the other hand, a number of
early modern self-written documents suggest a porousness of this boundary,
not only that of the Calvinist Augustin Güntzer, but also that of the Basel phy-
sician Thomas Platter, written in the early seventeenth century, or the reminis-
cences of the minister Friedrich Lucä (1644–1708), active in the Silesian duchy
of Brieg.77 Self-narratives confirm that confessional demarcation and intercon-
fessional curiosity did not necessarily exclude one another, in spite of the dis-
ciplinary ambitions of state and church, and that the actual formation of
individual and collective confessional identity always remained linked to a
given and tangible life-world.
***
Since the days of Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) until recently, autobiographi-

cal documents of the early modern period have repeatedly and preferen-
tially been read as testimonials of the larger processes of individualization and
75 Cited ibid., 183. On the tradition of the ‘dirt pharmacy’ as part of domestic medicine, from
the city physician of Augsburg Jeremias Mertz (Martius) (1578) to Christian Franz
Paullini’s works, see Rudolf Schenda, “Der ‘gemeine Mann’ und sein medikales Verhalten
im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” in Pharmazie und der gemeine Mann. Hausarznei und Apotheke
in deutschen Schriften der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Joachim Telle (Ausstellungskatalog der
Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, no. 36), (Wolfenbüttel: 1982), 9–20, here 10
and 18 f.
76 Etienne François, Die unsichtbare Grenze. Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg,
1648–1806, Sigmaringen 1991.
77 Der Chronist Friedrich Lucä. Ein Zeit- und Sittenbild aus der zweiten Hälfte des 17.
Jahrhunderts, ed. Friedrich Lucä, (Frankfurt a.M.: 1854), 168. See also chapter 6 (concern-
ing the minister Johann Balthasar Collinus, 1623–1704) in: Lorenz Heiligensetzer, Getreue
Kirchendiener – gefährdete Pfarrherren. Deutschschweizer Prädikanten des 17. Jahrhunderts
in ihren Lebensbeschreibungen (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 15), (Cologne, Weimar,
Vienna: 2006), 238–247.
secularization that heralded modernity. With this contribution I want to show

that early modern self-writing can also be read differently: as texts offering evi-
dence of early modern particularities, especially as regards mentality and reli-
gion. From this vantage point these texts warn us, at the same time, that we
should avoid the pitfalls of an unconsidered “modernization” of our evidence.
In particular, we should not allow early modern history to be regarded one-
sidedly as a mere prehistory to modernity.78 What is more, I also wanted to
illustrate the potential fascination of early modern self-writing for those who
want to engage with this field of research more extensively. Research on self-
writing is quite literally research “drawn from life,” and in this respect, to use a
notion borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche, it unquestionably represents a
fröhliche Wissenschaft, a joyful academic pursuit.
78 Meanwhile, the Berlin research group “Selbstzeugnisse in transkultureller Perspektive,”

headed by Claudia Ulbrich, has opted for a complete departure from individualization
by concentrating on conceptions of personhood at a given time and place. This is illus-
trated by a number of contributions to this volume. Cf. also Vom Individuum zur Person.
Neue Konzepte im Spannungsfeld von Autobiographietheorie und Selbstzeugnisforschung,
ed. Gabriele Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich, (Querelles. Jahrbuch für Frauen- und Geschlech
terforschung), (Göttingen: 2005).
Swiss-German Self-Narratives
The Archival Project as a Rich Vein of Research1
In recent decades, self-written documents have become established in early

modern historical research as a useful and serious resource.2 This has to do
with the discipline’s reorientation in the direction of cultural history, but we
should not forget that it is also a result of the success of numerous archival
projects in various countries. Only recently have scholars realized that there
are countless autobiographical texts in archives and libraries simply waiting to
be (re)discovered. Rudolf Dekker’s remark about the situation in Dutch literary
studies is symptomatic, and is just as relevant to the discipline of history: “The
reason for literary scholars’ reticence in the matter of these [autobiographical]
texts is obvious: everyone was convinced that the Dutch had written very
few such texts in the past and that even in the present there is no tradition
of autobiographical writing.”3 The archival project which he led, involving
a systematic search through numerous public archives and libraries in the
Netherlands for self-written documents from 1500 to 1814, proudly brought to
light 1200 texts.4
1 This article is based on a lecture delivered by the author at an international workshop on

“Stock-taking and Perspectives in Self-Writing Research” at the Free University of Berlin,
November 14–15, 2003. It was translated by Misha Kavka.
2 Kaspar von Greyerz, “Vom Nutzen und Vorteil der Selbstzeugnisforschung für die
Frühneuzeithistorie,” Jahrbuch des Historischen Kollegs (2004), 27–47; Kaspar von Greyerz
(ed.), Selbstzeugnisse in der Frühen Neuzeit: Individualisierungsweisen in interdisziplinärer
Perspektive (Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien, vol. 68), (Munich: 2007).
3 See Rudolf Dekker, “Verzeichnen und Edieren niederländischer Ego-Dokumente vom 16. bis
zum frühen 19. Jahrhundert,” Internationales Jahrbuch für Editionswissenschaft 9 (1995),
80–95, here 80.
4 The resulting 1200 texts were published in two volumes, with the 500 travel accounts sepa-
rated out from the other self-written documents. See Ruud Lindeman, Yvonne Scherf and
Rudolf Dekker, Egodocumenten van Noord-Nederlanders van de zestiende tot begin negen
tiende eeuw. Een chronologisches lijst (Rotterdam: 1993); and Reisverslagen van Noord-
Nederlanders uit de zestiende tot begin negentiende eeuw. Een chronologische lijst (Rotterdam:
1994). The catalogue is available on the Internet (October 9, 2011, http://www.egodocument.
net/egodocument/egodocuments-1814.html). See also Rudolf Dekker, “Egodocuments in the
Netherlands from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century,” in Envisioning Self and Status:
Self-Representation in the Low Countries 1400–1700, ed. Erin Griffey (Series Crossways, vol. 5),
(Hull: 1999), 255–285.

Swiss-german Self-narratives 59
The situation in Switzerland is similar. For a long time researchers were con-
cerned only with a few known self-written texts (e.g., Thomas and Felix Platter,
Josua Mahler, Johann Kaspar Lavater, Ulrich Bräker). When, in the middle of
the 1990s, Kaspar von Greyerz proposed a similar Swiss archival project, it first
required a one-year pilot study just to prove that the Swiss archives and libra
ries held a large number of unknown self-written documents from the early
modern period. What was overlooked in the process was that many such texts
had already been edited or cited, admittedly often in obscure publications, by
earlier cultural historians writing at the end of the nineteenth and beginning
of the twentieth centuries. Led by Kaspar von Greyerz, the pilot study, which
involved a search of institutional holdings in northwestern and northeastern
Switzerland for handwritten self-narratives from 1500 to 1800, brought to light
311 texts within one year. Over the next six years it was possible to extend
the archival search for autobiographical sources systematically across all of
German-speaking Switzerland.5 In what follows, I will discuss the archival
work related to this project.
In practice, the research involved searching through all of the larger docu-
ment-holding institutions: cantonal archives, university and cantonal libraries,
as well as several larger city and/or church archives and libraries. Using the full
range of written inventaries, researchers systematically scanned the holdings
for self-written documents, which sometimes meant looking through entire
boxes. The result of this archival research is an inventory in the form of a data-
base with entries for 870 self-written documents.6 We (meaning the principal
researcher Kaspar von Greyerz as well as the three collaborating resear
chers Gudrun Piller, Sebastian Leutert and Lorenz Heiligensetzer) understand
the concept of self-narrative in broad terms, drawing on the definition of
5 See Sebastian Leutert and Gudrun Piller, “Deutschschweizerische Selbstzeugnisse (1500–

1800) als Quellen der Mentalitätsgeschichte: Ein Forschungsbericht,” Schweizerische
Zeitschrift für Geschichte 48 (1998), 197–221; Kaspar von Greyerz, “Deutschschweizerische
Selbstzeugnisse (1500–1800) als Quellen der Mentalitätsgeschichte. Bericht über ein
Forschungsprojekt,” in Das dargestellte Ich. Studien zu Selbstzeugnissen des späteren
Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Arnold, Sabine Schmolinsky and Urs-Martin
Zahnd (Selbstzeugnisse des Mittelalters und der beginnenden Neuzeit, vol. 1), (Bochum:
1999), 147–163; Idem, “Deutschschweizerische Selbstzeugnisse (1500–1800) als Quellen der
Mentalitätsgeschichte,” zeitenblicke 1.2 (October 9, 2011, http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2002/02/
greyerz/index.html).
6 The database, originally considered to be a tool for the project, was available on the Internet
for several years. It will go online again (in 2015) as part of a larger Swiss databank hosted by
the University of Lausanne: www.egodocuments.ch.
60 Heiligensetzer
Selbstzeugnisse offered by Benigna von Krusenstjern.7 This suggests that not

only autobiographies and diaries should be included, but all forms of writing
about the self. Letters, account books and travel accounts, however, which are
of course also forms of self-narrative, were excluded for pragmatic reasons
and/or were not systematically collected.
The archival project involved reading through an extensive range of
resources, not only the 870 self-written documents which found their way into
the database but also many other resources – perhaps two or three times as
many – which were not included. Because Selbstzeugnis is not a common
archival term, self-written documents could be concealed under any number
of search terms, such as ‘chronicles’, ‘records’ and ‘notes’, which required taking
far more texts into consideration than were ultimately included in the inven-
tory. It should be mentioned, for the sake of completeness, that we came across
highly interesting documents in the process: calendar diaries, farm chronicles,
recipes, equine medicine books, songbooks, horoscopes, etc. In what follows,
the corpus of Swiss-German self-written documents will be presented by way
of three texts which act as a microcosm of the larger sample. I have chosen
these texts because 1) up until now they have been unknown; 2) they represent
the three main types of self-narrative: autobiography, diary and family book;
and 3) they are each in their own way idiosyncratic. This idiosyncrasy will in
turn allow me to make general remarks about the entire corpus of autobio-
graphical sources.
The Diary of Barbara Bansi (1777–1863)
The diary is by far the most common type of self-narrative in the Swiss-German
corpus, ranging from the intimate diary to the more official embassy diary,
from sporadic entries in annual calendars to a diary of multiple volumes writ-
ten over years. The database contains a total of 279 diaries, a third of all the
texts, of which the majority originate from the eighteenth century. The diary
under consideration here also dates to the eighteenth century. It was written
by a young woman and is thus quite singular in the context of the database,
which contains relatively few texts written or co-written by women (a total of
58, most of which were written after 1750). The diary discussed here was writ-
ten by the artist Barbara Bansi, who at the time of writing was just 15 years old.
7 See Benigna von Krusenstjern, “Was sind Selbstzeugnisse? Begriffskritische und quellen-
kundliche Überlegungen anhand von Beispielen aus dem 17. Jahrhundert,” Historische
Anthropologie 2 (1994), 462–471.
Barbara Bansi, daughter of the reformed minister Heinrich Bansi (1754–

1835), was born in Fläsch, in the canton of Graubünden, in 1777.8 In 1783 her
father sent her to live as a foster daughter with his friend the Zurich merchant
Johann Caspar Schweizer (1754–1811) and Schweizer’s wife Anna Magdalena
Hess (1751–1814).9 This represented a sort of pedagogical experiment, since
Schweizer, who also played host to Johann Caspar Lavater and Heinrich
Pestalozzi among others, was very involved in the education of children but
had himself remained childless. He thus wanted an adoptive child in order to
implement his ideas.
With her foster parents, Barbara Bansi moved to Paris in 1786 at the age of
eight, where she was educated as a painter and exhibited her work for the first
time in 1798 in the “Salon de Musée”. In 1802 Barbara Bansi left Paris and moved
to Italy, where she completed her education and temporarily served as a com-
panion to Lätitia Bonaparte, the mother of Napoleon. She converted to
Catholicism and in 1808 married the surgeon Lorenzo Nannoni in Florence,
who then died a few years later in 1812. In 1814 she returned again to Paris, as a
widow, where she lived until her death in 1863 as a governess and teacher of
painting.
In addition to several works of artwork10 – including a self-portrait from
179311 – there is also a diary written by Barbara Bansi in the same year.12 At the
time, Bansi was attending the Paris academy of Professor Joseph-Benoît Suvée.
8 For her biography, see Marta Morf-Tanner, “Barbara Bansi (1777–1863): Zum 100. Todestag
der bedeutenden Bündner Malerin,” Bündner Jahrbuch (1963), 121–123; and the entry for
Barbara Bansi, Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, vol. 1 (2002), 711. See also the references to
Barbara Bansi in the autobiography of her brother Johann Fortunat, Die Erinnerungen des
Johann Fortunat Bansi (1792–1875), ed. and with an introduction by Claudia Selheim,
Jahresbericht des Historischen Vereins für die Grafschaft Ravensburg 84 (1997), 117–152,
here 122 f.
9 See Johann Martin Trepp, Heinrich Bansi (Chur: 1908), 6 f.; and David Hess, Joh. Caspar
Schweizer und seine Gattin Anna Magdalena Hess (Helvetische Bücherei, vol. 2), (Zurich:
1940), esp. 51–55 and elsewhere.
10 Reproductions in Adolf Wiekenberg, “Eine Malerin der Goethezeit,” Die Weltkunst 26, 19
(1956), title page and 10.
11 28 x 32 cm, signed with “Paris July 24, 1793”. These details come from a reprint to be found
in the Cantonal Archive Graubünden (Staatsarchiv Graubünden) under the call number
A Sp III 8r F2. The location of the original is not specified and is not known to me.
12 This is to be found in the estate of her father, Heinrich Bansi, see Staatsarchiv Graubünden,
A Sp III 8r F1 (Schachtel 2); all references from here on appear as “Diary Bansi”. In the diary
she writes that she completed “my portrait with my shorn head” on February 5, but the
different date suggests that this probably does not refer to the self-portrait mentioned
above (see Diary Bansi, Notebook 1, 9).
62 Heiligensetzer
The diary, which covers the first half of 1793, consists of two octavo notebooks
totaling 61 pages.13 It is obviously incomplete, since Barbara Bansi herself
wrote “My Diary, Second Notebook”14 on the earlier notebook, meaning that
the beginning is missing. The text stops abruptly on July 26, 1793 at the end of
the second notebook, so that it possibly had a continuation. The author did not
write every day, but the entries, which appear every five to six days on average,
are always comprehensive. She also seems to have constantly read back over
the diary, as the text – which is in German – includes many corrections.
It is not clear from the fragment why Bansi kept a diary, since there are
hardly any reflexive statements, that is, statements made by authors as com-
ments on their writing.15 From one remark only we can surmise that she kept
the diary as part of her development as an artist,16 and indeed the main subject
of the diary is art.17 Bansi reports on her activities as a sketch artist, notes
her teacher’s comments and herself comments on the work of other artists.
Without a doubt, it would be interesting to interpret her artistic standpoint –
for instance, she is critical of the well-known classicist and historical painter
Jacques-Louis David18 – but in what follows I will restrict my interest to the
other main subject of the diary.
Barbara Bansi was an observer of the revolutionary events in Paris. Her diary
coincides with the Jacobins’ seizure of power. She consistently took part in the
events, regularly visiting the revolutionary tribunal (which had been set up in
March), walking frequently in the Tuilerie gardens and taking numerous notes
13 Both volumes are 23 x 18 cm; Notebook 1: “Tagebuch von Barbara Bansi 2tes Heft Vom 8ten
Jenner bis dem 30ten Aprill 1793,” 28 pages (Jan. 12–May 2); Notebook 2: “Tagebuch von
Barbara Bansi Vom 3ten May bis zum 28ten Juliete 1793,” 33 pages (May 3–July 26).
14 Diary Bansi, Notebook 1, 1.
15 Bansi was possibly encouraged to keep a diary by Lavater, whom she no doubt became
acquainted with at Johann Caspar Schweizer’s house in Zurich. On Lavater’s role as a
motivater, see Alfred Messerli, “Der papierene Freund: Literarische Anregungen und
Modelle für das Tagebuchführen,” in Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich:
Hans Medick and Patrice Veit (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 9), (Cologne, Weimar and
Vienna: 2001), 299–320.
16 The entry for February 18 begins as follows: “For a long time I have not known what to
write in my journal, but today I saw a figure that is worth talking about” (Diary Bansi,
Notebook 1, 11).
17 Further subjects include her reading (e.g., Virgil, Ovid, travel accounts, encyclopedias)
and entries about daily life in Paris (e.g., going to the theater, taking walks, a move of
house, shortage of bread, homesickness for Switzerland).
18 Diary Bansi, Notebook 1, 6, 20.
in her diary. The French Revolution is thus the second main topic in the self-
narrative of Barbara Bansi, which poses the question of what she saw and how
she evaluated such things. Diaries in particular are an exciting resource for the
construction of such observation, as the writing is usually very close in time to
the represented events. Diaries thus reflect the experience of certain events
and processes in a more unmediated way than other autobiographical sources,
as can be seen in the example of Barbara Bansi’s diary.
First, it is striking that the diary offers no clear political position. For
instance, Bansi is crazy about Jean-Paul Marat and welcomes the death sen-
tences handed down by the revolutionary tribunal to his so-called betrayers.19
On the other hand, she pities the imprisoned King Louis XVI and commiser-
ates with the emigrants, particularly the Marquis de Lafayette.20 It is also stri
king that certain important events, such as the execution of the king (January
21st) or the murder of Marat (July 13th), have no resonance in her diary. From
another perspective, however, her stance is clear and unmistakable, as exem-
plified in the following quotation:
Paris, April 17 [1793]

I still tremble when I think that in a century when all arts and sciences
are at their most enlightened, the soul itself freed from all superstition,
which hitherto necessitated the rabble as well as noble people to com-
mit many horrible acts, and still more heinous acts are perpetrated
now. People commit murder and there are even those who live from it,
who for a Assignat will spend the whole day near prison in order to kill
the criminals, who are much less guilty than they are. Many soldiers
and butchers leave their places in order to amuse themselves a little
and to do the nation a great service. But no more of that, I’m forgetting
myself.21
19 Diary Bansi, Notebook 1, 25 and Notebook 2, 1 f.

20 Diary Bansi, Notebook 1, 3, 8 and 14.
21 Diary Bansi, Notebook 1, 24: “Paris den 17ten Aprill [1793]. Noch zittere ich, wann ich denke,
daß es izt, in einem Jahrhundert, wo alle Künste und Wissenschaften am aufgeklärtesten
sind, selbst die Seele ist von allen Aberglauben befreyt, die den Pöbel [und] auch die
vornehmen Leüte vorher viele grausame Thaten zu verfertigen nöthigte, und noch viel
abscheulicher geht es iz zu. Man ermordet und selbst gibt es Leute, die davon erleben, für
ein Assignat bleiben sie den ganzen Tag an einem Gefängnis um die Verbrecher, die viel
unschuldiger als sie sind, zu töden. Viele Soldaten und Mezger verlassen ihre Pläze, um
sich ein bischen zu ergezen und um der Nation einen grossen Dienst zu leisten. Aber
nichts mehr von dem, ich vergesse mich noch.”
64 Heiligensetzer
This entry from April 17th addresses, in the form of a complaint about the era,
the brutalization of everyday life brought about by the Revolution.22 Barbara
Bansi complains about the low value of human life and the great number of
murderous men who seize on vigilante justice out of greed or in the belief that
they are serving the nation. Horror at such brutal tendencies can also be found
elsewhere in her self-narrative, running like a thread through her diary.
Sometimes it is the condition of the Tuilerie gardens that Bansi complains
about (under the king, the gardens were cultivated and full of flowers, but
today there are full of heavily built, dancing menials23); sometimes it is the pil-
laging of food stores by the “Pöbel” [rabble],24 a word that she frequently uses,
with clearly negative connotations,25 to indicate how they disgust her; and
again, it is the environment of the revolutionary tribunal which she abhors,
namely, the carnival atmosphere in the Palace of Justice where people disport
themselves while next door others are sentenced and hanged. In response to
this, she comments, “That is the character of the French.”26
In brief, the French Revolution takes on great significance in Bansi’s diary
and is evidently of concern to the young woman. Her observations and state-
ments allow us to conclude that Barbara Bansi was critical of contemporary
revolutionary events. Her criticism is less founded in a particular political con-
viction than in her horror at the coarseness associated with the Revolution,
which seems to wound her personal sensibility. In the diary, the Revolution is
thus less a political event than an aesthetic and moral step backward.
A House Book from Solothurn
Aside from the diary, the family book is well represented in the Swiss-German
archives and libraries; a total of 161 such reports were inventoried, which is just
under a fifth of all the texts. The individual texts of this genre are distributed
fairly equally over the period under consideration, which means that, in
22 See also Michel Vovelle, Die Französische Revolution: Soziale Bewegung und Umbruch der
Mentalitäten (Ancien Régime, Aufklärung und Revolution, vol. 7), (Munich and Vienna:
1982), esp. 98–104.
23 Diary Bansi, Notebook 1, 14 f., 22 and Notebook 2, 15.
25 See also the entry for “Pöbel” in Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-
Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste, vol. 28, (Halle and Leipzig: 1741), 948 f. (online:
http://www.zedler-lexikon.de/).
contrast to most of the other types, there is no rapid increase of this form of
self-narrative in the eighteenth century. In terms of content, family books do
not at first seem particularly interesting, as they were frequently used to for-
mally record births, marriages and deaths within the family.27 As a particular
form of private writing, composed by a number of hands and often stretching
across generations, however, the genre is doubtlessly a highly interesting
resource when seen in its totality. A small-scale assessment of the holdings in
the Chur Archives (Staatsarchiv Graubünden, Kantonsbibliothek Graubünden,
Rätisches Museum), which consists of 32 family books, turned up the following
results.
Of the 32 family books, 12 were written by one hand, six by two separate
hands, and 14 by more than two hands (up to as many as 20 hands).28 In 13
cases, the families kept records for more than 100 years, of which three ran for
more than 200 years and, in the case of the Jecklin family, even went from 1581
to 1864.29 As far as the historical distribution goes, nine texts originate from the
sixteenth century, while 11 and 12 texts, respectively, originate from the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. At least six of the 32 texts (that is, nearly a
fifth) include writing by women, although a precise handwriting analysis of as
yet unidentified hands could conceivably raise that number. Amongst the
oldest of the self-written texts composed by women are the four pages of
family notes written by Katharina Tscharner née Brunner (?-1626) in the
Tscharner family book during the years 1574 to 1602,30 as well as the family
history chronicled by Barbara von Salis née Meiss relating to 1594–1622.31
In addition to letters, family books are thus a good resource for tracing
women’s writing in German-speaking Switzerland prior to 1750.
27 For more on the genre of the family book, see Konstanze Jungbluth, Die Tradition der
Familienbücher. Das Katalanische während der Decadència (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für
Romanische Philologie, vol. 272), (Tübingen: 1996), esp. 6–25; and Urs Martin Zahnd, Die
autobiographischen Aufzeichnungen Ludwig von Diesbachs. Studien zur spätmittelalterli-
chen Selbstdarstellung im oberdeutschen und schweizerischen Raume (Schriften der Berner
Burgerbibliothek, vol. 17), (Bern: 1986), esp. 309–341.
28 Staatsarchiv Graubünden, D V/3 225 Nr. 5 (the Wietzel/Travers family for the years
1549–1766).
29 Staatsarchiv Graubünden, D V/4 b Nr. 1.
30 Staatsarchiv Graubünden, D V/3 230 Nr. 219–220 and Nr. 222–224 (some dozen different
hands for the years 1535–1753).
31 Staatsarchiv Graubünden, D VI SM 1 Pl 83/2, collected in Nicolaus von Salis-Soglio,
Notanden der Barbara v. Salis-Meiss, nebst biographischen Mitteilungen über die drei ersten
Generationen der Linie Soglio, (Mitteilungen des Geschlechts-Verbandes derer von Salis,
vol. 2), (Sigmaringen: 1916).
66 Heiligensetzer
This is also the case in the chosen example. It concerns a self-written docu-
ment begun in 1696 by the Solothurn patrician Urs Victor von Sury (1670–1710)
on the occasion of his marriage. The document consists of a single volume of
200 pages, of which only 30 contain writing, but the notes continue to the year
1865 – that is, just under 200 years – in seven discernable hands.32 In this vol-
ume Urs Victor von Sury neatly noted the births of his children, for example of
the eldest son, also named Urs Victor von Sury (1697–1736):
A°. 1697. Saturday, February 16, my wife was successfully delivered of a

son between eight and nine o’clock in the morning. On the same day the
said child was baptized at St. Ursen and named Urs Victor. Godfather
cousin captain younger council Urs Suri. Godmother colonel Clara von
Roll, born Wallier.33
All of the entries regarding his eight children are presented by von Sury in the
same manner.34 There are even some records written by his wife Klara Brunner
(1674–1736), who noted down the death of the son Johann Ludwig as well as
a remedy for kidney pain in the volume.35 Although von Sury had sons,
the family book was not handed down the filial line, as was usual, because
the third hand, which begins noting records in 1733, belongs to Urs Karl Gugger
(1694–1778) from another Solothurn patrician family. He had married one
of von Sury’s daughters36 and in this way came into possession of the family
book.
32 32 x 10 cm, title, “Sit Nomen Domini Benedictum.” The volume is to be found in the
Cantonal Archive of Solothurn (Staatsarchiv Solothurn) in Box 1 (Schachtel 1) of the
deposit by the Sury-von Roten family, from here on to be referenced as “Solothurn House
Book.”
33 Solothurn House Book, fol. 2r: “A°. 1697. Sambstag den 16. Hornung ist mein F. morgenß
zwischen acht undt neün Uhren mit Einem Sohn glückhlich genäßen. Eodem die ist
gemeltes Kind bei St. Ursen getaufft worden, und Urs Victor genennet worden. Gevatter
H. Vetter Haupt. Jung. Urs Suri. Gevatterine F. Obrist Clara von Roll Ein gebohrne
Wallierine.” Von Sury’s entries on fol. 2r–3r und 5r (specific mention). For Urs Viktor von
Sury, see Paul Borrer, Familiengeschichte von Sury, nach den Quellen zusammengestellt
(Solothurn: 1933), 36 f.
34 Borrer lists nine children (Familiengeschichte von Sury, 36 ff.); the family book leaves out
the youngest daughter, Cleophe Katharina, who died shortly after birth.
35 Solothurn House Book, fol. 4r und 13v; even though she is not explicitly named, it must be
Klara Brunner who notes the death of “my son Johan Ludwig” (Johann Ludwig von Sury
[1701–1726]), since her husband had already died in 1710.
36 Margaritha von Sury (1707–1775), see Borrer, Familiengeschichte von Sury, 37.
Gugger, too, noted numerous births, marriages and deaths in his family;37
after his own death in 1778 the writing was carried on by an unknown hand,38
a point to which we will return. The fifth hand can again be identified: it
belongs to Johann Baptist Altermatt (1764–1849), member of another Solothurn
patrician family, who from 1792 – this time in French – kept the record of his
own family’s history.39 He had married Gugger’s granddaughter40 and thus came
into possession of the book. Ultimately, an unknown hand entered his death in
1849,41 while the last record in 1865 can be attributed to the offspring of Eduard
Tugginer (1791–1865), from a fourth patrician family.42 Tugginer had married one
of Altermatt’s daughters43 and was thus able to take over the family book.
Four different families thus recorded their family history in this volume,
beginning with the von Surys and ending with the Tugginers. Although there are
family relationships among them, this is a special case in the context of our cor-
pus of family books, as the book – apparently in view of the gaps in male succes-
sion44 – is repeatedly handed down and carried on through the daughter line.
This, however, has a simple explanation. Urs Viktor von Sury, the first writer, was
the owner of the ‘Königshof’, a manor house just outside the city of Solothurn.45
37 Solothurn House Book, fol. 7r–8r und 9r; even though Gugger is not explicitly named, the
entries, which are written in the first person, can easily be traced back to him on the basis
of family historical data.
38 Solothurn House Book, fol. 10r und 11r.
39 Solothurn House Book, fol. 11r–12r; even though he is not explicitly named, the hand that
reports the death of “ma chere fille Marguerite Altermatt” (1790–1818) and in 1836 the
death of his wife must belong to Johann Baptist Altermatt.
40 Maria Margaretha Gugger (1771–1836) is a granddaughter and not the daughter of
Gugger – Borrer mistakes this (Familiengeschichte von Sury, 37) – as is clear from the
family book.
41 Solothurn House Book, fol. 12r.
42 Solothurn House Book, fol. 12; since this entry refers simply to “our much beloved father,”
it is not possible to decide which of Tugginer’s children was the author. Tugginer had six
children, of whom five were alive in 1865; see Bruno Amiet and Stephan Pinösch,
“Geschichte der Solothurner Familie Tugginer,” Jahrbuch für solothurnische Geschichte 10
(1937), 152–162.
43 Elisabeth Altermatt (1795–1875), see Amiet/Pinösch, Familie Tugginer, 153.
44 Of his many children, only von Sury’s daughter Margaretha gave him grandchildren (see
Borrer, Familiengeschichte von Sury, 36 f.). According to the family book, Gugger had a
daughter, who remained childless, as well as a son, who himself had only a daughter.
Finally, according to the family book, Altermatt had only daughters.
45 See Charles Studer, Solothurner Patrizierhäuser (Solothurn: 1981), 56 f.; Markus
Hochstrasser, “Restaurierung und Bauuntersuchung Rüttenen ‘Königshof’,” Archäologie
und Denkmalpflege im Kanton Solothurn 1 (1996), 116–125.
68 Heiligensetzer
The manor house was passed down in 174846 to his son-in-law Urs Karl Gugger,
the third writer, then later through marriage to Johann Baptist Altermatt, and
finally in the nineteenth century to the Tugginer family.47 Afterwards, the
‘Königshof’ was put up for auction and is today privately owned.
It seems that the book of family records always went with the house, passing
from one owner of the manor house to the next. The easiest way to explain this
is that the volume always remained at the ‘Königshof’, to be discovered and
then continued by the new residents. This means that here we have a family
book that would more correctly be called a ‘house book’.48 This relationship
between house and book also makes it possible to identify the fourth hand,
which up until now was not known. It probably belongs to Xaveria Glutz (1738–
1795), the daughter of Urs Carl Gugger, who married into the Solothurn family
of Glutz and was the owner of the ‘Königshof’ after her father.49 There were no
children from this marriage;50 otherwise, the house and the book with it would
presumably have taken another course.
The Autobiography of Johannes Erb (1635–1701)
The third main type of self-narrative in the Swiss-German corpus of sources,

after the diary and the family book, is the autobiography. The database
46 Borrer, by contrast, dates this to 1732; see Borrer, Familiengeschichte von Sury, 36.
47 A correction to Hochstrasser’s list of owners (p. 124): Altermatt was not a widower in 1793;
rather, according to the family book, his wife née Gugger did not die until 1835. Also, the
manor house was not passed down to the Tugginer family in 1836, but only in 1849, after
the death of Altermatt; see Amiet/Pinösch, Familie Tugginer, 153.
48 In the typology, family book, house book, family chronicle and house chronicle are regu-
larly used synonymously and/or are not strictly distinguished; see, for ex., Adolf Rein,
“Über die Entwicklung der Selbstbiographie im ausgehenden deutschen Mittelalter,”
Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 14 (1919), 193–213. At its core, however, a house book is essen-
tially a household or account book related to the household economy; see Zahnd,
Aufzeichnungen Ludwig von Diesbachs, 279–397.
49 See Konrad Glutz von Blotzheim, Zur Genealogie der Familien Glutz von Solothurn
(Solothurn: 1951); Hochstrasser, “Königshof,” 124. The entries which can be traced back to
her report the death of her father Urs Carl Gugger, of her brother and his wife, as well as
the marriage and first child of her only niece, Maria Margaretha Gugger, the wife of
Altermatt.
50 That she remained childless can be concluded from the testamentary evidence (see
Solothurn House Book, fol. 14r and 15r) that names her niece as Xaviera Gugger’s benefi-
ciary. The entry is written in another hand, and is therefore presumably a copy.
contains 129 life narratives, successively increasing in number from the six-
teenth to the eighteenth centuries. The autobiography under discussion here
originates in the seventeenth century and, due to its form, does not belong to
the usual framework because the life story of the author is presented as a dia-
logue. The writer is a Protestant rural pastor named Johannes Erb (1635–1701).51
He came from a family in Thun, studied in Bern and Heidelberg,52 and then
preached at parishes in the Bern rural region, initially in Grindelwald in the
Bernese Alps53 and then in Oberburg in the Bernese Mittelland.54
It is no coincidence that the third example should take up the writings of a
pastor, as the Swiss-German database contains a surprisingly high number of
clerical authors, with nearly a quarter of all the texts (230) written by clergy-
men.55 In addition to clergymen, we find texts above all by councilors and
army officers, that is, members of the upper classes, and relatively few ‘popu-
lar’,56 that is, not upper-class, writers of self-narratives, amounting to 57 texts.
This social division can certainly be connected to the differing degrees of lit-
eracy; however, it is also worth pointing out that our chosen search strategy
relied on national institutions, where the legacies of important families are
centrally collected. It is therefore very possible that in communal and private
archives which we were not able to take into consideration there are still
numerous texts written by artisans or farmers.
51 See Eduard Bähler, “Johannes Erb 1635–1701.” Sammlung Bernischer Biographien,

vol. 5 (Bern: 1906), 267–275; and Lorenz Heiligensetzer, “Johannes Erbs lange Studienzeit,”
in Berns mächtige Zeit. Das 16. und 17. Jahrhundert neu entdeckt, ed. André Holenstein,
(Bern: 2006), 200.
52 Bähler (Johannes Erb, 268) reports – without specifying the date or source – that Erb also
spent a long period in England.
53 On the role of Erb during the plague epidemic of 1669 in Grindelwald and his exemplary
behavior at the time, see Heinrich Türler, Die Pest im Oberland im Jahre 1669 (Bern: 1893):
the book contains a reproduction of extracts from Erb’s letters. Erb’s experiences during
the plague even provide the material for a devotional local novel; see Christian Rubi, Das
Jahr des Johannes Erb: Eine Erzählung aus dem Berner Oberland (Frauenfeld: 1955) [new
edition, including illustrations by the author: Das Jahr des Johannes Erb: Bewährungszeit
des Pfarrers zu Grindelwald (Bern: 1980)].
54 See also Karl Schweizer, Chronik von Oberburg, (Hasle: 1902), 51–57.
55 See also Lorenz Heiligensetzer, Getreue Kirchendiener – gefährdete Pfarrherren.
Deutschschweizer Prädikanten des 17. Jahrhunderts in ihren Lebensbeschreibungen
(Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol 15), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2006).
56 See James S. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe
(Stanford: 1980); and idem, “Vox populi: Popular Autobiographies as Sources for Early
Modern Urban History,” Urban History 20 (1993), 30–42.
70 Heiligensetzer
To return to Johannes Erb: he was a well-read man who possessed a substan-

tial library and a cabinet of curiosities,57 translated English and Dutch devo-
tional books,58 and also wrote such books himself and had them printed,
although the majority of these have been lost.59 Of these, the following texts
have been or can today be verified:
• Felicitations on the Wedding of Johannes Kurz and Rachel Lehnherr (Bern:

Georg Sonnleitner, 1657)60
• Thomas Taylor, Christs combate and conquest: or, The lyon of the tribe of
Iudah, vanquishing the roaring lyon, translated from the English by Johannes
Erb (Bern: Georg Sonnleitner, 1676)61
• The Reformed House Church (Basel: Johann Brandmüller, 1678)62
57 On Erb’s attempts to turn his private library into a newly founded city library in his
hometown of Thun (which, however, did not occur due to lack of interest; the city
library was not founded until 1785), see Bähler, Johannes Erb, 273; on the testamentary
disposal of the library, several paintings and goblets, see Eduard Bähler, “Zwei Briefe von
Pfarrer Johann Erb,” Blätter für bernische Geschichte, Kunst und Alterumskunde 3 (1907),
149–152.
58 In addition to the authors mentioned next, Erb also translated the writings of Richard
Baxter; see Bähler, Johannes Erb, 268, 272. For the significance of English edification texts
in general, see Udo Sträter, Sonthom, Bayly, Dyke und Hall: Studien zur Rezeption der eng-
lischen Erbauungsliteratur in Deutschland im 17. Jahrhundert (Beiträge zur historischen
Theologie, vol. 71), (Tübingen: 1987).
59 See the compilation of the printed works by Erb in Bähler, Johannes Erb, 272, which is
based on the index in Hans Jacob Leu, Allgemeines Helvetisches, Eydgenössisches oder
Schweitzerisches Lexicon, vol. 6, (Zurich: 1752), 384 f. and Supplemental vol. 2 (Zug: 1787),
148, taking into consideration that “all of the works of Erb, except for several pieces of
occasional poetry, have been lost.” More comprehensive is the index of Erb’s writings in
his autobiography (p. 26), which consists of 22 works.
60 See Bähler, Johannes Erb, 272 (privately held).
61 Held by the University Library in Basel (call number fb 2508). The dedication, dated July
25, 1676 in Oberburg, makes clear that Johannes Erb is the translator; this reference to Erb
as the translator is missing in Edgar C. McKenzie, A Catalog of British Devotional and
Religious Books in German Translation from the Reformation to 1750 (Bibliographie zur
Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 2), (Berlin and New York: 1997), Nr. 1633.
62 See the comprehensive description of this work in Kurt Guggisberg, Bernische
Kirchengeschichte (Bern: 1958), 381 f. (there erroneously dated 1677, without specifying the
location, so that Dellsperger [Pietismus in Bern, 35 (see below)] later searched for the
work in vain); the title page (without specifying the location) is reproduced in Margrit
Blättler-Aeschlimann, “Lebensbilder,” Oberburg: Eine Gemeinde im unteren Emmental, ed.
Einwohnergemeinde Oberburg (Bern: 1992), 217.
• Everlasting Calendar (Basel, 1681)63

• Franziskus Ridderus, Blood Mirror of Religion, translated from the Dutch by
Johannes Erb (1686)64
• Latin Prayer for the Dead for Anton Herbort (Basel, 1689)65
Johannes Erb is regarded as a trailblazer of pietism in Bern in part because of

his writings, which focused on a new domestic piety through songs and prayers,
but also because of his reputation as a devotional preacher and charismatic
personality.66 In the description he wrote of his life, however, there is no indi-
cation of a new piety or a new form of autobiographical writing unique to
pietism whose gaze is focused on the spiritual condition of the self.67 In terms
of content, its formulations are largely conventional, that is, concerned with
the external occurrences and fortunes of his life story.68 This autobiography,
written by Erb in 1690 at the age of 5569 and encompassing some 30 pages, has
up until now been overlooked in the research on Johannes Erb. It contains a
range of subjects that is common for the seventeenth century: Erb begins
with his parents, recounts his education at various schools, records his mar-
riage as well as the births of children, reports on illnesses and concerns himself
extensively with his activities as a preacher. What is of interest, however, is less
63 Held in the Burgerbibliothek in Bern (call number Mss.h.h. XLV.225); the autobiography
is linked to the calendar (see below).
64 The copy (without call number) in the holdings of the Cantonal Archive in Bern
(Staatsarchiv Bern) does not have a title page, but the title, author and translator of the
work are clear from the Erb’s dedication, dated January 13, 1686; see Rudolf Dellsperger,
Die Anfänge des Pietismus in Bern: Quellenstudien (Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Pietismus,
vol. 22), (Göttingen: 1984), 35 f.
65 Held in the University Library in Bern (call number ZB H var 6203).
66 See the entry on “Johannes Erb,” in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, vol. 4, (Basel: 2005), 241.
67 See Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Autobiographie (Stuttgart and Weimar: 2000), 145 ff.
68 For more on profane life description, largely oriented toward the family, as the primary
form of autobiographical writing, see Günter Niggl, Geschichte der deutschen Autobio
graphie im 18. Jahrhundert: Theoretische Grundlegung und literarische Entfaltung
(Stuttgart: 1977), 15.
69 The autobiography can be found in the Burgerbibliothek Bern (Mss.h.h. XLV.225), which
also contains two pamphlets: as mentioned above, the “Everlasting Calendar,” published
by Erb in 1681, which is a kind of memorial book for each and every day, as well as
“Consilium medicum,” written by Paul de Sorvait and published in 1679 in Vienna. Further,
it contains various handwritten texts (biographies, anecdotes, prayers, etc.). The autobio
graphy is separately paginated, and cited from here on as “Autobiography Erb”; for the
dating of the autobiography, see Heiligensetzer, Getreue Kirchendiener – gefährdete
Pfarrherren, 224.
72 Heiligensetzer
the content than the formal aspects of Erb’s autobiography. For a start, it is
worth discussing the title:
Speculum Providentiae Divinae

or
The True Description of the Life
Johannis Erby
Thunensis pastoris Ecclesiae Domini in Oberburg
Martyris incruenti
presented under two pseudonyms:
Armmgast and Baldreich70
The title indicates that Johannes Erb – like many other autobiographers of the
time – sought to understand his life story as a providential story, an exemplary
biography of the effect of divine providence on the course of an individual
life.71 The title also suggests the second theme of the text by proclaiming that
it presents the life of an unbloodied martyr, that is, a life story which accentu-
ates the persecutions experienced and lacks only a violent death to claim
the full fate of a martyr. The experience of suffering in the form of hostilities,
poverty and illnesses thus also plays a prominent role in the life writing of
Erb – this, too, has a commonality with other texts of the period which explicitly
understand themselves as stories of suffering.72 The title further announces
that the text is written in the form of a dialogue. It begins as follows:
Armgast: Good day, Baldreich.

Baldreich: Many thanks, Armmgast.
Armg: Where are you going so early?
Baldr: I ask you, where are you going, not so early, but so sorrowful and
aggrieved?
Armg: I am going to Schertzlingen,73 in the region of Eselmatt, to go for a
walk so as to try and forget my cares.
70 Autobiography Erb, 1.
71 For more on the belief in providence as a central element of self-narratives in German,
see Kaspar von Greyerz, Vorsehungsglaube und Kosmologie: Studien zu englischen
Selbstzeugnissen des 17. Jahrhunderts, (Veröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen
Instituts London, vol. 25), (Göttingen and Zurich: 1990), 46.
72 See Heiligensetzer, Getreue Kirchendiener – gefährdete Pfarrherren, ch. 5.8.
73 Scherzlingen was once a village on the stretch of the Aare where it flows from Lake Thun;
today it is part of Thun. See Geographisches Lexikon der Schweiz, vol. 4 (Neuenburg: 1906),
567 f.
Baldr: Yes, I thought that something disagreeable had happened to you,

since you look so pale, yellow and old.
Armg: You have thought right, as I, a poor guest74 in this world, am being
aged by lament, misery and illness, as it were before my time.75
The starting point for the autobiography is the coincidental meeting of two
friends early in the morning near Thun. Armmgast takes the opportunity to tell
his interlocutor Baldreich that he wishes to take a walk in order to forget his
cares. This statement provides Baldreich with the opportunity to ask about his
life and Armmgast to relate it. While Armmgast – the respondent – is easily
identified with Johannes Erb on the basis of his life story, the figure of Baldreich
remains shadowy in terms of biographical background. He nonetheless plays
an important narrative function because his questions serve to steer the con-
versation, introduce new topics and provide commentary on what he hears.
For interpreters of the autobiography, integrating a conversation into the text
as a kind of scaffolding means that both its structure, and the author’s approach
reflected therein, become particularly prominent.
The figure of Baldreich can also be understood as an instrument to alert the
reader. With his questions and commentary, this figure anticipates a reader’s
possible reactions and structures the understanding of Armmgast’s, alias Erb’s,
biography to a large extent in advance. It is precisely the dialogue structure of the
text that insistently points to its staged character, which is true in general of all
autobiographical representations. This can also be seen from the naming of the
characters. While Armmgast himself deciphers his name, as we have seen above –
he is a “poor = guest” in this world – the text offers no explanation of the name
Baldreich, but presumably it can similarly be broken down into “Bald = reich”.76
If this breakdown is correct, then it seems clear that the two names relate to one
another, so that the poor guest, that is, Johannes Erb, will soon be rich, no doubt
in the sense of heavenly riches, even though this is not made explicit against the
background of Protestant teachings about justification.
Conclusion
The diary, family book and autobiography are the major forms of self-narrative
in the data-bank of Swiss-German self-narratives of the early modern period,
74 “Armer-gast” in the original, where arm means poor and gast means guest, hence a word-
play on the Diary character’s name.
75 Autobiography Erb, p. 1.
76 “Bald = reich” combines bald, meaning soon, with reich, meaning rich.
74 Heiligensetzer
although the list of forms that self-narrative can take is considerably longer.
Nonetheless, it is possible within this diversity to demarcate groups of related
forms. While the 279 diaries in our inventory, regardless whether official or pri-
vate in terms of content, can be regarded as a unit because of their basis in
ongoing writing practices, the family book and the autobiography can be orga-
nized into larger groups. In addition to the 161 family books, the records rela
ting to families include another 21 family chronicles in which the writers also
thematize their own lives, as well as 10 educational scripts for offspring or bio
graphies of family members in which the writer’s own life is covered. In the
category of autobiographical texts, one can include, in addition to the 129
descriptions of a life, another 26 texts containing reflections on the year past
(annual notes), 67 shorter pieces of life writing, as well as 51 reports which
represent only a particular part of a life.
Finally, the 97 chronicles which, in addition to the existing chronicle pas-
sages, also make clear references to the biography of the writer, can be regarded
as the fourth largest subgenre. Examples of this include the records of preacher
Johannes Gast (?-1552), which are central to the sixteenth-century history
of Basel,77 as well as those of Professor Christian Wurstisen (1544–1588).78
A smaller group consists of the 37 accounting notebooks in our database,
which in addition to invoices also contain autobiographical entries or entries
relating to family history, although these self-written documents could also be
grouped with the autobiographical texts or the family records. As a final obser-
vation it is important to note that the typology of early modern self-narratives
regularly confronts boundaries and often proceeds only by approximation,
as mixed forms are frequent.79 It can thus be regarded as an essential out-
come of our work that our corpus of self-written documents involves a highly
77 Chronik der Jahre 1531–1552, held in the University Library Basel (Ki.-Ar. Ms. 107), contained
in Das Tagebuch des Johannes Gast, ed. Paul Burckhardt (Basler Chroniken, vol. 8), (Basel:
1945).
78 Chronik der Jahre 1557–1581, held in the University Library Basel (Ki.-Ar. Ms. 153, Nr. 1),
contained in Rudolf Luginbühl, “Diarium des Christian Wurstisen 1557–1581,” Basler
Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde 1 (1901), 53–145.
79 For example, the self-written document of the Lucerne patrician Christoph Pfyffer von
Altishofen (1593–1673), held in the Zentral- und Hochschulbibliothek Luzern (KB Pp.Msc.
49.2°). His text begins with an autobiography in the third person, then however shifts to
the first person. The portrayal of his youth is followed by an extensive description of his
travels in Italy in 1610, meaning that the text changes genre to become a travel account.
After a brief report on his marriage, Pfyffer notes the birth of his children and thus the
text changes into a family book. This is followed by reports in the style of a chronicle
regarding natural catastrophes as well as contemporary events and curiosities.
heterogeneous collection of source material, which – with the exception of the

81 travel accounts80 (which were not systematically inventoried) – do not
appear to be rigidly molded according to pre-existing genre forms.
80 See Justin Stagl, “Der wohl unterwiesene Passagier. Reisekunst und Gesellschaftsbe
schreibung vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert,” in Reisen und Reisebeschreibungen im 18. und
19. Jahrhundert als Quellen der Kulturbeziehungsforschung, ed. Boris I. Krasnobaev, Gert
Robel and Herbert Zeman (Studien zur Geschichte der Kulturbeziehungen in Mittel- und
Osteuropa, vol. 6), (Berlin: 1980), 353–384.
Private Body – What Do Self-Narratives Bring
to the History of the Body?1
Gudrun Piller
Historical research expects from self-narratives a particularly direct access to

history. Self-narratives, as sources that supposedly depict actual experience,
become authentic and direct. This is especially the case for investigations into
the history of the body. For example, in his essay on plague experiences based
on self-narratives, Otto Ulbricht explains that one “must first and foremost
draw on primary sources that actually retain such experiences.”2 Consequently,
he assesses medical treatises and manuals as well as literary texts as “metho
dologically unacceptable” for investigating experience.3 For Ulbricht, the value
of self-narratives over other sources is their greater actuality in describing sub-
jective experience. In a similar way, Jens Lachmund and Gunnar Stollberg
appeal in their research to the greater authenticity of self-narratives in descri
bing experiences with illness.4 The same assumption underlies Patrick Barbier’s
claim that nothing is known of the sexual lives of castrati because “none of
them left behind autobiographical writings.”5 And Philipp Sarasin sees the
“junctions between the symbolic and the real,” the rifts in which the real
becomes tangible, foremost in ego-documents, thus also in self-narratives.6
This assessment – met by Sarasin rather cautiously – conceals several
methodological dangers. It can lead to interpretations that overestimate the
referential content and the text’s verisimilitude, and it tends to ignore the
character of their construction. Regarding the history of the body, Kathleen
1 This article was translated by Hannah Elmer. It summarizes some of the results of my
dissertation: Gudrun Piller, Private Körper. Spuren des Leibes in Selbstzeugnissen des 18.
Jahrhunderts (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 17), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2007).
2 Otto Ulbricht, “Pesterfahrung: ‘Das Sterben’ und der Schmerz in der Frühen Neuzeit,” Medizin,
Gesellschaft und Geschichte 15 (1996), 9–35, here 11.
3 Ibid., 11.
4 Jens Lachmund and Gunnar Stollberg, “Zur medikalen Kultur des Bildungsbürgertums um
1800. Eine soziologische Analyse anhand von Autobiographien,” Jahrbuch des Instituts für
Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung 6 (1987), 163–184, here 166.
5 Patrick Barbier, “Über die Männlichkeit der Kastraten,” in Hausväter, Priester, Kastraten. Zur
Konstruktion von Männlichkeit in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Martin Dinges
(Göttingen: 1998), 123–152, here 140.
6 Philipp Sarasin, “Mapping the body. Körpergeschichte zwischen Konstruktivismus, Politik
und Erfahrung,” Historische Anthropologie 7, 3 (1999), 437–451, here 450.

Private Body 77
Canning has concluded that discourse history treats the body as an abstrac-
tion, while works on bodily experience demonstrate the opposite problem:
“they are often overly concrete, undertheorised or cast too simply.”7
The following article is concerned with the various uses self-narratives can
have for the history of the body and how these can be applied in a methodologi-
cally sensible way. It thus focuses primarily on methodological and theoretical
problems. As can be clearly seen in the introductory sentences and quotations,
works of body history that are based on self-narratives lead directly into the
debate over the term ‘experience’. Therefore, the following text also attempts to
see where a self-narrative-based history of the body could be positioned in the
discussion about experience versus discourse history. The starting point of
my thesis was the lapidary question of how authors of self-narratives in the
eighteenth century regarded the body. The main body of sources was formed
by approximately fifty hand-written and unedited eighteenth-century self-
narratives – eight of which were composed by women – and which, until
recently, lay unnoticed in the archives of German-speaking Switzerland.8
Formally, the texts I addressed were autobiographies, longer curricula vitae,
house books, family books, diaries, annual notes, notebooks in yearly calen-
dars or self-narratives concentrating on, for example, raising children or a fai
ling marriage in which the forms might intertwine. Self-narratives vary so
much in form, range, content and function that the genre of ‘self-narrative’ is
often defined through a listing of its subgroups. Definitions that can encom-
pass all texts are hard to find unless they are based on very general statements.
For instance, Benigna von Krusenstjern claims that a constitutive criterion of
self-narratives is that they contain a certain degree of “self-thematizing by
an explicit self.”9 The advantage of such an open definition is that mixed
forms, fragmentary, incoherent and atypical texts are not excluded, which is
normally the result of more stringent definitions, such as a restrictive concept
of ‘autobiography’. Even in more recent investigations of German self-writing,
7 Kathleen Canning, “The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender
History,” Gender & History 11, 3 (1999), 499–513, here 502.
8 The texts were inventoried in the context of the project “Deutschschweizerische
Selbstzeugnisse (1500–1800) als Quellen der Mentalitätsgeschichte” funded by the Swiss
National Science Foundation. The project was lead by Kaspar von Greyerz. Regarding the
project, cf. Sebastian Leutert and Gudrun Piller, “Deutschschweizerische Selbstzeugnisse
(1500–1800) als Quellen der Mentalitätsgeschichte. Ein Forschungsbericht,” Schweizerische
Zeitschrift für Geschichte 49 (1999), 197–221.
9 Benigna von Krusenstjern, “Was sind Selbstzeugnisse? Begriffskritische und quellenkundli-
che Überlegungen anhand von Beispielen aus dem 17. Jahrhundert,” Historische Anthropologie
2 (1994), 462–471, here 463.
78 Piller
a differentiation between supposedly interesting (those with reflections) and

uninteresting texts (pure narration without reflection) has also been applied
as a criterion, one which leads to the exclusion of very many self-narratives.10
In particular, the texts by women are dismissed most frequently with the
justification that here “concessions regarding these standards would have to
be made.”11
However, in order to be able to approach self-narratives in their historical
significance, the rough, fragmentary, ‘only’ narrative or fully formalized and
atypical texts must also be analyzed. It is necessary to recognize the variety
of autobiographical texts without opting for narrow genre definitions of
‘autobiography ’ or ‘diary’. One way of doing this is through concentrating on
unedited material. Unedited material can reveal characteristics of normalcy –
disunity, abrupt breaks, unfinished sentences, illegibilities – in a merciless way.
Changes in the authorship of the same text that cannot be indisputably recon-
structed, widely differing access to biographical data on authors – above all,
female authors – and also texts that only exist as copies are problems that can
be made more evident in working with previously untouched sources. The
methodological decision to work with unedited texts initially results in an
approach to self-narratives, which does not assess them on the basis of
formally determinable criteria but rather as a cultural practice.12
There are reasons for focusing on the eighteenth century. The new media of
the Enlightenment – newspapers, illustrated magazines, journals and encyclo-
pedias – transmitted to the public understandings and conceptions of the
body as well as the correct way to handle it. Even if the body was an object of
scholarly investigation long before the Enlightenment, the open discourse of
the eighteenth century nonetheless developed a new interest in body, health,
10 As in Peter Alheit, Morten Brandt, Hans-Rüdiger Müller and Frank Schömer,

Konfigurationen der Bildung. Drei Fallstudien zur Leibthematik im autobiographischen Text
um 1800 (Göttingen: 2001).
11 Alheit/Brandt/Müller/Schömer, Konfigurationen der Bildung, 7. The authors, however,
see no cause to consider the standards they have formulated. Christoph Lumme like-
wise excludes texts by women, with the justification that only a small number have been
transmitted: Christoph Lumme, Höllenfleisch und Heiligtum. Der menschliche Körper im
Spiegel autobiographischer Texte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Münchner Studien zur neueren
und neuesten Geschichte, vol. 13), (Frankfurt a.M., Berlin, New York, Paris and Vienna:
1996), 11.
12 For this approach, cf. Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self. Autobiography
and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge: 1997), 8; James S. Amelang, The Flight of
Icarus. Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: 1998), 6.
Private Body 79
illness and medicine.13 It is certainly appropriate that research has meanwhile

brought into question the thesis of a top-down medicalization of society in the
eighteenth century. What remains undoubted, however, is that many discus-
sions and debates were increasingly pursued, and pursued in new ways, during
the course of the century. The body experienced a thematization boom: it was
not only of fundamental importance in health discourse but also in the frame-
work of the newly emerging sciences of pedagogy and anthropology, as well as
in discussions on marriage, gender, naturalness and motherhood.
In the cities of the eighteenth century, there was an educated public, eager
to communicate. This public also forms the core of the Swiss Enlightenment.
This specific culture of communication was also the breeding ground for the
development of self-narratives. Among the writers of the fifty self-narratives
investigated are manufacturers and merchants, scientists and professors, law-
yers and pastors – that is, members of the financial, political and intellectual
stratum. The eight female authors likewise belonged to this urban elite, and
they composed – often in their child-rearing roles – self-narratives for their
children, or they took on (or over) directing the family books. However, authors
did not come solely from the center of the urban elite, as the writings of a pri-
mary school teacher, an apothecary, a confectioner, a goldsmith and a grave-
digger make clear. In the words of Andrew Wear, history that is written on the
basis of these sources is seldom ‘history from below’ but nonetheless “history
from the middle, the history of literate but often unimportant people.”14
The body becomes a topic in self-narratives in different ways. Fundamental
physical experiences, such as birth, illness, or death, qualify as events worthy
of being remembered and communicated, and thus find their way into the
texts. But daily corporeal techniques and practices are also the subject of wri
ting. Thus even deciding what is to be understood by ‘thematizing the body’ can
provoke discussion: the body “is no topic, or, perhaps almost all topics,” writes
13 A short, useful definition of ‘discourse’ is provided by Martin Dinges. In English transla-

tion it reads: “Discourses establish what can be said on a given topic at a specific point in
time because it is important and becaue it is ‘true’. They also determine what a person can
say at all by communicating the standards of what is relevant and what is correct. Thus
they create a certain context for discussions within society, but they remain mutable.”
Martin Dinges, introduction to Neue Wege in der Seuchengeschichte, ed. Martin Dinges
and Thomas Schlich (Jahrbuch des Instituts für Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch
Stiftung, Beiheft 6), (Stuttgart: 1995), 15.
14 Andrew Wear, “Interfaces: Perceptions of Health and Illness in Early Modern England,” in
Problems and Methods in the History of Medicine, ed. Roy Porter and Andrew Wear
(London, New York and Sydney: 1987), 230–255, here 231.
80 Piller
Caroline W. Bynum, and thereby addresses a problem that also arises in work
on self-narratives.15
The body becomes most conspicuous when it is sick or threatened. Incisive
physical experiences, such as birth or illness, which would become life-threa
tening much more quickly than today, are worthy of being communicated and
remembered. Research into self-narratives therefore investigates the body
most often from this perspective. Even the work summarized here addresses
how birth and illness are handled in writings, but it also looks at other aspects
of the body: as a constant life-companion, as a location of self-definition and
construction of subjectivity, as a medium of communication between genders
and as the object of education and self-control. Additionally, the body also
comes up variously as a location of differentiating characteristics, such as
male/female, self/other, young/old, beautiful/ugly, idle/industrious, pure/
impure, etc.
The body has a history. This does not require an extensive discussion.16 It
has become established in cultural studies to think of the body as a historical,
social and cultural fact. The discourse specific to a given period encompasses
body and shapes how it is perceived, determines how it is spoken of and
thus forms it as a social fact.17 Nevertheless, the body is no ‘mere’ effect of
discourses. By way of the body a person becomes sick, experiences pain,
and through the body a person dies. Human existence is therefore insepara-
bly bound to the body in its sheer materiality. The ways, however, that people
15 Caroline W. Bynum, “Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,”
Critical Inquiry 22, 1 (1995), 1–33, here 2.
16 It is no longer possible to achieve an overview of research on the history of the body. Basic
contributions are: Jacques Revel and Jean-Pierre Peter, “Le corps. L’homme malade et son
histoire,” in Faire de l’histoire. Troisième partie. Nouveaux objets, ed. Jacques Le Goff and
Pierre Nora (Paris: 1974), 169–191; Roy Porter, “History of the Body,” in New Perspectives on
Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Oxford: 1991), 206–232; Barbara Duden, Geschichte
unter der Haut. Ein Eisenacher Arzt und seine Patientinnen um 1730 (Stuttgart: 1991); Jakob
Tanner, “Körpererfahrung, Schmerz und die Konstruktion des Kulturellen,” Historische
Anthropologie 2 (1994), 489–502; Elisabeth List, “Der Körper (in) der Geschichte.
Theoretische Fragen an einen Paradigmenwechsel,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für
Geschichtswissenschaften 8, 2 (1997), 167–185; Philipp Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen. Eine
Geschichte des Körpers 1765–1914 (Frankfurt a.M.: 2001).
17 Marcel Mauss described body techniques such as sleeping, waking, eating, drinking,
walking, giving birth, coughing, etc., as results of upbringing and thus as socially con-
structed behavior, as early as 1935. Cf. Marcel Mauss, “Die Techniken des Körpers,” in
Soziologie und Anthropologie, vol. 2 (Frankfurt a.M.: 1989), 197–220. (First published in:
Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique 32, 3–4 (1935), 271–293).
Private Body 81
conceive of the body, also the sick, pained or dying body, that they perceive it
and handle it are subject to historical change.
Meanwhile, in the German-speaking area, there exist numerous works that
address the perception of the body and social practices dealing with the body
by using self-narratives as a foundation. Nevertheless, the investigation of
bodily experience is still perceived, even in recent times, as a desideratum.
Otto Ulbricht summed it up, in observing that “investigations into bodily expe-
rience itself” are still “vanishingly rare.”18 One reason for this assessment lies in
the problem of the term for ‘experience’.
In historiography which focuses on the body and uses self-narratives as its
basis, the relationship between experience and discourse comes under scru-
tiny in two ways. First, the body occupies an exceptional place in the debates
about the category of ‘experience’ being a guiding concept for research. Second,
self-narratives are the sources most frequently suggested for researching
human worlds of experience and are also used with the goal of reconstructing
‘experience’. For Reinhart Koselleck, ‘experience’ numbers among the most
fundamental categories of recognition that are necessary for history even to be
a possibility: “there is no history except that construed through the expe
riences of acting or ailing people.”19 In social history, labor history, history of
daily life and women’s history, experience forms the foundation for recogni-
tion.20 In the course of the linguistic turn which the humanities underwent
in the 1990s, the term ‘experience’ as a fundamental category of historical
recognition was acknowledged as problematic and was increasingly sup-
planted.21 Joan Scott, in her much-cited article “The Evidence of Experience,”
radically brought into question the appeal to historical subjects’ experiences as
18 Otto Ulbricht, introduction to part 2 “Körpererfahrung in der Frühen Neuzeit II,” in

“Erfahrung” als Kategorie der Frühneuzeitgeschichte, ed. Paul Münch (Historische
Zeitschrift, Beiheft 31), (Munich: 2001), 91–97, here 94.
19 Reinhart Koselleck, “ ‘Erfahrungsraum’ und ‘Erwartungshorizont’ – zwei historische
Kategorien,” in Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, 4th edn
(Frankfurt a.M.: 2000), 349–375, here 351.
20 On the role of the term of experience in the variously specialized histories, cf. Kathleen
Canning, “Problematische Dichotomien. Erfahrung zwischen Narrativität und
Materialität,” Historische Anthropologie 10, 2 (2002), 163–182; Paul Münch, introduction to
“Erfahrung” als Kategorie der Frühneuzeitgeschichte (Historische Zeitschrift, Beiheft 31),
(Munich: 2001), 11–27; Christoph Conrad and Martina Kessel, “Geschichte ohne Zentrum,”
in Geschichte schreiben in der Postmoderne. Beiträge zur aktuellen Diskussion, ed. idem
(Stuttgart: 1994), 9–36, here 14.
21 On the “linguistic turn” in German historical research, cf. Peter Schöttler, “Wer hat Angst
vor dem ‘linguistic turn’?,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 23 (1997), 134–151.
82 Piller
foundational to historical research.22 Experience could not be taken as the

starting point for historical explanation because it itself requires explanation:
“Experience is, in this approach, not the origin of our explanation, but that
which we want to explain.”23
A theoretical discussion, which continues today, sprung from the question
whether people can have authentic experiences of their environment, which,
as a result, can be reconstructed by analyzing primary sources, or if experience
is only possible as an effect of discourse and language. From one perspective,
language appears to be the unavoidable element that produces all experiences.
Experience is formed by symbolic structures and discursive conditions. Reality
is a linguistically constructed phenomenon.24 From another perspective, how-
ever, this concentration on language and discourse has been described as a
‘crisis’ in the humanities, which had the effect of promoting an approach
which focuses on experience and subjectivity in their material and physical
dimensions.25 The fundamental view here is that language does not create
reality but instead represents it.26
In the context of body history, the relationship between discourse and expe-
rience poses a particularly thorny dilemma. If the body is culturally formed
and discursively modeled, and yet experience is also an effect of discourses
and language, how can we grasp actual corporeal experiences that we know to
exist and always have existed, even if they are now different? The idea that
experience is always culturally transmitted, always shaped by knowledge and
discourse runs against its limits when it comes to body, since the materiality of
body is indisputable. Bodies live and die, eat and sleep, sense pain and joy, suf-
fer from illness and violence. Certainly, deconstructive theorists such as Judith
Butler have also debated the materiality of the body.27 But historians – Caroline
W. Bynum or Lyndal Roper, for instance – promote a “sense for the immediacy
22 Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” in Questions of evidence: proof, practice, and
persuasion across the disciplines, ed. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson and Harry
Harootunian (Chicago and London: 1994), 363–387 (First published in Critical Inquiry 17
(1991), 773–797).
23 Scott, The Evidence of Experience, 387.
24 See, for example, Sarasin, Mapping the Body.
25 See Lyndal Roper, “Jenseits des linguistic turn,” Historische Anthropologie 7 (1999), 452–
466; eadem, introduction to Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in
Early Modern Europe (London etc.: 1994), 1–36.
26 Roper, Jenseits des linguistic turn, 466.
27 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: 1990); eadem, Bodies that Matter (New York and
London: 1993).
Private Body 83
of bodies, living and dead,”28 and advance writing history that is beyond the
analysis of language and “asks about subjectivity and experience and also
about human action.”29
Considering this theoretical discussion, it remains relevant for historical
research to ask if and where experience can be grasped in a text. Philipp Sarasin
describes the places where this occurs as rifts through which experiences push
to the surface. Yet even if self-narratives enable more direct access to ordi-
nary people’s assertions than do indirect sources such as medical treatises or
doctor’s reports – as is assumed – we must not use terms such as authenti
city, immediacy or verisimilitude when giving a positive qualification for ‘self-
narrative’ types of texts. Even in self-narratives, most of what appears to be the
‘experience’ of a speaking subject refers back to the discursive conditions that
form these experiences. Even writings on birth, illness, violence, dying and
death, that is, writings on so-called corporeal primary experiences, are embed-
ded in the discourses of the time, are based on the writer’s knowledge back-
ground, obey the rules of the chosen genre, and likely follow specific intentions
in their statements.
These considerations can be made more clear through the help of an exam-
ple. In 1783–84, the seventeen/eighteen-year-old Johann Rudolf Huber of Basel
composed a diary.30 Each day for 263 days, the young man catalogued all of
his actions, from waking to going to bed, wrote about his lessons, readings,
his leisure activities, recorded his physical states, noted his resolutions and his
regular breaches of these. The text provides a multifaceted view on the world
of thought and experience of a young bourgeois at the end of the eighteenth
century.
Huber’s writings are a self-education program, brought about by
the intensive readings of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert’s Moralische
28 Bynum, Why All the Fuss about the Body?, 33.

30 Johann Rudolf Huber, Tagebuch meiner selbs(t). Ms. Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, pa 694 B 7b.
Johann Rudolf Huber was born in 1766 as the fourth of eight children in the Huber family
of Basel. His parents were astronomer Johann Jakob Huber (1733–1798) and Rosina Huber-
Rohner (1737–1812). In 1785, at age 19, Johann Rudolf Huber was appointed to a professor-
ship of history at the University of Basel. In 1789, he became a minister in Strasbourg; in
1794, minister in the parishes of Riehen and Bettingen (near Basel); and in 1800, minister
of the St. Elisabeth’s parish in Basel. He held this office until his death in 1806. On the
biography of Johann Rudolf Huber, see the resúmé that Huber himself composed for the
funeral oration. Ms. Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt pa 694 B 7a. Cf. also Michael Raith, “Johann
Rudolf Huber (1766–1806) ‘Prophet der Revolution?’, “ Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und
Altertumskunde 91 (1991), 159–180.
84 Piller
Vorlesungen.31 In the seventh lecture, which Huber had just read at the start of
his writing, is Gellert’s advice: “If you can find enough time, keep a diary on
your own heart, and undertake a close examination of your behavior. Deny no
fault, no illicit inclination, no impure thoughts.”32 The nine rules for a virtuous
life with which Gellert prefaces his Moralische Vorlesungen were borrowed
by Huber as the introduction to his diary. Above all, the nine rules focus on
attempting self-awareness, controlling affects, striving for virtue and avoiding
vice. By copying the rules word for word in his diary, Huber adopts them as his
own. He follows with an insistence on permanent examination of religious
conscience through keeping a diary and with the idea that by way of regular
self-reflection and self-control in the diary, morals can be refined.33
Gellert’s influence on the young Huber is hardly atypical for the eighteenth
century. Christian Fürchtegott Gellert was one of the most read and most influ-
ential poets of the eighteenth century, as well as one of the most widely read.34
Again and again, references to Gellert appear in self-narratives. For example,
the Basel naturalist Hieronymus Bernoulli-Respinger (1745–1829) wrote in his
résumé [Lebenslauf] that he found the true taste of God’s word through
Gellert’s Moralische Vorlesungen, and the thirteen-year-old Bernhard Wild of
St. Gall (1776–1832) also comments again and again in his diary in his reading
Gellert’s lectures.35
31 Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, Moralische Vorlesungen. Moralische Charaktere, ed. Sibylle

Späth (Berlin and New York: 1992).
32 Gellert, Moralische Vorlesungen, 91: “Halten Sie sich, wenn Sie Zeit genug dazu gewinnen
können, ein Tagebuch über Ihr eigen Herz, und stellen Sie eine genaue Prüfung Ihres
Verhaltens an. Verschweigen Sie sich keinen Fehler, keine unerlaubte Neigung, keinen
unedlen Gedanken.” See also Sibylle Späth, “Vom beschwerlichen Weg zur Glückseligkeit
des Menschengeschlechts. Gellerts Moralische Vorlesungen und die Widerstände der
Realität gegen die empfindsame Gesellschaftsutopie,” in “Ein Lehrer der ganzen Nation”.
Leben und Werk Christian Fürchtegott Gellerts, ed. Bernd Witte (Munich: 1990), 151–171.
33 See Alois Hahn, “Zur Soziologie der Beichte und anderer Formen institutionalisierter
Bekenntnisse: Selbstthematisierung und Zivilisationsprozess,” Kölner Zeitschrift für
Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 3 (1982), 407–433.
34 Only recently have researchers paid much attention to Gellert. Cf. Witte, Ein Lehrer der
ganzen Nation; Friedrich Koch, Christian Fürchtegott Gellert. Poet und Pädagoge der
Aufklärung (Weinheim: 1992); Rafael Arto-Haumacher, Verehrt – verkannt – vergessen.
Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, ed. Gellert-Museum Hainichen (Egelsbach: 1996).
35 Résumé and other household notes by Hieronymus de Nicol. Bernoulli. Ms. Hand
schriftenabteilung der Universitätsbibliothek Basel, Bernoulli Archiv, III q 1, und Tagebuch
für mich, Bernhard Wild angefangen den 13. Christmonath 1789, 1ster Theil.
Ms. Kantonsbibliothek St. Gall, 678.
Private Body 85
Huber’s diary, which was begun in the sense of a religious examination of

conscience and a refinement of morals, reveals itself to be a location of perma-
nent awareness about the body and a medium of registry and control of physi-
cal processes, such as sleep, nutrition, excretion, movement and sexuality.
Huber notes his daily hygiene activities such as fixing his hair, brushing his
teeth and clothes, and he writes about his diet, sleep and movement just as he
writes about constant bodily adversity, such as illness, pain and – very com-
mon for Huber – constipation. This awareness of his body is accompanied by
constant readings. Huber believes that he must especially internalize Gellert’s
eleventh moral lecture about the health of the body. In this text, Gellert
laments health as the condition necessary for every man to be able to uphold
his duties as father, spouse and friend.36 In contrast, even the smallest sign of
illness, an unhealthy complexion, for example, awakens the suspicion, accor-
ding to Gellert, that the man is a slave to raging passions.37 Gellert’s instruc-
tions for promoting health pertain to air, sleep, nutrition, physical activity and
passions – still in clear proximity to the galenic ‘res non naturales’. The diary is
seventeen-year-old Huber’s medium for detecting the readings’ insights on his
own body, and simultaneously for bringing the physical adversities and chal-
lenges that confront him under control by taming them through writing.
One topic that repeatedly provides occasion for self-condemnation is his
falling asleep in church. Huber locates the cause of his sleepiness in his exces-
sive eating: “It was a very good sermon, and yet I still could not ward off sleep.
I believe this comes from too large a lunch. I eat far more than is necessary for
my sustainment. I must break this habit.”38 Complaints about his ‘Fresserey’
[excessive eating] run through the entire diary: “I am very, very unsatisfied
with today. I disgustingly glutted myself with food and often had bad
thoughts;”39 or “I also spent the day poorly; I often had bad thoughts and com-
pletely overloaded myself with food. Thus I have been very inconvenienced by
indigestion.”40 Huber was steadfast in his efforts to improve himself: “Among
other things, I have made the decision that tomorrow I shall begin restraining
36 Gellert, Moralische Vorlesungen, 134.

37 Ibid.
38 Huber, Tagebuch meiner selbs(t), 2 (1): “Es war eine sehr gute Predigt, u. doch konnte ich
mich nicht des Schlafs erwehren. Ich glaube dies kommt vom allzuvilen Mittag Essen.
Überhaupt esse ich vilmehr, als zu meiner Erhaltung nöthig ist; das muß ich mir
abgewöhnen.”
39 Huber, Tagebuch meiner selbs(t), 12 (1).
40 Huber, Tagebuch meiner selbs(t), 13 (1): “Auch den Tag habe ich schlecht zugebracht, oft
schlechte Gedanken gehabt, u. mich auch gar mit Essen überladen. Daher hatte ich
Unverdaulichkeit, die mich sehr incommodirte.”
86 Piller
myself in eating, because there can be no other outcome than me destroying

myself by my intemperance.”41 The self-destruction mentioned here is by no
means limited to the body but concerns – if one reads Gellert – body, mind and
spirit equally. This can then help to explain why Huber’s overeating and bad
thoughts are always directly next to each other. This unhealthy lifestyle also led
Huber’s thoughts to his greatest and most impairing ailment, constipation. His
constipation would make him dizzy, which in turn would keep him from lear
ning his vocabulary. A doctor, the apothecary, his parents and his teachers were
all involved with trying to uncover the meaning and a solution to Huber’s
digestive problems. His philosophy teacher made him aware of the danger of
hypochondria as a consequence of constipation.42 The doctor perpetually
wrote him new prescriptions. For a time, Huber was occupied multiple times a
day with enemas, and he did not hesitate to note when they were effective.
Even he provided an explanation for his situation: “Because of the cramping in
my intestines, and after that also in my stomach, I could not go to church and
lay in bed from a quarter to 3 until 5 o’clock. […] And so, neglecting my health
is why I could not go to church this afternoon and why I had to spend the
greater part of the day being idle.”43 In this last interpretation, the explanatory
models that have appeared throughout link up particularly clearly: insufficient
attention to health makes optimal physical self-control impossible. The
unhealthy body leads to idleness, which then results in the disruption of per-
forming duties to God. Here are reflected precisely those connections among
influences that the bourgeois discourses of morals and health implemented.44
41 Huber, Tagebuch meiner selbs(t), 24 (2): “Unter anderem faßte ich den Entschluß, mit dem
morndrigen Tag anzufangen enthaltsam im Essen zu seyn, weil es nicht anders seyn kann,
als daß ich mich durch meine Unmässigkeit zu grunde richte.”
42 The term ‘hypochondria’ was used in many different ways in the eighteenth century.
However, it was considered a ‘fashionable’ affliction. See Esther Fischer-Homberger,
Hypochondrie. Melancholie bis Neurose. Krankheiten und Zustandsbilder (Bern, Stuttgart
and Vienna: 1970).
43 Huber, Tagebuch meiner selbs(t), 14 (1): “Wegen den Krämpfungen in den Gedärmen, u.
hernach auch im Magen konnte ich nicht in die Kirche gehen, u. legte mich deswegen von
3/4 auf 3 bis um 5 Uhr aufs Bette. […] Und so ist nun meine Unachtsamkeit auf meine
Gesundheit Schuld daran, daß ich heute, Nachmittag nicht in die Kirche gehen konnte, u.
den grössten Teil des Tages müssig zu bringen mußte.”
44 On the discourse on health in the eighteenth century, see for example, Christian
Barthel, Medizinische Polizey und medizinische Aufklärung. Aspekte des öffentlichen
Gesundheitsdiskurses im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M. and New York: 1989); Michel
Foucault, “Die Politik der Gesundheit im 18. Jahrhundert,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für
Geschichtswissenschaften. Kulturen der Krankheit 3 (1996), 311–326.
Private Body 87
Healthy bodies are a part of the story of the bourgeois who were establishing
themselves in the eighteenth century. Health appears here, in Huber’s work
and in the bourgeois discourse on norms, at once as a prerequisite and a con-
sequence of a righteous and orderly life. The importance of health in the bour-
geois canon of values inspired a flood of publications. Newspapers and
magazines, dietetics, health books, as well as literature postulate life praxes,
which they formulate as values such as moderation, inurement, the combat of
unhealthy drives and passions, exercise, walks, hygiene and calmness. As a
reader of literature from his time, Huber has an ongoing interest in this dis-
course. And with the understanding that only a healthy body permits virtue,
industriousness and correct practice of religious duty, and that health can
only be achieved through a good lifestyle, Huber takes meticulous account of
his body.
Yet again and again he reaches the boundaries of the explicitly namable:
“Today I first got up before 8 o’clock — — — + n.g.m.fl. — — — — ! — ! —
— < xxx > —.”45 What is to be said here, or rather, what is to be silenced here?
There are many such places in Huber’s text where the author switches into this
reduced character set. His cryptography is based on only a few symbols, which,
above all, signal the absence of language: dashes, crosses, quotation marks and
a few exclamations, such as Pfui, Ach or Weh. The relevant places are clearly
recognizable in the text. The author never provides an explicit key to the
puzzle. Nevertheless, the encrypted parts become recognizable as nothing
other than a sign for masturbation. Masturbation is Huber’s cross. His diary
thus leads into the realm of sexuality, which, as Michael Maurer has estab-
lished in his large study on the German bourgeois, is extremely difficult to
research because of the state of the primary sources.46
On September 19th, it read: “After eating until about 2, I read Livy and — —
ach! ++ — — — — — — […] I went to bed at 11 o’clock and prayed to God for
forgiveness for my great sins of the day.”47 That this was not just a great sin but
one that concerned the flesh becomes clear in a later entry. On November 17th,
Huber’s daily dictum was: “If you are changed in mind, you shall not perform
the desires of the flesh.” In the evening, he noted in his diary: “for the entire
45 Huber, Tagebuch meiner selbs(t), 24(1): “Heute stuhnd ich erst vor 8 Uhr auf — —
— + n.g.m.fl. — — — — ! — ! — — < xxx > —.”
46 Michael Maurer, Die Biographie des Bürgers. Lebensformen und Denkweisen in der forma-
tiven Phase des deutschen Bürgertums (1680–1815) (Göttingen: 1996), 239.
47 Huber, Tagebuch meiner selbs(t), 26 (1): “Nach dem Essen bis gegen 2 las ich im Livius und
—— ach! ++ — — — — — — […] Ich gieng um 11. Uhr zu Bette, u. bat. Gott um
Verzeihung für die grossen Sünden des heutigen Tages.”
88 Piller
afternoon until 4 o’clock dd and finally + — — — Bad use of today’s dictum!

— —.”48 Another part reads: “Had to dress myself a bit so that I could accom-
pany Mama across the Rhine. And then it happened again ++!! repulsive !! —
— —.”49 Many other examples could be cited.
Detecting, indicating and yet concealing masturbation represents a chief
motive and the fundamental dilemma of Huber’s writings. Between the insis-
tence on complete self-revelation, as is formulated by Gellert, and the aware-
ness of the power of writing in which reality is established, Huber decides to
label the delicate subject in a roundabout way. This allows him at once to name
and to conceal his vice.
Huber was not at all alone in his employment of encryption; other diarists
used this procedure. For example, thirteen-year-old Bernhard Wild used secret
symbols to write down the forbidden, and seventeen-year-old Johannes Aberli
of Winterthur even composed his entire diary in two different secret lan-
guages.50 The young Dutch nobleman Alexander van Goltstein developed an
almost identical strategy as Huber’s for addressing masturbation. While Huber
inserts crosses and thus symbolically refers to the sinfulness of the action, van
Goltstein uses stars to symbolize masturbation. In each case, the stars appear
between two dates, thus referring to masturbation in the sense of a “nocturnal
activity.”51 Van Goltstein likely took this idea of graphically encoding sins from
the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.52 But this type of disguising tech-
nique can also be found with other famous authors, for instance, in the diaries
of Johann Kaspar Lavater, Victor Hugo and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.53
48 Huber, Tagebuch meiner selbs(t), 51 (1): “Wandelt im Geist, so werdet ihr die Lüste des
Fleisches nicht vollbringen. […] Den ganzen NachMittag bis um 4 Uhr dd u. endl. + — —
— Schlechte Benutzung des heutig Tagspruchs! — —.”
49 Huber, Tagebuch meiner selbs(t), 55 (1): “Mußte mich ein wenig einkleiden, damit ich die
Mama über Rhein begleiten könne. u. da wars als wied. geschah ++!! abscheulich !!
— — —.”
50 Wild, Tagebuch für mich; Johannes Aberli (1774–1851), Joh. Aberlis’ Graveurs und
Medailleurs’ von Winterthur Tagebuch mit eigenhändigen Notizen aus dem Jahr 1791, Ms.
Handschriftenabteilung der Stadtbibliothek Winterthur, ms 8° 83.
51 Rudolf Dekker, Childhood, Memory and Autobiography in Holland from Golden Age to
Romanticism (London: 2000), 56.
52 Ibid.
53 On the disguising techniques in diaries, cf. Manfred Schneider, “Chiffrierte Sekrete,”
KulturRevolution 24, (1991), 59–63, and Gustav René Hocke, Europäische Tagebücher aus
vier Jahrhunderten. Motive und Anthologie (Frankfurt a.M.: 1991), 162–172; Paul Etter,
“Johann Caspar Lavaters Geheimschriften im ‘Geheimen Tagebuch’,” Zürcher Taschenbuch
(1954), 67–73.
Private Body 89
The dilemma of simultaneously wanting to reveal and to hide masturbation

Huber also shared with pedagogues and doctors of his time who sought to
combat the vice. They all knew the problem, that the evil which they were
fighting, was simultaneously spreading. Nevertheless they took up the topic
with great eloquence, sometimes with the indication of a careful choice of
words. In the second half of the eighteenth century, anti-masturbation cam-
paigns that were established at the beginning of the century in England were
also running at full force in the German-speaking areas.54 In fact, the period
between 1770 and 1790 – thus during Huber’s childhood and adolescence – was
a high point for the anti-masturbation writings. Stories were told in readers for
young people about blooming youths suddenly transformed into miserable
skeletons because they had weakened their bodies through secret sins.55
Johann Friedrich Oest wrote in a prize-winning piece for combating masturba-
tion about the miserable decay of a youth; he finished his text: “Thus a fifteen-
year-old youth died a pitiful and ignominious death, a youth who from his
predisposition could have been a happy and fortunate, valuable man!”56 The
masturbation discourse of the eighteenth century was, however, not only a
pedagogical one but above all a medical one.57 The classic work in the fight
54 Dr. Bekker’s text “Onania, or the heinous sin of self-pollution and all its frightful conse-
quences in both sexes, considered with spiritual and physical advice” appeared in 1710.
The 17th edition was published as early as 1737. About twenty-five years later, similar texts
began to appear in large numbers in Germany. Cf. Donata Elschenbroich, Kinder werden
nicht geboren. Studien zur Entstehung der Kindheit (Frankfurt a.M.: 1977), 133–156. On the
history of the struggle against masturbation, see also Ludger Lütkehaus, “O Wollust, o
Hölle.” Die Onanie. Stationen einer Inquisition (Frankfurt a.M.: 1992).
55 Cf. Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, Moralisches Elementarbuch (Leipzig: 1783), cited in:
Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der Aufklärung. Eine Textsammlung, ed. Hans-Heino Ewers
(Stuttgart: 1980), 263; Johann Baptist Strobl, Folgen unrichtiger und verwahrloßter
Erziehung. Ein Lesebuch für Jünglinge und Mädchen von reiferem Alter (Munich: 1794).
56 Johann Friedrich Oest, “Versuch einer Beantwortung der pädagogischen Frage: wie
man Kinder und junge Leute vor dem Leib und Seele verwüstenden Laster der Unzucht
überhaupt, und der Selbstschwächung insonderheit verwahren, oder, wofern sie schon
davon angesteckt waren, wie man sie davon heilen könne? Eine gekrönte Preisschrift.
Allen Eltern, Erziehern und Jugendfreunden gewidmet,” in Allgemeine Revision des
gesammten Schul- und Erziehungswesens von einer Gesellschaft practischer Erzieher.
Sechster Theil, ed. Joachim Heinrich Campe (Wolfenbüttel: 1787), 296f. [“So starb ein
fünfzehnjähriger Jüngling des kläglichen und schimpflichen Todes; ein Jüngling, der
seiner guten Anlage nach ein froher, und glücklicher nützlicher Mann hätte werden
können!”].
57 For example, cf. Karl Braun, Die Krankheit Onania. Körperangst und die Anfänge moderner
Sexualität im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M. and New York: 1995); Freddy Mortier, Willem
90 Piller
against masturbation, which the above-mentioned authors referenced, came

from the sphere of medicine: it was the work of doctor Samuel André Tissot of
Lausanne. Tissot’s piece L’onanisme ou Dissertation physique sur les Maladies
produites par la masturbation first appeared in 1758.58 The first German transla-
tion was published in 1760, and many editions followed down to the nineteenth
century.59 With Tissot, the medicalization of anti-masturbation morals was
finally complete. Masturbation would no longer be treated firstly as a sin or
crime but instead as an illness, and an illness with potentially fatal conse-
quences. Tissot pursued pedagogical-Englightened objectives with his medical
work. It was composed for an educated audience – since masturbation was
especially suspected in the upper classes – and was also received by them. His
writing, according to the doctor, was to “help [young people] expose the repul-
sive habit.”60
Masturbation’s dangers concern firstly the economy of the male body.
Women are addressed less extensively. Tissot believed it wrong, however, not
to instruct the female sex as well, because he thought females were even more
strongly affected by their self-defilement. For, as he wrote in the chapter on the
“Consequences of the wanton self-defilement of the female sex,” aside from
the evils that afflict men, “they are still exposed to many particular evils.”61 The
female-specific consequences of self-defilement are, for example, ulceration
and destruction of the uterus and reproductive organs, extension of the clitoris
and indifference to marital embraces.
Warnings can indeed be found directed at girls even in self-
narratives. Twenty-nine-year-old Anna Katharina Vonder Mühll-Ryhiner
of Basel inserted a didactic excursus for both her six- and seven-year-old
daughters in the biography [Lebensbeschreibung] she composed in 1790:
“[take care] that you diligently guard every part of your bodies with virginal
bashfulness, [take care] that you do not touch them more than required for
Collen and Frank Simon, “Inner-scientific Reconstructions in the Discourse on

Masturbation (1760–1950),” Paedagogica Historica XXX, 3 (1994), 817–847.
58 Samuel Auguste André David Tissot, Von der Onanie oder Anhandlung über Krankheiten,
die von der Selbstbefleckung herrühren, nach der vierten Ausgabe aus dem Französischen
übersetzt (Eisenach: 1785).
59 Tissot’s writings were translated into several languages. See Maria Szlatky, “Tissot as part
of the medical Enlightment in Hungary,” in The popularization of medicine 1650–1850, ed.
Roy Porter (London: 1992), 195–214.
60 Tissot, Von der Onanie, Preface, not paginated.
61 Ibid., 55–65: “Folgen der muthwilligen Selbstbefleckung beym weiblichen Geschlechte;
[…] sind sie noch vielen besonderen Uebeln ausgesetzt.”
Private Body 91
cleanliness.”62 Because of masturbation, the corporeal cleanliness demanded

of the daughters becomes a source of danger to their sexual purity and integ-
rity; cleanliness threatens to fall into conflict with purity.63
It is safe to say that Huber’s diary and Vonder Mühll’s biography are rather
exceptional. We do not often find places in German-language self-narratives
where masturbation is mentioned, and even with Huber and Vonder Mühll the
topic is more implied than clearly formulated. Nevertheless, they still suffice to
show that the discussion about masturbation was well known in the bourgeois
social stratum. Whether Anna Katharina Vonder Mühll or Johann Rudolf
Huber read or knew of Tissot’s writings or other masturbation treatises cannot
be determined. But a knowledge of the topic did not depend on specific medi-
cal readings, since even in Gellert’s Moralischen Vorlesungen we can read that
“the flattering lust […] has made so many blossoming youths into withered
skeletons,” an allusion that doubtlessly refers to masturbation.64 The idea of
withering often appears in texts on masturbation and references the depletion
of the spinal cord as a consequence of masturbation.
Against the background formed by the discourse described here, Huber’s
pedantic accounting is not astonishing. A chief motive for the young diarist in
his written self-observations is represented by the detecting and controlling of
masturbation as a prerequisite for health and as the focal point of his mascu-
line self-mastery. Huber did not, however, effectively fight masturbation with
his writings. On April 20th, five months and eleven days since the last passage
with the significant cross it reads: “This afternoon until about 2 o’clock, I read
in Maißner’s Skizzen in Bianka Capello. Alas then + !!!! — — almost a half
year – woe! woe! I straightened my sheets.”65 A few days later his diary ends,
unannounced and without comment. He says nothing about why he broke off
the text here.
62 Anna Katharina Vonder Mühll-Ryhiner, Lebensbeschreibung. Ms. Staatsarchiv Basel

Stadt, pa 511 305-02-04: “[Hüttett euch] alle theile eures körpers mit jungfraulicher
Schamhaftigkeit sorgfältig zu bewachen, [hüttet euch] sie nicht mehr als denn punkt der
reinlichkeit betrifft anzurühren.”
63 On the moral dangers of bathing, also see Georges Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness.
Changing Attitudes in France Since the Middle Ages (Cambridge and New York: 1988),
173ff.
64 Gellert, Moralische Vorlesungen, 147: “Die schmeichlerische Wollust […] so manchen
blühenden Jüngling zum verdorrten Gerippe gemacht hat.”
65 Huber, Tagebuch meiner selbs(t), 36 (2): “Nachmittag bis gegen 2 Uhr las ich in Maißners
Skizzen in Bianka Capello. Ach dann + !!!! — — Bald ein 1/2 Jahr — weh! weh! Machte
meine Laken.”
92 Piller
Johann Rudolf Huber’s text was one of ten that were extensively analyzed –
as model sources – for my dissertation. Work with self-narratives can be
founded on one text or on hundreds of them.66 For investigations based on
several texts, various methodological approaches are conceivable. One option
is to proceed on the basis of single text analyses, which are then brought
together in a concluding examination.67 The advantage of this methodological
approach is that individual texts can be interpreted and also presented exten-
sively, intensively and with consideration to the context in which they emerged.
These individual text analyses make it possible for us to assert models of per-
ception, thought and action within a cultural and societal context. This
approach, however, lacks the comparative perspective which allows results to
be supported, but above all, differentiated and contrasted. A further disadvan-
tage of this process is that not all texts lend themselves to extensive analyses
because of their density or quality, which would lead to the exclusion of a siz-
able number of extant self-narratives.
Another option, then, would be to survey and evaluate multiple texts regar
ding one topic.68 This method can better justify generalizations. However, it
also holds the danger that sources become removed from their contexts and
exploited simply as quarries for supporting evidence.
The method proposed here is a combination of the two approaches. Each of
the five main chapters of the summarized work has two texts at its center,
which are used as model sources. These model sources are texts in which the
problem at hand is to be most deeply pursued, and pursued from two diffe
rent perspectives. The analyses of the individual texts should allow the prob-
lem to be addressed in depth and should enable answers to be developed.
Analyzing narrative patterns and strategies as well as argumentation processes
is the primary approach here. Interpreting narrative structures and linguistic
arrangements is fundamental to the discussion of content. Flanking the model
66 For their historical works on the body and medicine, for example, Robert Jütte
addresses one text (Hermann von Weinsberg), while Lachmund/Stollberg deal with 700
autobiographies. See Robert Jütte, Ärzte, Heiler und Patienten: medizinischer Alltag in der
frühen Neuzeit (Munich: 1991); Lachmund/Stollberg, Zur medikalen Kultur des Bildungs
bürgertums um 1800.
67 For example, Lorenz Heiligensetzer, Getreue Kirchendiener – gefährdete Pfarrherren.
Deutschschweizer Prädikanten des 17. Jahrhunderts in ihren Lebensbeschreibungen
(Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2006); Stephan Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlich
keitsdarstellung in deutschsprachigen Autobiographien des 16. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag
zur Historischen Psychologie (Trier: 1993).
68 For instance, Lachmund/Stollberg, Zur medikalen Kultur des Bildungsbürgertums um 1800;
Lumme, Höllenfleisch und Heiligtum.
Private Body 93
sources in each chapter are up to twenty additional texts, on which the prob-
lem at hand is further developed and sharpened, and results are confirmed or
contrasted. It can also show that certain questions are only answerable through
comparative readings of several texts.
The alternation between the model sources and the additional texts as well
as the mutual referencing of both groups occurs in an area held in constant
suspense – between the typical and the atypical, the unspectacular sources
and the spectacular ones, between normal cases of self-narrative writing and
the exceptional. Roy Porter writes about this in an overview article on body
history: “The first-hand written record […] is largely silent – and where it is
eloquent, it is probably unrepresentative.”69 The texts that are suitable for
extensive analysis, and thus can be read as model sources, are the exceptional,
the loquacious works and thus not representative. How they came into exis-
tence can hardly be explained. Yet above all these texts enable us to illustrate
models of perception, interpretation and action and to analyze the narrative
strategies of the writings. Additionally, bringing in normal and unspectacular
texts also serves to locate the model sources in the framework of self-narrative
writing and to connect them to their context. The discrepancy between the
frequent ‘silent’ texts and the few ‘eloquent’ ones should not be smoothed over
but instead made fruitful for analysis.
The different discourses that unfurled around the body in the eighteenth
century and more strongly after 1750 form an important basis for interpreta-
tion. The experiences described in the self-narratives refer back to the discur-
sive conditions that form them. Be it in Huber’s writings about the mastery of
the youthful body, about masturbation or in the descriptions of illnesses, be it
in writing about health, marital violence or death, we can see again and again
how writing about the body is linguistically coded and bound to time-specific
discourses.70
However, self-narratives cannot be read merely as reactions to discourses.
As members of the educated social stratum – as scientists, politicians, pastors,
their spouses, or even as a young student in secondary school – authors
equally receive and produce public discourse. By composing self-narratives,
they create the discourses, reinterpret them, and define them in new and
69 Porter, History of the Body, 210.

70 On this, see Tanner: “Wenn Menschen sich sprachlich artikulieren, befinden sie sich
immer schon innerhalb dieses strukturierten Universums der Diskurse.” Jakob Tanner,
“Wie machen Menschen Erfahrungen? Zur Historizität und Semiotik des Körpers,”
in Körper Macht Geschichte. Körpergeschichte als Sozialgeschichte, ed. Bielefelder
Graduiertenkolleg (Bielefeld and Rieden: 1999), 16–34, here 34.
94 Piller
distinct ways. This allows a view from which discourses are not only under-
stood as abstract factors but also as elements embedded in praxes. While self-
narratives reflect the debates of norm and discourse, they also reflect those
debates of social praxis and lifestyle.
The self-narrative is not a simple translation of experience into text but is a
multifaceted cultural practice, a practice that the reading and communicative
bourgeois was particularly inclined to pursue. Even if a text was only produced
for its own sake or for the family’s, it needs to be interpreted as a communica-
tive act against a background of societal discourses, as Michael Mascuch argues
when he says that autobiography is “a performance, a public display of self-
identity, even when composed secretly for an audience of one.”71 The writer
pursues a certain subjective intention in his or her assertions with respect to
the explicit or implicit reader.
It is doubtless that subjectivity, actions and experiences can be traced in the
texts – as Lyndal Roper claims; this does not occur, however, ‘beyond’ language
and discourse, as she would like it to.72 Language and discourse do not form a
counterpart to reality but are instead constitutive pieces of life-realities – both
societal and the individual-subjective. The differentiation between social prac-
tices and lifestyles on the one hand and norms and discourses on the other is
thus not always conclusively possible in the work on self-narratives. It is pre-
cisely with the knowledge that authors of self-narratives do not simply react to
discourses but also actively help to create them that we can recognize the
boundaries between discourses and practices as not being rigid and impene-
trable. In the briefly summarized text by Johann Rudolf Huber, this interplay
between subjective experience and discourse becomes evident through the
example of masturbation.
The questions posed cannot be handled from a bird’s-eye view but instead
require a way of reading that grasps language not as an arduous hurdle on the
path to reality but also not as simple coincidence. The diary of the young
Johann Rudolf Huber is an example for how a societal discourse – here the
discourse on masturbation – can manifest itself in a single linguistic symbol:
the cross.
Body history based on self-narratives thus reveals itself to be discourse his-
tory. Nevertheless the analyses allow insight on the subjective and individual
modes of articulation and perception of corporeality, which articulate them-
selves in self-narratives.
71 Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self, 9.

PART 2
Approaches
∵
“I will Wake the Maidens, They shall Prepare Soup
for You” – Food as a Code in the Autobiography of
Thomas Platter1
Angela Heimen
If food is treated as code, the message it encodes will be found in the pat-
terns of social relations being expressed. The message is about different
degrees of hierarchy, inclusions and exclusions, boundaries and transac-
tions across the boundaries.
mary douglas, Deciphering a Meal2
In 1572 Thomas Platter (1499?–1582) wrote the account in which he describes

his way from an impoverished goatherd in the Valais to an esteemed citizen of
the city of Basel.3 Ever since, this autobiography has enjoyed an immense
popularity. Eleven contemporary hand-written manuscripts have survived. In
1742 it was printed for the first time in an unabridged version and in the nine-
teenth century translations in various languages followed suit. In its early
reception, Platter’s account was perceived as exemplary and he was presented
as a role model, especially for young people. In recent years the text has been
used in a great number of literary and historical studies. There, the story serves
predominantly as an outstanding example of early individualisation.
However, many current scholars who underscore the singularity of the text
seem at the same time to be disappointed by it. It does not live up to their
expectations. The reasons for this are probably the countless anecdotes and
dialogues, which Platter incorporated in the text and which are generally per-
ceived as superfluous.4 Many scholars accept the incidents recounted as facts,
1 This article is based on my master thesis “Essgeschichten – Essen in der Autobiographie des
Thomas Platter” (Free University of Berlin, 2006).
2 Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” (1972), reprinted in idem, Implicit Meanings. Essays in
Anthropology (London: 1975), 249–275, here 249.
3 “Thomas Platter – Lebensbeschreibung,” ed. Alfred Hartmann, 2nd edn, revised by Ueli Dill
(Basel: 1999). The only source for Platter’s date of birth is a remark of his elder sister. It has
been widely discussed that in many instances the text makes more sense if one assumes a
much later date.
4 This led scholars to the verdict that the text is “artless” and “jotted down” as Heinrich Düntzer
concluded in 1882 (cited by Jacob-Friesen, see below). More recently, Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow
claimed that Platter writes without reflecting on his own person, that the text is “naive” and

98 Heimen
some doubt their accuracy. Hardly any studies deal with the question why
Platter has narrated his life in this way.5
It is one of the many peculiar features of the work, that close reading reveals
that Platter refers often to food and food imagery. I would like to pursue
the question of how these references can be interpreted. My considerations
have been prompted by Gabriele Jancke, who points out that the writing of
self-narratives is an act of communication, and by Natalie Zemon Davis,
who argues that early modern people consider themselves always as part of a
network.6 Surprising aspects emerge if one reads Thomas Platter’s account
of his life with those criteria in mind. The aim of this essay is not to find out
what “really happened” or to take Platter’s stories necessarily at face value,
especially since one has to keep in mind that his autobiography probably
reflects less what he felt at the time of the recorded events, than his sentiments
at the time of writing and his experiences accumulated over the years. I want
to explore possible explanations as to why Thomas Platter chose to give so
much space to seemingly futile anecdotes and why his story revolves so fre-
quently around food.
that it depicts a certain “innocence” and “simplemindedness.” He nonetheless interprets

these factors as “proof for his [Platter’s] credibility.” Roy Pascal attests Platter “clumsiness”
and that he lacks an “autobiographical will.” see Jacob-Friesen, Holger: “Das alte und das neue
Interesse an Thomas Platter – Nachwort 1999.” In: Thomas Platter – Lebensbeschreibung.
Alfred Hartmann, 2nd edn, revised Ueli Dill (Basel: 1999, 185–207, especially 186. Ralph-
Rainer Wuthenow, “Thomas Platter – Anfänge der deutschen Biographie,” in Thomas Platter –
Hirtenknabe, Handwerker und Humanist. Die Selbstbiographie 1499–1582, ed. Heinrich Boss
(Nördlingen: 1989), 111–122, here 199. Roy Pascal cited in Völker-Rasor, Anette: Bilderpaare –
Paarbilder. Die Ehe in Autobiographien des 16. Jahrhunderts. (Rombach Wissenschaft. Reihe
Historiae, vol. 2), (Freiburg: 1993), 41.
5 Among the exceptions are the studies by Stephan Pastenaci and Hans-Rudolf Velten. Stephan
Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellung in deutschsprachigen Autobiographien
des 16. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zur Historischen Psychologie (Literatur – Imagination –
Realität, vol. 6), (Trier: 1993); Hans-Rudolf Velten, “Selbstbildung und soziale Mobilität in der
Autobiographie Thomas Platters,” in Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich.
Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500–1850), ed. Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans
Medick and Patrice Veit (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 9), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna:
2001), 135–157.
des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 10),
(Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2002); Natalie Zemon Davis, “Boundaries and the Sense of Self
in Sixteenth-Century France,” in Reconstructing Individualism, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton
Sosna and David E. Wellbery, (Stanford: 1986), 53–63, here 53 f.
I will Wake the Maidens 99
Thomas Platter claims to have written his account in a fortnight. He kept

no diary. It is possible, however, that he used drafts, since there are very few
alterations in the final manuscript. More likely, he had told the various stories
often in the past, and, thus, had already formulated them in a certain way. At
the beginning of the book he states that the motivation for writing his life
account was the repeated request to do so of his son Felix (whom he addresses
directly) and “other renowned and learned men” who had been his pupils in
their youth.7 Platter’s self narrative tells the story of an incredible social
advancement. The author’s life was indeed astonishing: after an impoverished
childhood, during which he worked as a goatherd, he travelled with an older
cousin to obtain an education. In reality, Platter spent the next seven years
walking all over Germany and Switzerland, supporting his cousin by begging
and stealing. After escaping from the control by his cousin, Platter managed to
gain a humanist’s education, including a knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. A
varied career followed, during which he worked as a rope-maker’s apprentice,
a teacher, a servant to a physician, a printer and finally as headmaster of the
prestigious Münsterschule (cathedral school) in Basel. During his late teenage
years he was taught by Oswald Myconius who came to play an important role
in Platter’s life. Myconius not only introduced him to the ideas of Zwingli, but
also arranged Platter’s marriage to Anna Dietschi. The couple had several chil-
dren, of whom at the time of Thomas Platter’s death only one son, Felix, was
still alive.
It is somewhat surprising that food should play such a prominent role in the
rather brief account of Platter’s long and eventful life. One encounters at least
one, and more often several, references to foodstuffs or the consumption
thereof on 60 of the 117 pages that make up the main part of Alfred Hartmann’s
edition.8 The argument that Platter simply was an epicure who enjoyed eating
and good food can be dismissed on the basis of a closer inspection of the refer-
ences. Platter rarely writes about specific foodstuffs or goes so far as to mention
their taste or his pleasure. Although married for over 40 years, with several
children at home, he mentions food in a domestic context only once. Meals in
a predominantly social or official setting are only mentioned twice in passing
and never in a context where Platter shows himself as sharing a meal with oth-
ers. It is almost startling to realize in which contexts he mentions food. He does
so, for example, when he recalls in very brief words how he passed on the news
7 Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, 23.

8 I have only counted direct references to food or its consumption, including (alcoholic) bever-
ages. I have not taken into account food-related terms such as “Tischgänger” (boarders).
100 Heimen
that Zwingli had just been killed in battle (a battle that Platter had witnessed
at close distance), for, in the very next sentence, he remembers that he received
something to eat after making his announcement.9
The food references can give the impression of being insignificant little sto-
ries which disturb, rather than enhance, Platter’s narrative. This impression
becomes questionable, however, if one recalls that Platter, like any other auto-
biographical author writing in retrospect, could only document a limited share
of his rich store of personal experiences and that he had memorized the stories
he tells over a long time. He had to choose, therefore, which experiences he
wanted to pass on. Jancke emphasizes that “each report of facts is preceded by
concepts of perception and activity which affect the selection, arrangement,
collation, weighting, evaluation and interpretation of the details, and in fact
everything that is said and narrated about the person.”10 Looking at the text
from this perspective, it is unlikely that Platter would have filled his life account
with stories that he did not deem to be important. An examination of the con-
texts in which he writes about food, as well as of the place food assumed in
public discourse in his time, can help us to decode and evaluate the author’s
‘food language’. In the world Platter lived in, food was omnipresent, be it in the
public sphere, for example in civic rituals and in religious debates, or in a wide
range of publications, such as the printed sermons of Geiler of Kaysersberg,
scholarly literature on diet, novels such as Rabelais’ “Gargantua and Pantagruel”
and, of course, the Bible.11
To unravel Platters ‘food language’ I will first look at some examples of his
food references and interpret their significance for him, then examine more
closely how he uses these references to position himself within society and,
lastly, I will investigate what kinds of food Platter actually mentions in his
autobiography. Looking at how Platter invokes food in his account, it is possi-
ble to discern two different modes or – as I would like to call it – two distinct
food narratives. One food narrative, at which I will look only briefly, covers the
time he spent travelling as a young boy with his cousin. During this period, the
food entries are lengthy and detailed and dominate the text. The other food
narrative concerns the time before and after he travelled with his cousin. It is
much more subtle. In referring to these stages of his life, Platter is talking less
about food, than through food. From mere nourishment food has turned into a
symbol and sign.

10 Gabriele Jancke, “Autobiographical texts,” see below, 123.
11 Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg, Das Buch der Sünden des Mundes. XXIII Predigten
(Strassburg: 1518).
In that part of his account in which Platter recounts the time spent with his
cousin, the food entries all point to hunger.12 Platter travelled with an indefi-
nite number of small boys and a few young men, who seem to have relied to a
great extent on the support of the little ones. Platter describes how he and the
other children painstakingly acquired food, be it through begging or rummag-
ing through the countryside in search of edible fare such as acorns or crab
apples. Often they would be sent to sleep without food, while the young men,
their guardians, enjoyed dinner at an inn. Platter tells how, when begging, they
had to deliver all collected food to their guardians. If the guardians caught
them eating, they were beaten. This control went so far that the guardians
forced the children to rinse their mouth with water so as to detect crumbs of
food. Platter recalls that at the same time they often collected far more bread
than the guardians could eat so that it turned mouldy.13 These recollections
make it especially apparent that the guardians used food as a tool in their
power game with which they consolidated the existing hierarchy and rein-
forced their position. The mantra “I was very hungry” and the detailed descrip-
tion of food acquisition carry one message: Food denotes who wields power
and its lack conveys powerlessness.
It is, however, the second food narrative, on which I will focus in more detail.
This particular narrative begins after a brief introduction and references to the
lineage of his parents and his own birth. Platter lets his reader know that his
mother did not nurse him. Instead, he was given milk with the aid of a straw
(hoernlin). According to Platter, this was common practice, but only with older
toddlers who had been weaned.14 Platter comments, “this was the beginning of
my ellentz.”15 The explanation that his mother could not breastfeed him
because her breast was hurting comes close to an accusation, since he later
describes his mother as being “hard as a man,” who could deal with any hard-
ship and was in general rough with her children.16 With his indirect remark,
that the lack of mother’s milk was the direct cause of his migration, Platter not
only hints at the strained relationship to his mother, but also points to another
12 Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, 36–53.

13 Ibid., 43,45,50.
14 Ibid., 25.
15 Ibid. Another case in point is the remark of Platter’s mother: “…das ich do dry sün muß
sächen in das ellend gan.” (“…that I have to see three sons going into the Elend”), Platter,
Lebensbeschreibung, 58.
102 Heimen
theme that is recurrent throughout the text: that his life was predestined and
could not have developed in another way.
Thomas Platter also characterizes the relationship to his mother in referring
to food in recalling how he stopped by at his mother’s house for a few days after
not having seen her for about five years. After having being greeted by her with
a reproach for still not being settled anywhere, and especially for not yet hav-
ing become a priest, Platter helped his mother pick grapes, ate as many as he
could, and ended up lying on the ground with stomach pain so severe that he
felt it would tear his body apart. His mother reacted laughing: “If you feel like
it, just let it tear you apart; why did you eat ?”17
Some time later Platter visited his mother again in the Valais, an area which
continued to adhere to the Roman Catholic faith. Familiar with the Reformation
message of Zwingli, he argued with local Catholic priests about the New
Testament. The following day,
after mass was over, all the priests and students were invited for a meal,
but I was not invited. Nobody will believe how happy I was to be able to
fast for Christ’s sake. However, when my mother saw me, she said: ‘How
comes it, that you have not been invited?’ cut bread and cheese in a bowl
and looked for some soup.18
This willingness to abstain from food is somewhat surprising since Platter

complains otherwise about religious fasting.19 Platter remembers this scene so
vividly probably not because it signifies a major change in his relationship to
his mother, as Pastenaci argues, but because of his exclusion from a network.20
Considering the significance of the communal meal in Platter’s time, it is hard
to believe that Platter really appreciated not having been invited. In the early
17 Ibid., 58.
18 Ibid., 65,66.
19 Ibid., 63.
20 Pastenaci argues that this scene shows the improvement of the mother-son relationship.
It is, however, not even clear if the soup was prepared by his mother or if Platter helped
himself. Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellung, 209. This is a good moment
to recognize that one of the trickiest aspects of working with self-narratives is that we can
not “hear” the tone of the author. Our interpretation of somebody else’s autobiography is
therefore always to a great extent influenced by our own subjectivity, our own personal
experience and our own way of “reading” the world. This dilemma can not be avoided or
solved. The only way to deal with it is constant awareness of the problem, openness to self
criticism, and, of course, very close reading.
modern period, eating was predominantly a social act.21 Hans Medick and
David Sabean emphasize the significance of food and meal rituals in this time
as “idioms of social relationships” with which rights, obligations, trust and
belonging could be expressed as well as negotiated.22 The sociologist Pasi Falk
points out that due to the open concept of the body in the pre-modern period
commensality is marked by a “double-faced orality.” Not only do participants in
a meal consume food but also are these persons in turn “consumed” by the
group they share food with.23 According to another sociologist, Arnold
Zingerle, the meal, like no other institution, is a place at which an individual
can learn and confirm what he or she “is” in relation to others and at which his
or her value as a person will became apparent.24 Zingerle states that to be
included or to be excluded from a ritual meal will often function as a main
criterion for acceptance and status within a community.25 The exclusion made
Platter realize that his open support for Zwinglian ideas would have negative
consequences for him, such as the loss of his old network and with that the
chance to rise in the local Valaisan hierarchy. The fact that his mother con-
fronted him as directly with the situation as she did and that he had to be
content with an unlovingly prepared dish of simple food, undoubtedly empha-
sized the experience of exclusion.
The narrative also contains account of other events, which offer its author
an occasion to reflect on his relationship to the Roman church in referring to
food: He recounts how he, as a child, travelling in Silesia, was once excluded by
a priest from the Eucharist, because he had admitted at confession that he had
eaten cheese although it was Lent. He was keen on participating because, as
he explains, students who attended the ceremony were afterwards invited to a
meal by somebody in town. Another priest took pity on the crying child and
21 Hans J. Teuteberg, “The diet as an object of historical analysis in Germany,” in European

Food History – A Research Review, ed. idem (Leicester, London and New York: 1992), 109–
128, here 120.
22 Hans Medick and David Sabean, “Emotionen und materielle Interessen in Familie und
Verwandtschaft,” in Emotionen und materielle Interessen – Sozialanthropologische und his-
torische Beiträge zur Familienforschung, ed. idem (Göttingen: 1984), 39.
23 Pasi Falk, “Essen und Sprechen. Über die Geschichte der Mahlzeit,” in Verschlemmte Welt –
Essen und Trinken historisch-anthropologisch, ed. Alexander Schuller and Jutta Anna
Kleber (Göttingen: 1994), 103–132, here 104.
24 Arnold Zingerle, “Identitätsbildung bei Tische: Theoretische Vorüberlegungen aus kultur-
soziologischer Sicht,” in Essen und kulturelle Identität – Europäische Perspektiven, ed.
Gerhard Neumann, Hans Jürgen Teuteberger and Alois Wirlacher (Berlin: 1997), 69–87,
here 81.
25 Ibid., 82.
104 Heimen
absolved him. Platter comments on the fact that, in his home country, it was
permitted to eat cheese during Lent. In looking back, he is obviously outraged
by the arbitrariness with which the Roman church was able to intervene in his
life: one priest forbid him to participate in the sacrament of the Eucharist,
another one allowed it.26 In one place it was permitted to eat cheese during
Lent, in another it was prohibited. Significantly, this particular recollection
does not appear in its chronological place in the text, but at a point where the
author writes extensively about his attraction to Zwingli’s teaching.
Although he received some support from patrons such as Myconius, Platter
was unable to make a living and left Zurich to try his luck in the canton of Uri,
which continued to adhere to the old faith. There, however, he did not fare any
better and decided to return to Zurich. At the Urnersee, he asked an innkeeper
to give him some bread for his last money:
She gave me a big piece of cold boiled meat and a big piece of bread, and
even left me my money. Thereafter I went to the lake. There came a boat
(…) and I asked the captain that for God’s sake he should take me across
the lake (…). He said: I will go and have breakfast, wait and I will take you.
Then there was a man (…), he said: “Mate, I have several barrels of wine,
look after them. Drink as much as you like, but do not let anybody else go
near them.” [He] gave me a straw (…) and went to eat. So I ate the big
piece of meat and bread and drank enough, since I did not know about
the nature of wine. When the man came back, he said “did you take good
care?” I said “yes”. Then came the captain (…). I staggered to the ship, the
people laughing at me.27
The account of this scene with its amiable tone is, in many ways, exceptional
in Platter’s text. Not only was there suddenly food and drink aplenty, but also
he was able to consume it without having to suffer for it. If one considers fur-
ther that Platter mentions the consumption of meat only twice in his autobi-
ography, it becomes apparent that this moment holds special significance for
him. The scene is the climax to a whole series of recollections of food, con-
nected to Platter’s relationship with members of the old and new faith, and
deliberations, which of the teachings was more appealing to him. The decision
to leave Uri and return to Zurich – both places in which he had not fared too
well – was tantamount to a decision to join the adherents of the Reformation
26 “…do meint ich, [ich] mießte des tüfels warden,” Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, 63.
and most of all the community around Zwingli. Platter associates his old faith
with harshness and lack of food while the new creed stands for a community
that will care for him.
The scene is full of allusions to the New Testament, such as the miraculous
feeding of the multitudes, Jesus’ providing wine for the wedding in Cana or the
crossings of a lake by Jesus and his doubting disciples during a storm. During
Platter’s crossing of the lake, there is a thunderstorm so threatening that even
the captain thinks that they will drown. The waves are so high that the travel-
lers reach the shore completely drenched – a scenario that could well be inter-
preted as a baptism. At the same time, it is highly interesting to look at the role
of alcohol the author’s account of the scene. Platter’s drunkenness is in contra-
diction with the sober image he otherwise gives of himself, as will be discussed
below. His claim that he did not know about wine is not convincing, if one
considers that he must have been at least twenty at the time and that wine was
widely drunk in that area. It is much more likely that this particular story refers
to the liminal stage of Platter’s own rite of passage from the Catholic to the
Reformed world. The alcohol not only facilitated the transition but, far more,
made it possible for Platter to express that, at this moment, he was a different
person altogether, and that the principles, to which he normally adhered, were
suspended.28
Platter’s expression of his religious sentiments in referring to food looks less
surprising if one considers that food imagery was widely used in contemporary
religious discourse. The Bible and especially the New Testament are replete
with references to food and food metaphors. What is more, some of
the most heated debates of the Reformation centred on topics that where
directly related to food and its consumption: the sacrament of the Eucharist
and the strict catholic laws pertaining to fasting and abstinence. It is a shared
meal of sausages that is widely cited as the beginning of the Reformation in
28 Although the episode does not describe a fixed rite, it nevertheless is a transitional phase
for Platter. Arnold van Gennep defines “rites of passage” as “rites which accompany every
change of place, state, social position and age.” According to van Gennep, the “rite of pas-
sage” consists of three stages: separation, transition/liminal stage and incorporation.
During the liminal stage the participant will find him- or herself often separated from
others. Van Gennep emphasizes, that in general a literal crossing of an obstacle takes
place. Arnold van Gennep, The rites of passage, transl. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle
L. Caffee (Chicago: 1960), 10–13. Victor Turner has shown in his studies that during the
liminal phase normal inhibitions or codes of behaviour do not apply. Victor Turner,
The Ritual Process (New York: 1969), 94–96. See also: Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern
Europe (Cambridge: 1997), 19–20.
106 Heimen
Zurich, because it initiated Zwingli’s well-known sermon against fasting dur-

ing Lent.29
Although Thomas Platter was later commended for being a leading adher-
ent of the early Reformation, there are indications that his confessional per-
sonality was far from being as clear cut at that point, as it has usually been
represented from the nineteenth century onwards. Apart from the story about
relics of Zwingli’s body, which is recounted in other sources, there is a food
recollection which shows his ambivalence even more clearly.30 Platter was
offered a prestigious position as a teacher by the bishop in his Catholic home
country, but lost it to another person who accused Platter openly of having
eaten meat during Lent. Platter recounts how he travelled to Visp and tried in
vain to be admitted to the bishop’s palace. He finally managed to approach the
bishop in the street. In this meeting, Platter, who even claimed that he had
not been interested in the position, not only justified his behaviour but also
asked for a blessing, which he received.31 Although Platter states that he trav-
elled to Visp because he had further business there, it is the story with the
bishop he relates. This probably took place in about 1537, at a time, therefore,
when Platter had already a firm place within the confessional community of
Zwinglians. Even though Platter declares himself to have been an early follower
of Zwingli, there are references throughout his autobiography which show that
he not only continued to participate in his old network, but also had not really
given up his Catholic beliefs completely. Joining a new group apparently did
not necessarily imply that one had to cut ties with the old one. The episode in
question is a good example for a multiple sense of cultural belonging.
Besides dealing with religion, the anecdotes in which food plays a role show
us Platter interacting with other people. Anna Dietschi, Platter’s wife, plays a
minor role in Platter’s autobiography. His relationship to her was not particu-
larly harmonious. Their son, Felix, writes in his own autobiography about their
constant quarrels, and the couple’s own letters testify to this. Anna Dietschi
was a servant in the house of Platter’s teacher and patron, Oswald Myconius,
who suggested the match to Platter with the promise of making the couple his
29 Harm Klueting, Das Konfessionelle Zeitalter 1525–1648 (utb für Wissenschaft: Uni-
Taschenbücher 1556), (Stuttgart: 1989), 169; James Clifton, “‘Let no man therefore judge
you in meat or drink’: A Note on the Iconography of Daniel Hopfer’s B. 32, the so-called
‘Christ’s Mission to the Apostles’,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 61 (1998), 395–406,
here 400. Eva Barlösius, Soziologie des Essens. Eine sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche
Einführung in die Ernährungsforschung (Weinheim and Munich: 1999), 107.
30 Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellung, 220 f.
31 Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, 113 f.
only heirs. He further urged Platter to get married, so that he could settle down.
This might have been a far more important incentive to Platter than the prom-
ised inheritance: Platter knew that he needed to be married, if he wanted to be
recognized as a full member within the Reformed community.32
The author’s account of the beginning of their married life is marked by the
lack of any direct reference to food: all he tells about their wedding is that they
shared a table with strangers and the wedding “was held with such a feast,” that
nobody even noticed that they were getting married.33 A wedding was an
important festival and rite of passage within a person’s lifecycle, since it often
(in the case of first marriages) signaled the beginning of adulthood. The festivi-
ties sometimes spanned several days, during which several lavish meals for a
large number of guests where given, often to the point of near bankruptcy of
the host. This was the reason for the numerous sumptuary laws, which were
passed to regulate wedding festivities. Felix Platter’s account of his own wed-
ding, which will be described more closely below, is a good case in point for the
importance that was accorded to a wedding feast. Still, it was not uncommon
for learned authors in this period not to mention their weddings or their wives
in their autobiographies. However, Platter not only mentions the wedding, but
also makes a point of letting his reader know what a humble affair it was. He is
positively understating the event. Platter, who maintains that he had to be
talked into marrying, also relates that he did not touch his wife until they
landed accidently in a bed together during a journey long after the wedding.34
The author clearly tries to negate the marriage, and the reference to the miss-
ing feast also encapsulates a denial of its consummation.
One of the few occasions in the book in which Anna Dietschi plays a
prominent role, and the only time Platter mentions food stuffs in his own
domestic context, is when Platter recounts how he and Dietschi used to go to
32 Kaspar von Greyerz asserts that for the autobiographers he studied for his article “Religion
in the Life of Autobiographers” (one of them is Thomas Platter) adulthood and matri-
mony were synonymous. Kaspar von Greyerz, “Religion in the Life of German and Swiss
Autobiographers (Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries),” in Religion and Society in
Early Modern Europe 1500–1800, ed. idem (London: 1984), 223–245, here 228. Platter’s
emphasis that the people around them could not be aware of the wedding is all the more
surprising if one considers that having a wedding witnessed by as many people as possi-
ble is an important factor for its legitimacy in the pre-modern era. The wedding meal as
well as the often boisterous processions of the wedding party to the place where the mar-
riage was to take place served this purpose. See Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern
Europe (Cambridge: 1997), 34–37.
34 Ibid.
108 Heimen
the basement of their first house to have a drink of wine from a barrel and
teased one another about who should drink first: Dietschi, since she was nurs-
ing their child, or Platter, since he was having a hard time teaching.35 The cou-
ple had just settled in Basel, where Platter with the help of influential friends
had secured his first position as a teacher with an above-average salary. Platter
describes how he bought the barrel and carried it home on his own shoulders.
He recalls how Heinz Billing, an esteemed citizen of Basel, gave them a glass in
the shape of a boot, which allowed the couple to share in drinking the wine,
and even bought them another barrel of wine later on. It is up to debate
whether the recollection of this scene is really the expression of fond memo-
ries regarding his wife and their early married years, as Pastenaci argues, or
whether it is meant to present himself and Anna Dietschi in their respective
roles as head of a prosperous household and as wife and mother.36 In referring
to Billing’s gifts, Platter could highlight how accepted he was in the prestigious
circles of the city of Basel, even long before acquiring civic rights.
For similar reasons he probably recalled a soup offer made by Zwingli, which
is quoted in the title of this contribution. Platter, then a young man in his early
twenties, had acted as a clandestine messenger during the disputation at
Baden in 1526, at which Zwingli was not allowed to participate. Platter describes
vividly how he acted in a last-minute exchange of information, which he deems
to have been crucial for the future of the Reformed movement. The climax of
his account was obviously not Zwingli’s reaction to his message but the fact
that the great reformer had offered him food and was even willing to wake the
women in the house to prepare it.37
Just as Platter uses references to food to signify social identity and inclusion,
he uses it to distance himself from certain groups. His contempt for the nobil-
ity becomes apparent when he recalls how he and Myconius came across some
noblemen at an inn. After one of them had harassed Myconius by trying to
force him into a drinking contest, the couple later observed how one of the
noblemen was rebuked strongly by his drunken peers, because he leaned with
his elbows on the table, an incident which, according to Platter, highlighted
the hypocritical morals of the aristocracy.38 With the aid of food references,
he touches upon a wide range of issues, such as his relationship to other people
or his religious inclination. Most importantly, he is able to throw light on his
status within society.
35 Ibid., 96.
36 Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellung, 217.
37 Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, 73, 74.
38 Ibid., 110–112.
II
In recalling his life in Basel, Platter portrays himself as an esteemed member of

the civic elite. In this respect it is especially puzzling that he never shows him-
self sharing food with others. The lack of references to domestic meals might
be explained by the fact that he did not deem this part of his life of any interest
to his intended audience. This might to a certain extent apply as well to his
non-reference to festivities that mark important transitions in life such as bap-
tisms, weddings, both in his own family circle or in that of other people.39 The
only recorded events of this kind are his own wedding and that of his son,
Felix, which will be discussed below. It is nonetheless surprising that he does
not recount his participation at any civic ritual meals. Festive meals were the
core of civic life, often staged publicly and with great pomp.40 For the last
twenty years before writing his autobiography, Platter was headmaster at
Basel’s most prestigious school. In this position he must have had many occa-
sions to be present at important, municipal festivities. For several years, Platter
was also a member of a printer’s guild. Their annual feasts, which were often
preceded by elaborate processions through the town, during which platters
with lavishly adorned foodstuffs where displayed, were significant demonstra-
tions of power.41
There are indications at various stages in the story that Platter portrays his
position more favourably than it actually was. With regard to the time he stayed
with Myconius, he depicts himself as part of the household. Rudolf Velten
writes about Platters’ acquaintance with another boarding guest, Bibliander,
that “here, at the schoolmasters’ lunch table, a rewarding exchange took
place….”42 Platter, however, never mentions sharing a meal with Bibliander or
any other member of the household. Boarding guests, such as Bibliander, paid
good money for their accommodation, especially if staying with a well-known
39 Platter never mentions, for example, whether he acted as godfather.

40 Gerhard Fouquet, “Das Festmahl in den oberdeutschen Städten des Spätmittelalters. Zu
Form, Funktion und Bedeutung öffentlichen Konsums,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 74
(1992), 83–123. Many of Fouquet’s examples for ritual civic meals come from Basel and
involve both festivities of the guilds and the political and intellectual elites (which over-
lap since the guilds provided most members of the Great Council). How important food
was deemed by the guilds can be gleaned from the fact that not only the money spent on
meals was recorded, but also recipes and information such as the disappointment if the
chef had failed to produce the expected result. Fouquet, 110–112, 114–121.
41 Fouquet, Das Festmahl, 118.
42 Velten, Selbstbildung und soziale Mobilität, 141.
110 Heimen
scholar such as Myconius, since this would often include personal tuition.43
Platter, who was still destitute at the time, paid nothing for the privilege to live
and study in Myconius’ house. He mentions supervising the studies of some of
the boarding guests as well as heating the stove in Myconius’ study in the
morning.44 Perhaps, then, Platter had more the status of a servant and did not
eat with any of the boarding guests at all. Much later in the manuscript and in
his life, Platter tells a lengthy anecdote about a journey to a spa, which revolves
around his falling ill and only being able to eat rye bread. Only after the inn-
keeper ordered a certain kind of wine for Platter did he recover.45 Werner
Meyer points out that Platter was well aware of status symbols, since he men-
tions eating pheasant during this journey.46 In fact, however, Platter does not
mention the consumption of pheasant or even pheasant as a foodstuff. He only
recounts that his travel-companion was presented with pheasants and that he,
Platter, took some of the feathers back home. Pheasants, like game in general,
were the prerogative of the very rich.47 The companion, who financed the trip
for Platter, addresses him informally, while Platter addresses him in formal
terms. Once again, it is not clear what status Platter had: that of a friend or that
of a servant? It is possible that Platter’s illness was related to a status problem,
which might explain why this story was so important to him that he recorded
it. His claim that the only food he could tolerate was rye-bread, a food only
eaten by the lowest order, might have spared him the acknowledgment that he
was not a guest but a servant who would not get a share of delicacies such as
pheasants and, perhaps, would not even be allowed to share the same dinner
table as his travel companion. Platter re-establishes his honour somewhat by
making the innkeeper – a learned man, as Platter emphasizes – order espe-
cially for him a vast amount of wine nobody else would drink, since, according
to Platter’s wish, it was very sour.
The only time Platter actually depicts himself at a meal is one at which he
most likely did not even partake in the consumption of food. Platter describes
how he accompanied his master, the doctor, to official meals at the bishop’s
residence and recalls the conversations at the dinner table. It is, however,
43 Jancke, Autobiographical texts, see below.

45 Ibid., 117.
46 Werner Meyer, “Geissbub und Schlossherr. Die Eidgenossenschaft um 1500 in der
Wahrnehmung Thomas Platters,” in Platteriana. Beitäge zum 500. Geburtstag des Thomas
Platter, ed. Werner Meyer and Kaspar von Greyerz (Basler Beiträge zur Geschichtswis
senschaft, vol. 175), (Basel: 2002), 55, n. 183.
47 Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance, Berkeley, ca, 2002, 205.
highly unlikely that Platter actually participated in the meal. He only describes
how the doctor was greeted and placed at the table. On other occasions, it
becomes obvious that Platter was addressed informally by both his master and
the bishop, while he addressed them formally. Befitting his role as a servant, he
probably watched the meal from a distance or perhaps assisted his master. He
nonetheless considers it important to mention the meal situation and his pres-
ence at it.
As he concludes the main part of his autobiography, Platter addresses his
son Felix again and recounts how various towns honoured him in public cere-
monies with honorary gifts of wine. Especially important to him seems the
recollection of the ceremony in his former (and invariably Catholic) home-
town of Sion. He even quotes the mayor’s speech. It is remarkable that Platter
does not mention an award or mark of distinction received from the city of
Basel, where, by the end of his life, he owned considerable real estate and
headed the most prestigious school. Platter is not included in a so-called “Book
of Heroes” which was printed in Basel in 1566 and listed the biographies of
numerous scholars and dignitaries of the city. Many contemporary sources, on
the contrary, render a rather critical picture of him: In connection with his
position as headmaster, there is talk of the barbari Plateri mores and of barba-
rus Blatero (barbaric, uncouth ranter [translation Jenny]), probable references
to his uncontrolled temper.48 Velten mentions sources that point to a strained
relationship between Basel’s intellectual elite and Platter.49 We know from his
own story, that it was in anger that he dropped out of his association with his
printing partners (after a serious fight in which he injured one of his partners
severely) and had to go on alone with the printing business. Jenny assumes
that Platter got his position as the headmaster of the cathedral school less on
account of his learnedness than on account of his abilities as a financial
manager.50
48 Beat R. Jenny, “Humanismus und städtische Eliten in Basel im 16. Jahrhundert unter
besonderer Berücksichtigung der Basler Lateinschule von 1529–1589,” in Platteriana –
Beiträge zum 500. Geburtstag des Thomas Platter, ed. Werner Meyer and Kaspar von
Greyerz (Basel: 2002), 77–123, here 104.
49 Velten, Selbstbildung und soziale Mobilität, 107.
50 Jenny, Humanismus und städtische Eliten, 102. Platter’s text suggests that he was not satis-
fied with his position as a teacher or even headmaster. Thus he gave up teaching positions
to work as a servant for a doctor (who promised to teach him medical knowledge in
return) or as a printer, even if this meant affronting patrons who had organized the posi-
tions for him. Although he taught for almost 35 years, he focuses very little on this experi-
ence. On the other hand, he writes in some detail about the time he spent with the doctor
and as a printer (this is perhaps the reason why Natalie Zemon Davies refers to him as “the
112 Heimen
Incidents such as Platter’s reminiscing about the public gifts of wine or the
meal-scene at the bishop’s palace underscore how sensitive he was to the
importance of such events. It is hard to believe that he would have kept silent
about a place of honour at one of the many highly dramatized public meals or
guild feasts. Perhaps Platter avoided writing about (or even remembering)
shared meals because it would have become obvious that he was actually not
as much part of Basel’s elite as he wished to convey.
III
Just as it is revealing to see in which contexts Platter writes or fails to write

about food, it is worthwhile looking at what he actually eats. During the time
with his cousin, Platter talks about food at length and in detail and even notes
ways of preparation. However, references to his actual diet are rare with regard
to the time after he left his cousin. Bread is referred to eight times, two times as
rye bread. Apart from the few occasions, on which he talks about nuts or
grapes, the only other food he mentions eating are cheese and soup. Twice he
mentions the consumption of meat, each time he specifies it as boiled. There
are several references to the drinking of wine.51
Other sources show that Platter also consumed other foods. In a letter to
Felix he writes “I cannot eat those rare (seltzamen) foods. Bitter oranges make
my teeth feel strange, so that I do not like to bite into a piece of bread after-
wards, pomegranates take too much time, grapes are eaten by mother or by
somebody who is sick, I eat according to my custom some porridge like other
peasants.”52 It is remarkable that even in this letter Platter is distancing himself
from “extravagant” foods, while mentioning them on other occasion in order to
printer Thomas Platter”). Davies, Boundaries, 56. When, after many years as a teacher, he
accepted the post as the headmaster of the Münsterschule, he accompanies his reference
to this promotion by quotations of praise for the teaching profession by Basel dignitaries.
Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, 130.
51 Not included in this count is a list that Platter provides and which affords a glimpse of
Platter’s actual diet. Before he moves to Basel, Platter holds for about a year a post as a
village teacher in the Valais. He lists gifts received from pupils and relatives, who, as
Platter assumes, were still hoping for him to become a priest and therefore interested in
pleasing him. The list enumerates eggs, cheese, a bale of butter, several quarters of a
sheep, milk and wine. He concludes that there was hardly a day without gifts. Platter lists
these foods to show how esteemed he was. They do not feature as part of his diet. Platter,
Lebensbeschreibung, 90.
52 Cited in Meyer, Geissbub und Schlossherr, 39.
highlight his social station. It is interesting to note the effort he makes to estab-
lish that he does not like “rare foods”: They are bad for his well-being, uneco-
nomical, or meant for a different group of people. Taste does not matter. In
claiming that he does not like bitter oranges because they affect his bread eat-
ing, Platter once more underscores his preference for a sober and sensible life-
style over a luxurious one. Likewise illuminating are the differing accounts of
father and son Platter of the wedding of Felix Platter. Thomas Platter describes
in detail in his autobiography how it was he who chose his son’s bride and
overcame the opposition of the bride’s father. About the wedding itself he only
writes: “held the wedding with befitting honours.” Felix Platter in his own auto-
biography describes his wedding in detail, which was held in the house of his
father and involved 150 guests. He mentions four big meals on the wedding day
and the day following, and lists meticulously all the different dishes served,
especially the many different and costly meat and fish dishes.53
With his ‘life-account-diet’ of bread, cheese, soup and very little boiled
meat, Thomas Platter conveys a variety of messages. With his emphasis of sim-
ple foods he fashions himself as an unassuming man who is still rooted in his
humble origins and, so, refutes accusations to be an impertinent upstart who
has placed himself above his God-given rank. What is more, the frugal lifestyle
he invokes corresponds not only with the ideals of Zwingli, but also with those
of contemporaneous scholars in general.54 Platter associates himself firmly
with a tradition that has its origins in antiquity and shows men of great learn-
ing as ascetic beings who are above mundane matters such as food and sleep.55
Nevertheless, it is apparent that, although in his letter to Felix he likens himself
to a simple peasant, in his autobiography all those foodstuffs are missing,
which were commonly, and often in a negative way, associated with a peasant-
diet, such as onions, beans, garlic or cabbage.56 Platter wanted to be perceived
as leading a plain and frugal life but not as an outright peasant.
53 Felix Platter records amongst others “rißmus” (ricepudding), “wildbrätpfeffer” (stewed

and roasted game) und “fischgalleren” (jellied fish). Ricepudding and especially the
“Fischgalrey” were very costly dishes. The fish dish was furthermore very time consuming
and elaborate to produce. Felix Platter, Tagebuch (Lebensbeschreibung) 1536–1567. Ed.
Valentin Lötscher (Basel and Stuttgart: 1976), 326 f.
54 Gadi Algazi: “Food for Thought,” in Egodocuments and History, ed. Rudolf Dekker
(Hilversum: 2002), 21–43, here 26, 27.
55 His emulation of this tradition is not only apparent at his diet. Thus he uses topoi such as
studying through the night and having to hold stones or water in his mouth to keep him-
self from falling asleep while studying.
56 Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance, 191.
114 Heimen
The complete lack of references to any ‘luxury’ food in his autobiography is

underscored by the fact that apart from the scene at the Urnersee (referred to
above), which has a highly religious connotation, Platter does not mention the
enjoyment of food. Whenever he mentions the consumption of food that
could be looked at as extravagant, its consumption either leads to illness, as
with grapes and nuts, or is assigned a special position, as is the case with wine.
Wine is the single most often featured foodstuff in Platter’s text.57 If wine is
consumed by others, Platter applies a negative twist to his story, as in the case
of the noblemen from Basel or that his one-time employer, the physician, was
drunk all the time.58 If Platter speaks of wine in connection with his own per-
son, it is always as a symbol of status or as a gift: The barrel of wine he received
as a gift at the beginning of his career in Basel; a remark that he and his wife,
however poor had never supped without bread and wine, the gift of wine that
was ordered especially for him during his illness; and the ‘wines of honour’
presented to him by various towns. Nevertheless, for Platter, wine certainly is
nothing to be indulged in or to be consumed in great quantities. Of the wine
gift which amounted to about 200 litres and was given to him during his illness,
Platter allegedly only took two draughts.
On the two ocassions that the author refers to the consumption of meat he
remarks that it was boiled. It is is unlikely that this is an accidental remark.
Meat is a food of highly symbolic value in most societies. Claude Lévi-Strauss
claims that food is a code that expresses the structure of a society.59 In his
study he focuses on the modes of food preparation. He provides ample evi-
dence that many societies across time and place invest the concept of boiled
versus roast meat with meaning. He concludes that whereas roast meat stands
for nature, boiled meat signifies culture. In Platter’s society the cost of meat
rose steadily during the sixteenth century and it was not part of the everyday
menu of the common people. If it was served, it was much more likely to be
boiled than roasted, since this would avoid burning part of the meat and would
additionally render meat stock that could be used for an extra dish. Roast meat
was a sought after dish at that time, which was strongly associated with the
57 Wine held a special place within the dietary teachings of that period. It was considered
highly nutritious and its qualities were likened to those of blood. Interestingly, it was
recommended also as best corrective for “disordered passions of the soul.” Albala, Eating
Right in the Renaissance, 73, 79,121,122.
58 An exception is his use of wine to wash sheets after his sick employer, the doctor, had
soiled himself.
59 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Culinary Triangle,” in: Partisan Review XXXIII, 4 (1966), 586–
597, here 586–589.
extravagant eating habits of courtly society.60 It generally constituted the cen-

trepiece and highlight of festive meals, and the nobility would eat it fre-
quently.61 If one considers the negative traits of how the early modern nobility
was frequently depicted by non-noble contemporary persons, Lévi-Strauss’
thesis looks rather convincing. By specifying that the meat he ate was boiled,
Platter could once again underscore his frugal ways. Even more importantly, in
doing so he was able to distance himself from the ‘barbari’ nobility and firmly
associate himself with the ideals of the cultured, Reformed, civic society of
his time.
Platter’s ideas about food were influenced by concepts such as Galen’s the-
ory of the four humours and his food language is certainly informed by the
knowledge of dietary literature, which was immensely popular in his time.
Platter would have been well familiar with these books and their theories.
Throughout his life it had been his dream to become a physician, and Felix
Platter writes that his father kept up reading on the subject. Furthermore,
many books dealing with the subject were printed in Basel during the time
when Platter worked as a printer. Books on how to eat right were written and
printed in great quantity.62 Most of them were based on Galen’s humoural
physiology.63 The diet was the crucial instrument to influence the humours,
and foodstuffs were, in turn, invested with the qualities of the humours. A per-
son’s choice of beneficial foods depended on his or her personal humoural
make-up. Since the right balance of the humours varied from person to person,
so did the right diet. Thus, for example, a person who had an excess of phlegm
(cold/moist) should eat little fish, which was moist and cold or, at least, try
60 Gerhard Fouquet, “Von Apfelmus bis Zuckerfladen – das Kochbuch des Augsburgers
Ulrich Schwarz und die Speisegewohnheiten im Spätmittelalter,” in Goldene Speisen in
den Maien. Das Kochbuch des Augsburger Zunftbürgermeisters Ulrich Schwarz, ed. Gerhard
Fouquet (St. Katharinen: 2000), 151–175, here 162,164, 170.
61 Fouquet, Von Apfelmus bis Zuckerfladen, 162,170.
62 Ken Albala claims that in the diet literature from the 1530s onwards there was a stress on
the need to correct one’s own system due to the baseness of natural instincts. One of the
main aims in diet advice of the time was to aid the readers as to how to regulate and con-
trol their bodies. In his study on dietary literature in the Renaissance Ken Albala points
out that in the time from 1470 to 1570 the priorities underwent a significant change. In the
first half of that period most theories sided with (followed) Avicenna’s maxim “Quod
sapid nutrit” – if it tastes good, it is also good for your body. Authors of that period are
predominantly concerned with the achievement of health and pleasure. In spite of the
abundant “self-help” literature, the individual is ultimately determining him- or herself
what is aiding his or her health and diet. Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance, 172–177.
63 Black bile (cold/dry), yellow bile (warm/dry), phlegm (cold/moist) and blood (warm/
moist).
116 Heimen
to correct it by cooking it with some vinegar, which was considered to be dry

and hot.
In Platter’s case, this kind of thinking can explain some aspects of his recol-
lection of the wine gift mentioned above. Platter states that he specifically
asked for a wine that was extremely sour and then only drank two draughts of
the rather generous gift of about 200 litres, which cured his illness. His contem-
poraries will have understood that he had been suffering of some disorder of
his humoural system and needed the wine to correct it. Even for Platter’s absti-
nence from meat, and especially roast meat, the humoural teaching could offer
an additional explanation. Many meats, especially red meats, game or wild
fowl such as pheasant, were considered very hot and dry.64 The process of
roasting was further recommended to make moist foods more dry. Platter’s
hot-temperedness was widely commented on and even his own writings give
an idea of his tantrums.65 So perhaps Platter mentions that the meat was
boiled not only to disassociate himself from a certain group of people, but also
because in his mind the consumption of roast meat might be connected to an
obvious and very serious flaw of his character. By publicising his choice of cer-
tain foods Platter could thus create the kind of image of the self he wanted his
readers to perceive.
Conclusion
Thomas Platter had come a long way from the little boy who had to migrate
because he was refused mother’s milk to the man who was honoured in public
ceremonies with gifts of wine by the magistrates of various cities. It is diffi-
cult to recapitulate this life after reading his account, due to the countless
anecdotes and dialogues, which deal with soup and cooked meat but appar-
ently have little to do with Platter’s development as a person. One might
conclude on account of these tales that Platter’s narrative is ‘naïve’ and ‘unso-
phisticated’. However, because the references in question seem so pointless
and superfluous, it is even more important to ask why Platter bothered to
recount them so scrupulously.66 In analyzing them, it becomes clear that
64 Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance, 3.

65 Jenny, 204; Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, 120.
66 In his article “food for thought” Gadi Algazi stresses the importance of looking closer at
anecdotes in early modern autobiographies, especially those of learned authors. Algazi
points out that through them an author can communicate more “ambivalent” and “differ-
entiated” messages as well as provide models for his readers. Algazi, Food for Thought,
25, 26.
Platter constructed his account very carefully, so as to be able to present his

person in a specific way.
Why did Platter choose (even if he did this subconsciously) food to convey
his messages? Food is vital for survival, and Platter learned, like most of his
contemporaries, from an early age that he could not take food for granted. This
‘omni-importance’ of food is probably one reason why it is invested with so
much deeper meaning. It is also the reason why references to food function so
well to express power and dependency.67 Nonetheless,this does not necessarily
explain why eating, and especially eating in community, is so laden with sym-
bolism. the sharing of food has so much emotional value not simply because it
is a communal act. Many actions can be performed by a group and create a
feeling of group identity, such as singing or cleansing rituals, without ever hav-
ing become as significant as commensality. The difference with eating is that
every time we consume food, we incorporate something of the outer world
within our selfs and therefore, one could argue, each time we eat something,
we actually alter our identity.68 A group of people partaking in a joint meal can
therefore alter their personal make-up collectively and thus come closer to a
group identity.69 This incorporation of the outer world into the self is what
makes food so different from other markers of identity, such as clothes.
With the aid of his food-laden episodes Platter communicates numerous
messages: That he was ill treated by his mother and the Catholic Church, that
he earned the esteem of Zwingli, and that he disapproved of the nobility. He
inscribes himself into a tradition of learned men and demonstrates that he
lived his life in accordance with the values of the Reformed creed. On the other
hand, one could also argue that Platter at the same time involuntarily gives
away what other sources tell us: that he was an ill-tempered man whose rela-
tions to his peers were often difficult and who was valued for other qualities
than the ones highlighted by him. Most importantly, however, the food-laden
episodes enable Platter to depict himself as a valuable member of his com
munity and to show his audience where he locates his own position in that
society.
67 An example for how crucial food-security is for a person’s agency and capacity to act is
that Platter managed to finally break free from his cousin when he was taken in for a brief
period by a butcher-woman (Metzgeri) who provided him with food. The reason is pro
bably, that he was for once not preoccupied with the organisation of his next meal, which
allowed him to focus on his life in general. Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, 51.
68 As extravagant as this idea might seem today in western society, in Platter’s time at least
this concept was widely discussed, for example in scholarly treatises on nutrition.
69 A good indicator for how important the collective intake of the same food is, is the strong
reaction that members of a group will face if they categorically refuse parts of a meal,
especially symbolically important foods such a meat or alcohol.
Autobiographical Texts: Acting within a Network
Observations on Genre and Power Relations in the German-Speaking
Regions from 1400 to 16201
Gabriele Jancke
As an expression of man’s knowledge of himself, autobiography has its

foundation in the… phenomenon that we call self-consciousness…. The
history of autobiography is in a certain sense the history of human
self-consciousness.
… an objective, demonstrable image of the structure of individuality…
– georg misch2
For man can never actually know himself as he is known by God, who
better knows what there is in man, and what he would do, than man
knows himself.
– jakob andreae3
1 This article first appeared in German in 1996: “Autobiographische Texte – Handlungen in

einem Beziehungsnetz. Überlegungen zu Gattungsfragen und Machtaspekten im deutschen
Sprachraum von 1400 bis 1620,” in Ego-Dokumente. Annäherungen an den Menschen in der
Geschichte, ed. Winfried Schulze (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 2), (Berlin: 1996), 73–106;
in expanded form it is the first chapter of my book: Autobiographie als soziale Praxis.
Beziehungskonzepte in Selbstzeugnissen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen
Raum (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 10), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2002), 32–74. The
following version is the original article in slightly revised form. I am grateful to Hülya Adak,
Susan Boettcher, Björn Krondorfer, and Jacqueline Van Gent for investing their time and
attention in discussing difficult terms and finding an adequate English wording. The article
was translated by Misha Kavka and Hannah Elmer.
2 Georg Misch, “Begriff und Ursprung der Autobiographie,” in idem, Geschichte der
Autobiographie, vol. I: Das Altertum, 3rd edn (Bern: 1949), 3–21, here 10f. and 16. – On medita-
tion as a sixteenth-century literary genre leading towards self-knowledge: Klára Erdei, Auf
dem Wege zu sich selbst: Die Meditation im 16. Jahrhundert. Eine funktionsanalytische
Gattungsbeschreibung (Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissanceforschung, vol. 8),
(Wiesbaden: 1990).
3 Jakob Andreae, Hundert und siben Schlußreden, von der Maiestet des Menschen Christi, und
seiner wahrhaftigen, wesentlichen Gegenwertigkeit im heiligen Nachtmal, (1564), 34, quotation
from: Rosemarie Müller-Streisand, “Theologie und Kirchenpolitik bei Jakob Andreä bis zum
Jahre 1568,” in Blätter zur Württembergischen Kirchengeschichte 60/61 (1960/61), 224–295, here
238, n. 56.

Autobiographical Texts: Acting Within A Network 119
The subject of both quotations is self-knowledge. While the twentieth-century

scholar of autobiography presumes its possibility without question and inter-
prets autobiographies as formulations of self-knowledge, the Protestant theo-
logian of the sixteenth century is fundamentally sceptical about the possibility
of self-knowledge. His scepticism takes on added weight when we consider
that Jakob Andreae was himself the author of an autobiography, which this
article will foreground, along with two other autobiographical texts as key
examples. Andreae’s explicit position gives reason to doubt whether autobio-
graphical texts of this period can be understood in their specificity and inten-
tions by drawing on the categories of “self-knowledge” and “individuality.”
Starting from this doubt, I would like to pursue a different set of questions.
Autobiographical texts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries quite clearly
indicate that the authors see themselves as depicting and depicted “I”s
anchored in a network of social relations, and that they understand their auto-
biographical texts as a particular communicative action within this network of
relations. It is thus necessary to clarify the anchorage and function of autobio-
graphical texts within authors’ respective networks before more particular
questions can be asked. Moreover, the kinds of questions that are restricted,
for instance, to the concept of the self as articulated in writing or to mentality
require answers that recognize the connection between these circumstances
on the one hand and, on the other, the networks and patterns of social rela-
tions in which they became embedded in the process of being written down.
The sources on which I base my study are some 200 autobiographical texts
from the German-speaking regions – that is, including Switzerland – written
during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.4 Most of them are written in
German, although some are in Latin and one in Hebrew. Frequently there is
also a mixing of languages, so that expressions, sentences or entire excerpts in
one or more other languages are interspersed with the main language. In con-
trast to “ego documents,”5 which originated in a court of law or through other
4 Information on all these texts is now accessible online; see Gabriele Jancke: Selbstzeugnisse
im deutschsprachigen Raum – Autobiographien, Tagebücher und andere autobiographische
Schriften, 1400–1620. Eine Quellenkunde. Unter Mitarbeit von Marc Jarzebowski, Klaus
Krönert und Yvonne Aßmann (2008, August 13, http://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/
jancke-quellenkunde).
5 See Ego-Dokumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte, ed. Winfried Schulze
(Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 2), (Berlin: 1996), esp. the editor’s introduction: “Ego-
Dokumente: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte? Vorüberlegungen für die
Tagung ‘Ego-Dokumente’,” 11–30, printed before in a longer version as: “Ego-Dokumente:
Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte?,” in Von Aufbruch und Utopie. Perspektiven
einer neuen Gesellschaftsgeschichte des Mittelalters. Für und mit Ferdinand Seibt aus Anlaß
120 Jancke
forms of official compulsion, the texts I use were written voluntarily by their
authors or – in very few cases – dictated by them (for example, Götz von
Berlichingen).
In view of the very broad and highly variegated spectrum of autobiographi-
cal texts, which was not yet regulated by accepted genre norms, I do not at the
outset foreground a group of texts selected according to strict generic criteria.
For one, it is worth noting that in the period under investigation there are
numerous fluid transitions between comprehensive autobiographical writing
in retrospect (autobiography) and regular autobiographical writing over a
shorter or longer period (chronicle or diary). For another, the authors prove to
be highly creative in the way they draw on various genre models for their auto-
biographical undertakings and situate their texts within these models, such as
family histories, city chronicles, travel reports, Arthurian legends, letters and
literary epistles, prefaces, dialogues, songs and poems, gravestone epigraphs,
horoscopes, curriculum vitae, account books, catalogues of literary works,
biographical encyclopedia entries, diplomatic reports, and religious polem-
ics.6 The corpus even includes the curiosity of a costume autobiography,
consisting of miniatures provided with short texts, which deserves at least a
mention here.7
seines 65. Geburtstages, ed. Bea Lundt and Helma Reimöller (Weimar and Vienna: 1992),
417–450, with the rationale of his suggestion to include within a very wide field of ego-
documents those sources contingent on an administration as well as those judicially enforced;
for an overview of scholarship, see Rudolf Dekker, “Egodocumenten: Een literatuurover-
zicht,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 101 (1988), 161–189; for criticism of Schulze’s concept of
ego-documents and with a differentiation of self-narratives into four different types: Benigna
von Krusenstjern, “Was sind Selbstzeugnisse? Begriffskritische und quellenkundliche
Überlegungen anhand von Beispielen aus dem 17. Jahrhundert,” in Historische Anthropologie
2 (1994), 462–471; cf. also the contributions in Das dargestellte Ich. Studien zu Selbstzeugnissen
des späteren Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Arnold, Sabine Schmolinsky and
Urs-Martin Zahnd, (Selbstzeugnisse des Mittelalters und der beginnenden Neuzeit, vol. 1),
(Bochum: 1999), which seek to explore the variety within the spectrum of self-narratives; cf.
also Günter Niggl, “Einleitung,” in Die Autobiographie. Zu Form und Geschichte einer lite
rarischen Gattung, ed. idem (Wege der Forschung, vol. 565), (Darmstadt: 1989), 1–17.
6 Jozef IJsewijn points out the diversity of genres amongst humanistic autobiographies: Jozef
IJsewijn, “Humanistic Autobiography,” in Studia humanitatis. Ernesto Grassi zum 70.
Geburtstag, ed. Eginhard Hora and Eckhard Keßler (Humanistische Bibliothek I,16), (Munich:
1973), 209–219, here 210.
7 Die Schwarzschen Trachtenbücher, ed. August Fink (Berlin: 1963), 95–179 (Matthäus Schwarz),
181–259 (Veit Konrad Schwarz); cf. Valentin Groebner, “Die Kleider des Körpers des
Kaufmanns. Zum ‘Trachtenbuch’ eines Augsburger Bürgers im 16. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für
historische Forschung 25 (1998), 323–358.
In these genre-historical findings, it is not difficult to see a situation of tran-

sition with far-reaching consequences. The authors of autobiographical texts,
through their literary activities, instigate a change within the realm of autobio-
graphical genres, which leads to a surge in the number of such texts in the
sixteenth century and ultimately – through pietistic group pressure in the sev-
enteenth century, the market in literary books and several influential, norm-
generating authors of the eighteenth century (Rousseau, Goethe) – leads to
clear norms for the genre of autobiography. By broadly considering all autobio-
graphical texts in which a life story is fully or partially depicted, in whatever
form or length, I have attempted to take this manifest change into account.
My corpus is limited to the extent that I have included only material that
was already in print, which means texts which were either printed by their
authors or were published by a later editor. The spectrum of texts may there-
fore be marked by the selection criteria of editors and the various publication
tendencies of different authors. This is one important reason for initial caution
when it comes to drawing generalizing conclusions. Delimiting my corpus,
however, was necessary in order to compile the existing material in this form
for the first time and to be able to develop appropriate interpretive strategies.
What is it, then, that makes the question of networks of relations and activi-
ties within such networks so interesting for autobiographical texts? In contrast
to non-autobiographical texts and ego documents written involuntarily, these
texts are not simply another form of communicative activity8 in networks
of relations or another document of the concepts of relationships. They are
principally texts in which one’s own activity is thematized and conveyed in a
8 My remarks on “autobiographical texts” as communicative acts are developed as an exten-

sion of speech act theory from linguistics; however, they are not intended to present a fully
developed theory of autobiographical writing; cf. John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things
with Words. The William James lectures, 1955 (Oxford: 1963); idem, Philosophical Papers
(Oxford: 1961); John R. Searle, Speech Acts. An essay in the philosophy of language (Cambridge:
1970); Linguistische Pragmatik, ed. Dieter Wunderlich (Schwerpunkte Linguistik und
Kommunikationswissenschaft, vol. 12), (Frankfurt a.M.: 1972); idem, “Sprechakte,” in
Pragmatik und sprachliches Handeln. Mit einer Kritik am Funkkolleg “Sprache”, ed. Utz Maas
and Dieter Wunderlich, 3rd edn. (Athenaion Skripten Linguistik 2), (Frankfurt a.M: 1974),
69–188; cf. also Jürgen Lehmann, Bekennen – Erzählen – Berichten. Studien zu Theorie und
Geschichte der Autobiographie (Studien zur deutschen Literatur 98), (Tübingen: 1988), and,
taking up this concept, Hans Rudolf Velten, Das selbst geschriebene Leben. Eine Studie zur
deutschen Autobiographie im 16. Jahrhundert (Frankfurter Beiträge zur Germanistik 29),
(Heidelberg: 1995), 79ff.; on the various approaches to “Autobiography as action” from a liter-
ary studies perspective cf. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Autobiographie (Sammlung Metzler
323), (Stuttgart and Weimar: 2000), 55–58.
122 Jancke
discrete communicative act. Autobiographical representation manifests a con-

ception of relational structures and possibilities of action oriented around
one’s own person. The autobiographical communicative act seeks to put this
conception into effect at a selected point within the relational network of the
author. Autobiographical texts are thus sources for the conceptual and prag-
matic self-integration of the authors into the social contexts of their time.
These texts thus open up particular perspectives on processes that are cen-
tral to social change, especially in the sixteenth century (by far the most auto-
biographical texts originate from this period), which can here be briefly
designated by the keywords territorialization, early modern statehood, bureau-
cratization, juridification, professionalization and confessionalization.9 We
are thus concerned with a shift in political and social power relations and a
change in the means of exercising power, for which both written procedures
and the development of bureaucratic structures were particularly important.
As the large majority of autobiographical authors were employed within the
framework of early modern bureaucracies, their writing also belongs to this
context. Autobiographical texts are particularly suitable for providing clues
about the people who played essential parts in these processes. In addition
to the numerous occupants of positions in the state bureaucracies – above all
the aristocracy (who increasingly had legal qualifications), non-aristocrats in
the legal profession and Protestant theologians – there are also some writers
who autobiographically illuminate the same processes from outside these
institutions.
These different and at times contradictory autobiographical perspectives
allow a further interesting point to arise. In the evaluative representation of
one’s own acts or the acts of others, authors tend to articulate alternative ways
of acting and the ascription of responsibilities more or less explicitly together.
Furthermore, by taking up the autobiographical initiative, authors demon-
strate that they first and foremost feel responsible for themselves. How they
wish to understand this responsibility for their own person is then expressed
9 Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichte im 16. Jahrhundert. 1500–1618 (Neue Historische

Bibliothek), (Frankfurt a.M.: 1987); idem, Einführung in die Neuere Geschichte (Stuttgart:
1987), 61–67 (juridification); Deutsche Verwaltungsgeschichte, vol. 1: Vom Spätmittelalter bis
zum Ende des Reiches, ed. Kurt G.A. Jeserich, Hans Pohl and Georg-Christoph von Unruh
(Stuttgart: 1983); Heinrich Lutz, Reformation und Gegenreformation, 3rd edn rev. and
expanded by Alfred Kohler (Oldenbourg Grundriß der Geschichte, vol. 10), (Munich: 1991);
Rainer Wohlfeil, Einführung in die Geschichte der deutschen Reformation (Munich: 1982);
Heide Wunder, He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon. Women in Early Modern Germany, transl.
Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, ma and London: 1998), 85–112.
in more detail in the autobiographical text, which at the same time establishes
the social characteristics of this responsibility.
Hence, the question of relational networks also raises the subject of power
relations in which the respective author, whether male or female, moves. But
analyzing the recorded facts simply in terms of the categories true or false,
complete or incomplete, does not do justice to the actual information content
of such writings. For each report of facts is preceded by concepts of perception
and activity which affect the selection, arrangement, collation, weighting,
evaluation and interpretation of the details, and in fact everything that is said
and narrated about the person.10 How, then, can such concepts be recon-
structed from the sources?
It is necessary at first to shed light on all the aspects of the situation in which
the author finds her- or himself and in which she or he is autobiographically
active. In addition to the individual’s own situation at the time of writing, we
must also note the public situation chosen by the author for the particular
text – which public is meant to be reached through which medium, and which
roles are intended for those on both sides of this communicative situation?
Further, the literary situation must be clarified, so as to determine the genre of
the texts as well as, if applicable, the textual and generic context into which the
individual autobiographical text is inserted. The genre of the account book
suggests different contexts of social usage than, for instance, that of the literary
epistle, horoscope or family history. By analyzing the communication situa-
tion, it becomes possible to work out the concept of social relations11 as it is
practiced through writing in each case.
10 Cf. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in
the Sociology of Knowledge (London: 1971; first edn. 1966); Hans-Georg Soeffner, “‘Typus
und Individualität’ oder ‘Typen der Individualität’? – Entdeckungsreisen in das Land, in
dem man zuhause ist,” in Typus und Individualität im Mittelalter, ed. Horst Wenzel
(Forschungen zur Geschichte der älteren deutschen Literatur, vol. 4), (Munich: 1983),
11–44, esp. 21f.
11 “Concept of social relations” is closely related to questions about concepts of person as
they are pursued in anthropology and other fields, cf. The Category of the Person.
Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins and Steven Lukes
(Cambridge: 1985), here especially, Alexis Sanderson (“Purity and power among the
Brahmans of Kashmir,” in ibid., 190–216), who differentiates between metaphysical theo-
ries and “social personhood” and for the latter makes another important distinction: “We
must also go beneath the surface of philosophical and theological abstractions to the
theory and prescription of social roles and, beneath this level, to materials whose aim was
not to prescribe the construction of social personhood but to describe it or expose its
presuppositions” (190). In what follows, “concept” is meant similarly as a term including
124 Jancke
Next it is necessary to investigate the content. To understand the concept of

social relations we must look at the topics and their weighting, as well as the
people and actions that appear. We have to clarify the network of relations into
which the autobiographical subject writes her/himself, as well as which roles s/he
is shown to be fulfilling, which patterns of actions are ascribed to the subject
and to others, and which power structures ultimately ensue. Such an analysis of
the content helps to reconstruct the concept of social relations as it is narrated.
The functions of a text and the only partly expressed intentions it is meant
to fulfill are also elements of concepts of actions. As such, they help to struc-
ture the form and content of a text and must be taken into consideration in the
analysis of both. The authors often expressly associate their text with certain
functions it is meant to fulfill as a communicative act within a particular situa-
tion. The function of the autobiographical text as both act in itself and as an
instrument of relationships must thus be addressed in the analysis of the com-
municative situation. But the same text also has implicit functions, which are
conveyed through the content and its configuration. These must also be inves-
tigated in an analysis of the content.
Another desirable methodological step, which cannot be undertaken here,
however, would involve considering the contemporary processes of text pro-
duction and interpretation, especially the various rhetorical methods.
The methodological approach I have sketched here goes from the general
classification of the genre of a source text to its historical context, before distin-
guishing categories through various lines of questioning that branch out to
sociology, literary studies and communication studies. These categories are
intended to develop our understanding of the genre on the basis of a detailed
analysis of the individual texts with a view to their historical context and their
particular function within it. Obviously, the sets of questions and methodology
presented here must be demonstrated with the aid of individual texts. I have
selected three examples to discuss in the remainder of the article. All three
were written in the sixteenth century after the Reformation. The authors and
their texts are very different and hence appropriate for indicating the diversity
of autobiographical texts in this period: They consist of the Hebrew memoir of
the Jewish politician Josel of Rosheim, of the German-language “Letter to the
Entire Citizenry of the City of Strasbourg” by the clergyman’s wife and Strasbourg
resident Katharina Zell, and of the Latin autobiography “Vita Jacobi Andreae”
by the theologian and church politician Jakob Andreae of Württemberg.
the whole range of meanings between philosophical abstraction and a “sens pratique”
according to Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: 1990; first in French:
Le sens pratique [Paris: 1980]).
First Example: Josel of Rosheim (ca. 1478–1554)12
(1) Communicative situation: Josel of Rosheim was a member of the Holy

Roman Empire’s Jewish minority and made a living as a moneylender and also,
perhaps, partly as a merchant. After the Jews of Lower Alsace elected him,
along with Rabbi Zaddok and several others, to the community council (parn-
assim) in 1510, he devoted himself in the decades that followed to internal
Jewish affairs of community administration and jurisprudence, and often to
negotiations with the Christian authorities on behalf of the Jews of Lower
Alsace. Other Jewish communities in the Empire also asked him to intervene
on their behalf when they were threatened with breaches of law, expulsion, or
12 Source: Josel von Rosheim, “Chronicle (Hebrew),” in Joseph of Rosheim. Historical Writings,
ed. Chava Fraenkel-Goldschmidt (Jerusalem 1996), 42–55 (introduction), 275–310 (text)
(critical edition of the Hebrew text with annotations); English translation: Josel
von Rosheim, “The Chronicle,” in The Historical Writings of Joseph of Rosheim. Leader of
Jewry in Early Modern Germany, ed. Chava Fraenkel-Goldschmidt, transl. by Naomi
Schendowich, Engl. ed. and afterword by Adam Shear (Studies in European Judaism 12),
(Boston and Leiden: 2006), 303–339 (quotations are according to this translation). –
Secondary literature: see Jancke, Quellenkunde sv Josel von Rosheim; Ludwig Feilchenfeld,
Rabbi Josel von Rosheim. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland im
Reformationszeitalter (Straßburg: 1898); Selma Stern, Josel von Rosheim. Befehlshaber
der Judenschaft im Heiligen Römischen Reich Deutscher Nation (Stuttgart: 1959); Jacob
Rothschild, Art. “Joseph (Joselmann) ben Gershon of Rosheim,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica
(Jerusalem: 1972) (English) [abbreviated EJ] 10, 227–229; Daniel J. Cohen, “German Jewry’s
Struggle against Expulsion in 1545: R. Joselmann of Rosheim and the Appeal to Cardinal
Farnese,” in Israel and the Nations. Essays printed in Honor of Shmuel Ettinger (Jerusalem:
1987), 43–52 (Hebrew); Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, “Josel von Rosheim: Juden und
Christen im Zeitalter der Reformation,” in Kirche und Israel 6,1 (1991), 3–16; Eckardt Opitz,
“Johannes Reuchlin und Josel von Rosheim. Probleme einer Zeitgenossenschaft,” in
Reuchlin und die Juden, ed. Arno Herzig and Julius H. Schoeps in cooperation with Saskia
Rohde (Pforzheimer Reuchlinschriften 3), (Sigmaringen: 1993), 89–108; Elisheva
Carlebach, “Converts and their Narratives in Early Modern Germany. The Case of Friedrich
Albrecht Christiani,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 40 (1995), 65–83, here 69 n. 19, and 79
(Josel and converts); eadem, “Between History and Myth: The Regensburg Expulsion in
Josel of Rosheim’s ‘Sefer ha-Miknah’,” in Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Essays in Honor
of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ed. eadem, John M. Efron and David N. Myers (Tauber Institute
for the Study of European Jewry Series, vol. 29) (Hanover, nh: 1998), 40–53; Debra Kaplan,
“Writing History, Defining Communities: The Construction of Historical Space in Josel of
Rosheim’s Chronicle,” in Räume des Selbst. Selbstzeugnisse transkulturell, ed. Andreas
Bähr, Peter Burschel and Gabriele Jancke (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 19), (Cologne,
Weimar and Vienna: 2007), 97–109.
126 Jancke
torture and execution arising from accusations of ritual murder (this diplo-
matic function was referred to as shtadlan).13
The most important Jewish politician in the Empire of the sixteenth cen-
tury, Josel of Rosheim wrote his memoirs in Hebrew, which was the common
written language for Jews, at least amongst educated men, until the era of
assimilation.14 He divided his text, which covers ten printed pages, into a total
of 29 sections of varying length that are organized according to chronologically
or topically related remarks. Josel began to write the text after a trip to Würzburg
(due to an accusation of ritual murder) in 1543/44, where he came across a
Jewish prayer book which contained a handwritten record of the Burgundian
War 1475–1477 and its effects on the Jewish population of Alsace. His decision
that he, too, should write down what his father had related about his own ter-
rible experiences from that time can, according to him, be traced back to his
reading of this historical report. The suffering that he had previously only
heard about from his parents and other relatives gained in significance so
greatly on his discovery of this written document that Josel of Rosheim then
also began to write about his own experiences with the Christian population
and authorities as well as those of his family:
When I was here in the holy community of Würzburg, (…)15 I found the
book in which the man of Nuremberg had written at the top of a page
13 Cf. Editorial Staff, Art. “Shtadlan,” in ej 14, 1462f.; Isaac Levitats, Art. “Community. Middle
Ages. Character and Structure; Function and Duties,” in ej 5, 810–813, here 811f.; Josef
Meisl, Art. “Gemeinde, jüd.,” in Jüdisches Lexikon. Ein enzyklopädisches Handbuch des
jüdischen Wissens in vier Bänden, ed. Georg Herlitz and Bruno Kirschner (Berlin: 1927–30,
repr. 2nd edn Frankfurt a.M.: 1987), vol. II, 964–967 [henceforth jl]; Siegfried Wolff, Art.
“Parnass,” in jl IV/1, 821; Natan Efrat, Art. “Parnas,” in ej 13, 123f.; concerning the secular
functions of a judge that a parnas had to exercise: Menachem Elon, Art. “Mishpat Ivri,” in
ej 12, 109–151, here 127f.; Hans-Joachim Bechtoldt, “Josel von Rosheim, ‘Fürsprecher’ der
deutschen Juden, und seine Kontaktaufnahme zu Martin Luther,” in Ebernburg-Hefte
(2002), 13–29; François Guesnet, “Die Politik der ‘Fürsprache’: Vormoderne jüdische
Interessenvertretung,” in Synchrone Welten. Zeitenräume jüdischer Geschichte, ed. Dan
Diner (Göttingen: 2005), 67–92.
14 Heinrich Loewe, Art. “Sprachen der Juden,” in jl IV/2, 568–579, here 578f.; Esther
Goldenberg, Art. “Hebrew Language: Ashkenazic and Rabbinic Hebrew,” in ej 16, 1608–
1642, here 1636; Chava Weissler, “Prayers in Yiddish and the Religious World of Ashkenazic
Women,” in Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Judith R. Baskin (Detroit: 1991),
159–181, here 160.
15 My practice with quotations is as follows: ellipses are marked by parentheses: (…); the
exact reference to the edition used appears directly after the quotation, so as to disburden
the footnotes.
about the harsh persecution that they had suffered for many sins. Since I
had come here, I said in my heart: it is fitting that I should write down as
a memorial what I heard from my father, my teacher of blessed memory,
how he and my mother, may she rest in Eden, as well as all their loved
ones and children, left the city of Oberehnheim together with residents
of the region. They took flight upon hearing the shrieks, and fled for their
lives into the two fortresses of Bar and Lützelstein, where they remained
for a full year, suffering extreme hunger and thirst.
fraenkel-goldschmidt, ed./transl. 2006, § 2, 305
While Josel makes very clear the occasion and reason for his writing, he has
very little to say about its purpose and nothing at all about the readers to whom
he addresses his text. He expresses his intention with “it is fitting that I should
write down as a memorial what I heard from my father, my teacher of blessed
memory…,” but does not extend this further. From the context we come to
understand that his project depends on the historiographical text he found
and that he believes the oral stories of his father about that event are just as
important as the written report. Generally, the purpose of this text is “to mem-
ory,” but the Jewish readers would also recognize the call to remember Amalek’s
evil deeds that threatened the existence of Israel (Dt 25, 17–19). At this time,
Amalek was identified with the Christians.16
The intended reading public is not described in any greater detail; the peo-
ple who are meant to remember or who are now better able to remember
because of this text can thus be located on a broad spectrum. The text defi-
nitely addresses a Jewish public with knowledge of Hebrew, but beyond that
Josel leaves it open whether this memory should continue to be circumscribed
within the family circle or whether he also wishes to address readers from out-
side the family. He suggests the latter when he makes the historiographical
text, the possession of which he himself came to as a stranger, the starting
point for his own writing. His use of “we” in the text leads in the same direction:
he uses it to align himself with a group of people who are both those persons
named and present in his text as well as potential readers in the eyes of the
16 On the equation of Amalek with Christians, see Theodore Friedman, Art. “Gentile,” in ej
7, 410–414, here 411 “Terms”; also Samuel Abramsky and Elimelech Epstein Halevy, Art.
“Amalekites,” in ej 2, 787–791; Heinz Martin Döpp, Art. “Amalekiter,” in Neues Lexikon des
Judentums, ed. Julius H. Schoeps (Gütersloh and Munich: 1992), 30. On Jewish memorial
culture and notions of history cf. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor. Jewish History and
Jewish Memory (Seattle: 1983), and Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History
(Berkeley, ca: 1993).
128 Jancke
author. Josel includes his family in a “we” only once (§ 2, end); the rest of the
time he uses it to mean a universal but concrete Jewish community or the
entire Jewish population of the Empire. For his handwritten text he thus clearly
had in mind not only a familial readership but also those on whose behalf he
had been speaking for decades as their elected representative.
In addition, it can be expected that the very brief text, permeated with
numerous abbreviations, had its uses for the author. Since Josel does not
explicitly address this, the development of the text itself can be seen as an
indirect statement. The author begins with the 1470 trial for ritual murder in
Endingen, as a result of which three uncles of his father were murdered as sup-
posed perpetrators, amongst others, and he continues with the history of the
suffering of the Alsace Jews in the 1470s, as his parents themselves experienced
it and related it to him. Embedded in this introductory section are the remarks
quoted above about the occasion and motivation for his writing. A second long
section relates events which he himself experienced and actively helped to
bring about. The two parts are distinguished not only by the period reported
and the object of representation, but also in the magnitude of the suffering of
the Jewish people as well as the strength of Jewish self-assertion. While the first
part, using his own family as the example, describes the nearly powerless sur-
render of the Jews into the hands of the hounding, murderous, extorting
Christian population and its authorities (§§ 1.2), the second part (§§ 3–29)
extends its reach to the entire Jewish population of the Empire, showing a situ-
ation that admittedly remains threatening. Nonetheless, the concrete situa-
tions in the second part are characterized by the more or less successful
intervention of a Jewish representative, who in negotiations with the Christian
authorities seeks to protect the rights of the Jewish population. This represen-
tative, on the basis of this text, is almost exclusively Josel of Rosheim himself.17
Hence, the usefulness of the text for the author, in connection with this form
of fixing memory through writing, lies in making his entire social group aware
that they should not simply be defenseless victims surrendering to breaches of
17 The same assessment of Josel’s role can be found amongst modern historians: cf. only
Simon Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes. Von seinen Uranfängen bis zur
Gegenwart, 10 vols. (Berlin: 1925–1929), here vol. 6: Die Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes in
der Neuzeit. Das XVI. und die erste Hälfte des XVII. Jahrhunderts (Berlin 1927), 191f. and
206–217; Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750, 2nd edn
(Oxford: 1989), 11–13 and 16; Friedrich Battenberg, Das europäische Zeitalter der Juden. Zur
Entwicklung einer Minderheit in der nichtjüdischen Umwelt Europas, 2 vols., vol. 1: Von den
Anfängen bis 1650 (Darmstadt: 1990), 166–207, here 184–190; Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated
Minority. The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, ma and London: 1992), 175.
law and acts of violence, but rather should be able to defend themselves,
through diplomatic means, against such attacks aimed at their very existence.18
It is this fundamental insight into the possibilities of self-assertion that Josel
clearly records and wants to commit “to memory,” not least for the sake of rein-
forcing his own, far from easy role as shtadlan.
(2) Content: As has been previously mentioned, the content of Josel’s text
can be divided into two parts. The first two of the 29 sections present an intro-
duction which raises two themes. Josel reports on the fate of his family in
Alsace in the 1470s, and interjects a passage in which he explains the occasion
and purpose of this text (see above). These two segments – about a fifth of the
entire text – thus set out the conditions, which Josel wishes to bring into view,
for his life and the writing of his memoirs. For him, the decisive forces in this
are the saving intervention of God (§ 1), the belief in one’s own Jewish identity
(those who have returned to Judaism after forced baptism, § 2) and the solidar-
ity of fellow Jews (Juda Bamis, ibid.). He is thus concerned with the fundamen-
tal problem of how to preserve the existence, identity and tradition of his
social group in a situation of constant peril. The “I” of his text finds its place
here and firmly connects itself, by inclusion in the “we,” to this group in its
threatened position.
The second, major segment of his memoirs focuses on events up to 1547 that
the author himself experienced and helped to bring about. Josel, however,
obviously had no intention of portraying his own life in full. He writes nothing
about his childhood, education or marriage. His family, his children and his
profession can be deduced from a brief remark (§ 3), but for the purpose of his
text they are not important. He begins with the losses caused in general as well
18 In a text of Jewish history that is some 100 years older – the Gilgul bne Chuschim by
Salman von St. Goar (written between 1430 and 1450) – three types of self-defence are
named by biblical allusion: military, diplomatic (this includes gifts) as well as with prayer:
Israel Jacob Yuval, “Juden, Hussiten und Deutsche. Nach einer hebräischen Chronik,” in
Juden in der christlichen Umwelt während des späten Mittelalters, ed. Alfred Haverkamp
and Franz-Josef Ziwes (Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, Beiheft 13), (Berlin: 1992),
59–102, text (German translation) 96–102, here 99 and note q; the chronicle itself empha-
sizes the religious means of prayer and fasting, ibid., 82. – Gifts here, as also with the
Christian population, are embedded in power relationships and often even in forced situ-
ations. They are generally a part of a gift-exchange society; on this, see Natalie Zemon
Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison and London: 2000), esp. 128 (political
gifts from Jews to Christian authorities), and also Valentin Groebner, Gefährliche
Geschenke. Ritual, Politik und die Sprache der Korruption in der Eidgenossenschaft im
späten Mittelalter und am Beginn der Neuzeit (Konflikte und Kultur, vol. 3), (Konstanz:
2000), 115f. and 131 (esp. “gifts” that the Jews had to pay).
130 Jancke
as to him personally by the Bavarian War of Succession (1504), then proceeds

to describe the work related to his function as elected Jewish representative
before the Christian authorities (shtadlan). In doing this, he is not in the first
instance concerned with providing a full description; most important for him
are the instances in which he had to negotiate with the emperor. What is left
out, among other things, are the accusations that Charles V brought against
him before the Imperial Chamber Court (Reichskammergericht) because of the
title of “governor” (Regierer) used by Josel and other Jews for his office. The
author also remains silent about his defense of Judaism, which he successfully
pleaded before the Imperial Diet (Reichstag) of Augsburg in 1530 against
Antonius Margaritha’s defamations. Further, Josel has not a word to say about
the internal Jewish affairs in which he was engaged in his role as community
councilor (parnas) for Alsatian Jews; with regard to internal Jewish affairs, he
deems only his activity as intermediary to the Prague community to be worth
writing about (§§ 12.20.25).19
By contrast, what is important to him are his interventions in ritual murder
trials (§§ 13. 18. 22. 24. 26), expulsions (§§ 4. 7. 8. 9. 12. 22. 27), withdrawal of
rights of safe conduct (§ 9. 14. 22), interest regulations (§§ 14. 15. 17) and the
overall protection of rights for Jews (§ 28).
In this overview of what content is narrated and what is suppressed, it is
already clear how the author broadly presents his “I.” He is primarily concerned
with his function as a political representative of the Jews for the entire Empire.
This function, however, as the introduction shows, is closely connected for him
with his personal, social and religious experiences, where the threat to exis-
tence plays a decisive role. Several quotations will help to present Josel’s writ-
ten “I” in greater detail.
He describes his election as the leader of the Jews of Lower Alsace as
follows:
In the year 5270 (1509/10), I was appointed together with the Aluf, Rabbi
Zadok, and others to keep watch over the community with particular
care and to lead it. And in that same year calamity struck the Mark [of
Brandenburg], where 38 righteous people were burnt {at the stake} and
sanctified God’s name in the city of Berlin. May their souls be bound up
in the bond of everlasting life.
19 See Stern, Josel von Rosheim, 115–117, sources in Feilchenfeld, Rabbi Josel von Rosheim,
167–176; on his disputation with Margaritha: Stern, Josel von Rosheim, 85–89; on his tasks
within the Jewish community: ibid., 51ff.
The note is kept very short and, in addition to the election (“I was appointed”),
he only names the others who share the leadership position (“together
with the Aluf, Rabbi Zadok, and others”) and sketches the associated tasks
(“to keep watch over the community with particular care and to lead it”),
which highlights primarily internal Jewish affairs. The second half of the
sentence is devoted to the judicial murder in Brandenburg, which also took
place in 1510 and which the author was able to demonstrate to be completely
unfounded before the emperor in 1539 (cf. § 22). In spite of the significance of
this election for Josel of Rosheim personally and for the Jews of the Empire
in the coming decades – which he was no doubt aware of at the time of
writing – the author does not emphasize this aspect of the event. Rather, he
stresses the collegiality of the office and his function in internal Jewish affairs,
thus playing down the role for himself that developed from it. In the second
half of the sentence he points to the acts of violence, sanctioned by the author-
ities, which took place in Brandenburg in the same year. It is only in this con-
text that he mentions those who count as pivotal authorities for himself: these
leaders are the “extensions of God (of the Torah)” and were murdered with
other Jews; the highest authority, by whom they are led, is God and the Torah.
The author does not explicitly erase his “I” in this important segment, but he
does makes clear that he wishes to understand this “I” in relation to his own
social group, acting within collegial structures, taking God and by extension
the Torah as his highest authorities, and oriented towards external threats to
this group.
The emperor, as guarantor of Jewish rights across the Empire, is for Josel
a decisive authority. He expresses this in his text through his frequent men-
tion of the emperor as his partner in negotiations (§§ 4. 7. 9. 15. 16. 17. 19. 23.
27. 28. 29). Everyone else is mentioned only once or not at all. A string of
these secular and religious Christian authorities whom he mentions to have
initiated expulsion procedures are explicitly named as perpetrators: the
council of Oberehnheim (§ 4. 7. 10), the lords of Andlau and the Bishop of
Strasbourg (§ 7), the authorities of Hagenau (§§ 12. 21), the authorities of
Ensisheim (§ 21), the Duke of Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, the Margrave
as well as the Bishop of Brandenburg (§ 22), “all princes and dukes,” the gov-
ernments of Esslingen and Landau (§ 27). As collective leaders in this regard,
he mentions the city of Regensburg and the village of Dangolsheim (§ 8), the
cities of Rosheim and Kaysersberg (§ 9) as well as the Sefardim, that is, the
Spanish military in the Schmalkaldic War (§ 28). Josel’s text thus represents
Christian authorities below the emperor, i.e., below the highest political
authority of the Empire, as thoroughly unreliable supporters of the rights
and lives of their Jewish subjects; in fact, the number amongst them who are
132 Jancke
denoted as agents of the dissolution and breach of rights is amazingly high.

Unreliable as these potentates may be, however, they are indispensable,
according to Josel’s portrayal, to securing some semblance of a stable life
for the Jews:
In the year 5285 (1524/25) there was a tumult amongst the villagers, who
gathered in all parts of Germany and, above all, in this region – Alsace.
They wished to make themselves masters and it was their intention to
devour us alive. The scourge had already begun in certain places.
In the light of this situation, where Jewish lives were constantly under threat
from the Christian populace as well as the Christian authorities, Josel’s text
ascribes a unique function to the emperor. The term Josel uses to characterize
him expresses this unequivocally: “the emperor, our lord” (passim). He includes
the emperor, as the only non-Jew, in the “we” which in all other cases com-
prises himself as well as a more or less extensive but still exclusively Jewish
group.
Nonetheless, this does not yet fully describe the author’s sphere of political
activity. The emperor, indeed, is the only Christian potentate who is unreserv-
edly portrayed in a positive light; he is indeed the only one addressed as a reli-
able guarantor of Jewish rights – yet he is far from offering a truly reliable
guarantee of Jewish rights:
In the year 5280 (1519/20), our lord, the Emperor Charles, was crowned
king. I came to him and to his servants to plead for our people and our
inheritance. We (that is to say I and the man who was with me) obtained
comprehensive privileges for all of Germany. Notwithstanding this, in
that same year, charters were issued authorizing the expulsion of [the
Jews] from Rosheim and from the Vogtei of Kaysersberg. With the help of
God, blessed be He, I interceded with the King, and succeeded in having
the expulsion from the Vogtei of Kaysersberg cancelled altogether, with
the annulment of that particular charter of expulsion. However, the char-
ter to Rosheim was not rescinded, {nor was that city’s decision to expel
the Jews}. By dint of supreme efforts we succeeded time after time, with
great difficulty, in obtaining yet another postponement. To this day we
still do not know [how matters will turn out], and we can but place our
trust in our Father in Heaven. He will redeem us and save us from {our}
assailants. May it be His will. Amen.
fraenkel-goldschmidt, ed./transl. 2006, § 9, 315f.
“To this day we still do not know [how matters will turn out]” – this despairing
uncertainty stretches over more than twenty years (Josel began to write the
text in 1543/44). Everything that has been achieved is temporary, repeatedly
under threat. In spite of his successes and his aptitude for negotiation, which
is also highlighted in this passage, the author sees no reason to emphasize this
aspect of his undertaking. Rather, he indicates here in a few sentences the lim-
its of his decades-long endeavors and also reveals the emotional aspects of his
activity from a forlorn position of weakness (“By dint of supreme efforts we
succeeded time after time, with great difficulty”). He ends this segment with an
overall account of the powers amongst which he moves: “… and we can but
place our trust in our Father in Heaven.20 He will redeem us and save us from
{our} assailants. May it be His will. Amen.” His “I” is able to be politically active,
but he describes it as embattled and forsaken by those in political power. In
this field of political activity, the author notes only one figure on the side of the
“I” and the “we,” “our Father in Heaven.” Within the power relations of Christian
society, which he illuminates with a critical eye, it is only God to whom the
author ascribes the power to successfully save the Jews.
Despite accentuating the powerlessness and peril of his own activities, it is
essential to the author that he make the “I” visible amongst those he depicts as
greater powers. This “I” is drawn in terms of its limitations, but it is also through
these limitations that its own possibilities are formulated. In his memoirs, the
author thus indicates the scope for agency of his “I.” The “I” he transmits as “a
memorial” (§ 2, see above) is inscribed within the power relations of his soci-
ety. At the same time this “I” carries with it a concept of action which he is
anxious to adhere to and pass down: this action arises from solidarity, is
directed by the Torah, and is commenced and continued even when the
chances of success are minimal. In this way the “I” of his text is also the bearer
of an obligation (as the author has already outlined in the two introductory
segments). The activities which are associated with this “I” that is subjected to
obligation fit into the normative concept as delineated by Josel: the “I” of the
text struggles to safeguard the physical existence, life opportunities and reli-
gious identity of Jews in the Empire, which the author also inscribes into his
self-narrative as a duty under the heading of “we.”
The memoirs are thus the document of a self that is shown through the
materialization of a normative concept and with regard to a clearly defined
“we.” When the author transmits this “to memory,” he simultaneously offers his
own social, pragmatic and theological orientation, through his active “I,” to his
readership. Each reception of the text must necessarily come to terms with the
20 This passage is a slightly varied quotation from Mishna: mSota 9, 15.

134 Jancke
author’s normative concept. Josel’s additional strategy, which consists in

implicitly including his audience in this normative concept through the fre-
quent use of “we” in the text, diminishes the distance between public and text,
and facilitates its reception. Given Josel’s pessimistic analyses, as previously
cited, the twenty sections that follow can only fulfill the function of bringing
this obligatory “nonetheless” closer to his readership.
Second Example: Katharina Zell (1497/98-1562)21
(1) Communicative situation: Katharina Zell, the daughter of a master carpen-

ter named Schütz from Strasbourg, endeavored to give herself a theological
education. In 1523 she married the pastor Matthäus Zell, also of Strasbourg.
21 Source: Ein Brieff an die gantze Burgerschafft der Statt Straßburg/von Katherina Zellin/des-
sen jetz sa(e)ligen Matthei Zellen/deß alten und ersten Predigers des Evangelij diser Statt/
nachgelassne Ehe fraw/Betreffend Herr Ludwigen Rabus/jetz ein Prediger der Statt Ulm/
sampt zweyen brieffen jr und sein/die mag mengklich lesen und urtheilen on gunst und hasß/
sonder allein der war heit warnemen. Dabey auch ein sanffte antwort/auff jeden Artickel/
seines brieffs, n. pl. ([Straßburg] 1557), modern critical edition: Katharina Schütz Zell, ed.
Elsie Anne McKee, vol. 2: The Writings. A Critical Edition (Studies in Medieval and
Reformation Thought 69), (Leiden, Boston and Cologne: 1999), 167–303, cf. McKee’s intro-
duction ibid., 155–166; quotations are given after this edition translated by Misha Kavka
and Gabriele Jancke. – Elsie Anne McKee has also produced an excellent monograph on
Zell’s biography and theology, which makes older research positions in part obsolete (for
example, Katharina Zell as supposed Schwenckfeld follower): Katharina Schütz Zell, vol. 1:
The Life and Thought of a Sixteenth-Century Reformer (Studies in Medieval and Reformation
Thought 69), (Leiden, Boston and Cologne: 1999); for further references see Jancke,
Quellenkunde, sv “Katharina Zell,” e.g.: Miriam U. Chrisman, “Women and the Reformation
in Strasbourg 1490–1530,” in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 63 (1972), 143–168; Anne
Conrad, “‘Ein männisch Abrahamisch gemuet’: Katharina Zell im Kontext der Straßburger
Reformationsgeschichte,” in Geschlechterperspektiven. Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit,
ed. Heide Wunder and Gisela Engel (Aktuelle Frauenforschung), (Königstein, Ts.: 1998),
120–134; Ruth Albrecht, “Wer war Katharina Zell? Weder Bileams Eselin noch Inhaberin
eines Pfarrfrauenamtes: Beobachtungen zur Rezeption einer Reformatorin,” in ibid.,
135–144; Gabriele Jancke, “Die Kirche als Haushalt und die Leitungsrolle der Kirchenmutter.
Katharina Zells reformatorisches Kirchenkonzept,” in ibid., 145–155; Marion Obitz,
“Katharina Zell − Kirchenmutter, Publizistin, Apostelin, Prophetin,” in Evangelische
Theologie 60 (2000), 371–388; on Zell’s “Brieff” as an autobiographical and theological
text see also: Merry E. Wiesner, “Katharina Zell’s Ein Brieff an die ganze [!] Burgerschafft der
Statt Strassburg as Theology and Autobiography,” in Colloquia Germanica. Internationale
Zeitschrift für Germanistik 28 (1995), 245–254; also important is the bibliography in Marc
Lienhard, “Catherine Zell, née Schütz,” in Bibliotheca Dissidentium. Répertoire des non-
conformistes religieux des seizième et dix-septième siècles. Tome 1: Johannes Campanus,
During her marriage and as a widow (Matthäus died in 1548), she engaged in
numerous church activities, among them as spiritual advisor and organizer of
large-scale support measures for refugees during the Reformation and Peasants’
War years. In addition, she used whatever opportunities presented themselves
to further her theological education, such as when she and her husband
accommodated visiting theologians in the rectory. She also sought out theo-
logical correspondence with various reformers; in 1538 she accompanied her
husband on a lengthy journey through all of the German-speaking regions to
visit a number of Protestant theologians. She gave two funeral sermons and
published numerous writings, including studies of the 51st Psalm and the
Lord’s Prayer as well as several consolatory texts; she also published a
hymnbook. Like her husband, she was tolerant of Protestant minorities, but
this brought her increasingly into conflict with the prevailing opinion of
church officials.
Katharina Zell had her German-language text “A Letter to the Entire
Citizenry of the City of Strasbourg” printed in Strasbourg in 1557. This “Letter”
actually consists of a preface by Zell as well as five letters, namely – in the order
published – a letter to her by the pastor Ludwig Rabus, who had recently
moved from Strasbourg to Ulm, and four letters which Katharina Zell had
directed to him. She thus changes the chronological order of the originals: at
the beginning she places Rabus’s response (dated 4/19/1557) to three letters
written by her (Friday after Christmas, 1556;22 Thursday after Candlemas, 1556;
and 3/24/1557). Her first two letters, which Rabus left unopened and unan-
swered, she places at the end of the four she wrote to him; the third chrono-
logical letter, in which she demanded an answer from Rabus after the lapse of
one year, comes directly after his response, followed by her extensive reply
(undated, but the printed text bears the date 12/30/1557) to his short letter.
The form taken by Zell’s publication brings together two different commu-
nicative situations: three letters which the author wrote to Rabus are com-
bined with his answer. These four writings were originally intended by both
correspondents only to fulfill the purpose of communicating with each other.
Christian Entfelder, Justus Velsius, Catherine Zell-Schütz, ed. André Séguenny (Bibliotheca
Bibliographica Aureliana 79), (Baden-Baden: 1980), 97–125. − On the history of the
Reformation in Strasbourg see Lorna Jane Abray, The People’s Reformation. Magistrates,
Clergy, and Commons in Strasbourg, 1500–1598 (Oxford: 1985), covering the period up to
the legal establishment of Lutheranism in 1598, also Francis Rapp, “Straßburg, Hochstift
und Freie Reichsstadt,” in Die Territorien des Reichs im Zeitalter der Reformation und
Konfessionalisierung. Land und Konfession 1500–1650, vol. 5: Der Südwesten, ed. Anton
Schindling and Walter Ziegler (Katholisches Leben und Kirchenreform im Zeitalter der
Glaubensspaltung, vol. 53), (Münster: 1993), 72–95.
22 This assumes that the new year begins on December 25th.
136 Jancke
The author put her criticism of the addressee’s behavior directly to him, expect-
ing a detailed exchange regarding the points she made. The answer which ulti-
mately followed did not enter into an exchange between equals, but rebuffed
the author with defamatory language without articulating any kind of argu-
ment in response to her charges. Rabus thus initially attempted to reject the
communication initiated by Zell through his silence; when this failed, he
responded with the harsh letter, thereby actively escalating the conflict.
On the strength of this, the author decided not to break off communication
but rather to continue it, albeit before a wider public called by her as judges
(cf. in addition to the title, for example, McKee, ed. 227. 230. 260). She departed
from the form of the private letter she originally had chosen; instead, she used
the letters which until then had been private as public documentation of the
exchange, which she then supplemented with an open letter. In this open let-
ter, she publicly turned against Rabus with comprehensive theological argu-
mentation against his behavior and the understanding of his church office
which supported such behavior. This open letter to Rabus is configured as a
dialogue with him, in that the author breaks Rabus’s letter apart into short,
thesis-like segments and disputes each in turn.
The publication thus engages with the original dialogue between Zell and
Rabus, which is here publicly set forth before a general readership of the city,
in order to create support for the author/editor’s behavior, which was dispar-
aged by Rabus. In the extensive discussion of Rabus’s letter, composed with an
eye toward publication, she involves the public of Strasbourg from the start
with multiple modes of address. In those parts of her text which serve merely
to document the exchange, the author makes use of connecting passages as
well as a preface to involve her public at least after the fact and thus to trans-
form the dispute into a collective concern of the citizens of Strasbourg.
The author’s arrangement of the letters suggests from the start what is then
more extensively developed in the text – that Rabus’s letter is the motivation
for the publication. His answer to her criticism of him unmistakably expresses
the behavior she had found fault with earlier, so that it is comprehensible to her
audience and so that his letter becomes a piece of evidence how well-grounded
her first intervention had been. Her engagement with his writing is just as thor-
ough: of the 108 pages total, it takes up nearly half of the volume, with 51 pages.
The role ascribed to the public is not limited to simply judging the conflict:
Not for the sake of help/and not/that you should become incensed about
someone/but only that you beg God on my behalf/that He give me
patience/joy and a sure conscience in this matter.
mckee, ed. 170
It is thus important for Zell to receive the support of her fellow citizens
through prayer, and to be included in the solidarity of a critical community
in the city that is capable of judgment. Her formulation of this desire consists
of asking those who pray not just to support her personally but also to support
the actual position she has taken up in the dispute with Rabus (“that he
give me patience/joy and a sure conscience in this matter”; cf. her motivation
for writing to Rabus the first time: “to warn you, urged by my conscience,”
McKee ed. 284).
The autobiographical aspects of her writing provide the material for her
plea for testimony, proper judgment and support, on the basis of which the
author hopes to succeed with her concerns. Her entire reputation and her
honor are at stake; she thus argues with her entire life and its well-known con-
sistency since her youth:
I wish to put to your consideration, dear Strasbourg,/how I have behaved

toward you/honestly or dishonestly/from my youth onward/whose true
witness/of my entire life/I may well suffer at the hands of all who have
known me/.
mckee, ed. 227
One purpose of her writing is thus autobiographical self-defense.

In the public communicative situation she produces, the author pursues
two aims with regard to Rabus’s defamation of her person. On the one hand,
she seeks to remind her readers of her erstwhile reputation and her influence
on important men of the church, and thus to counteract the present loss of
reputation and influence:
In sum I write all of this because/I wish to show/how in my young days

I was so dear/to the old magnificent learned men/and builders of the
church of Christ/who rest in the Lord from their work/and of whom sev-
eral are still alive/so dear was I/their talk of holy things was not kept from
me/and mine very gladly heard (…) But now in my old age/such things
with these learned men/and all honor/faithfulness/love/and motherly
heart/as I have shown them, is forgotten/and disdained/yes, not just for-
gotten/but returned with shame and ignominy/but not all/rather only a
few and one in particular/one whom you, beloved church of Strasbourg,
in his youth took in,/loved and honored/and but he ungratefully turned
his back on you/about which infelicitous deed/I could not keep silent/
and have written to him about it in admonishment and chastisement.
mckee, ed. 172f.
138 Jancke
On the other hand, she wants to give an account of her theological views, spe-
cifically to show her constancy from the early days of the Reformation to the
present:
I thus wish to give account to everyone of my entire belief/who wishes it/

will then see/whether my pious husband’s and my belief is the same or
not/or whether my mind and faith/in the Lord Jesus has changed or not.
mckee, ed. 175
In both aims, the author strives to argue that her life has been consistent, and
it is for the sake of this argument that she brings her life into play in autobio-
graphical form.
The first of the two passages cited above accentuates a further self-
confident and purposeful intention alongside the two defensive concerns related
to her own person, namely the admonishment and chastisement of Rabus.
Through their publication, Zell’s letters of admonishment and chastisement
receive the character of a public theological teaching aimed at laypeople in the
church as well as at church office-holders, principally of the city of Strasbourg.
All of these intentions are closely tied together, and the autobiographical state-
ments thus also serve as an argument for the didactic aspect of the writing.
The functions of the autobiographical mode in this simultaneously defen-
sive and didactic argument are worthy of closer consideration. The quotations
have shown on the one hand the role that the author intended for the public.
On the other hand, she also makes clear that two people stand before the pub-
lic on trial for their behavior, Zell and Rabus, who must both vouch with their
entire lives for their theological claims and decisions in church politics. All
autobiographical statements which the author entrusts to her publication are
written with this motivation.
The highly comprehensive theological passages as well as the pointed place-
ment of her first two letters as an emphatic conclusion make manifest that the
author intends to gain influence as a theological writer and to make her posi-
tion regarding various questions in her home city effective. Zell’s overall inten-
tion can be described as a theologically motivated teaching about correct
belief and correct action. She expands on her understanding in the form of a
theological discussion whose object is the various behavior patterns and roles
of Rabus and Zell herself.
Her autobiographical details are for this reason contrasted with the bio-
graphical details of her opponent and are part of her theological argumenta-
tion. In this, Katharina Zell articulates a strong connection between doing and
believing in the lives of all Christians, both simple parishioners and officials.
Accordingly, everyone’s belief must be visible in her/his actions, and even the
actions of church officials are subject to theologically founded criticism.

Further, the belief of numerous laypeople is also founded in theology and thus
has a right to be taken seriously by the officials; criticism of parishioners by
officials must also be theologically based and articulated in the form of an
argument that does not denigrate the opponent. Following this notion, the
author submits the life of the widowed parson’s wife and the life of the super-
intendent now in Ulm equally to the judgment of the Strasbourg public, and
she subjects both to the same critical standards. Here she both formulates and
by publishing calls upon the notion of a critical public sphere with the same
rights and duties for all who belong to it.23
The most comprehensive autobiographical passages are found in those
two parts of the text that Zell intended for publication from the beginning –
the preface and her letter of reply to Rabus. The autobiographical form of argu-
mentation thus became important for the author primarily at the publication
stage. Hence, the autobiographical statements in the text combine relation-
ship structures with intentions in a complex, interwoven pattern, and in addi-
tion they are used for connecting different parts of the text as well as for
supporting the argument.
For the communicative situation, which has been made more anonymous
and less straightforward by publication, the autobiographical statements have
the following functions: They must corroborate and justify the status of the
author, who, as a single woman, publicly steps into the ring with a high-rank-
ing church official claiming that she not only has the right to do so, but is also
able to teach him and the entire population of the imperial city of Strasbourg
about correct theology and proper behavior. Since the author has neither
the qualification of office and sex nor recourse to an appropriately qualified
husband, she provides the qualification for the role she claims in autobio-
graphical form.
Further, the autobiographical statements do the work of positively exempli-
fying the teachings put forward – in contrast to the negative example of her
opponent Rabus. Zell’s view of a theology that necessarily emerges from a bibli-
cal foundation as well as her view of a corresponding use of power by church
officials, especially in relation to church minorities and laypeople, is traced
back through her life story and practices to the beginnings of the Reformation.
In this, her husband provides the positive example of a church official, in
23 While Heide Wunder refers to the public, critical acting of women: Wunder, He is the Sun,
163–184, Jürgen Habermas discusses just representative functions of the public sphere for
this period (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, ma: 1991)), 5–14. [Transl. Thomas Burger and Frederick
Lawrence, first publ. in German 1971].
140 Jancke
supporting her theological and practical activities, in his concern for Protestant
minority positions such as those of Schwenckfeld or the Anabaptists, in his
faith in argumentation and his own life practices as the means for spreading his
theological convictions, instead of imposing church-based or secular threats
and compulsory measures. The original intention of the Reformation with
regard to teaching and living is embodied in the life of the author; the autobio-
graphical statements carry this tradition into the present and characterize the
behavior of young church officials (such as Rabus) as a break with tradition.
The autobiographical information is not an end in itself. Rather, it supports
the influential role claimed by the author as well as the concrete position
which is to restore her to influence. In terms of this function, the autobio-
graphical elements are not subordinate, but rather endowed with a very impor-
tant task, which is decisive for the success of the text. The plausibility of the
argument rests on the fact that the views taken draw their credibility from the
autobiographical statements. It is only when the author is able to show herself
autobiographically to be trustworthy and competent that her theological argu-
ments stand the chance of being heard. This theology seeks to argue that
within a Protestant core consensus24 different theological strands can be
believed and practiced, that church officials should use their power to support
the weak – such as refugees – rather than oppress them, and that in a church
that aims at solidarity a life like hers is correct and important, and is both qual-
ified and justified to exert influence on the church.25
(2) Content: The autobiographical statements are to be found in all five of
the writings which Katharina Zell wrote and published in her “Letter.” The
information, however, is most comprehensive at two points. First, the preface
is altogether autobiographical (McKee ed. 168–176). Second, her long reply to
Rabus’s libel, which accounts for nearly half of the entire publication, contains
a long autobiographical passage (ibid. 230–245). It is worth looking at these
two excerpts more closely.
As I have already argued, Katharina Zell includes the autobiographical pas-
sages in her texts with the intention of showing the constancy of her life and
belief from childhood to old age – that is, up to the time of composition. She
uses the autobiographical preface to introduce the theme of constancy in its
various guises. She highlights the following aspects in turn:
24 Albrecht, Wer war Katharina Zell, 138; McKee, Katharina Schütz Zell, vol. 1, 265–295 (chap-
ter 10: “The Basic Theology of a Devout Lay Protestant”).
25 Protestant core consensus: McKee, ed., Katharina Schütz Zell, vol. 2, 202–213; officehold-
ers’ correct handling of their power: e.g., 191f. 192ff. 272f.; importance of one’s own role:
e.g., 169f. 230f. 239f. 243f.
Because my Lord then educated me from my mother’s body onwards/and

from youth onward taught me/I have always diligently cared and faith-
fully acted/for His church and the household of the same, happily and
always to the best of my understanding and grace He granted me/with-
out malice/and seriously sought what is the Lord Jesus’. So that all the
pastors and those related to the Church loved and respected me/even
though I was so young. Hence also my virtuous husband Mattheus Zell/at
the time and beginning of his preaching of the gospel/desired me as a
conjugal partner,/to whom I was also a loyal helpmeet in his office and
household/in honor of Christ/(….)
mckee, ed., 168f.
To begin with, the author refers to her education, which is to be traced directly
back to God as the teacher. She immediately ties this to her church activities,
which she articulates as work in the household. Her activity in the church is
thus nothing other than what for women is a matter of course, namely caring
for the household. The household sphere of activity was a social space, undis-
puted for women – this public sphere stood open to them without reserva-
tion.26 By referring to the church as a household, the author claims the sphere
of activity in the church as a social sphere that is open to her without any kind
of reservation. The work is oriented toward the daily necessities of material
and social survival, to food, clothing, shelter and elementary forms of social
interaction. This activity can be traced back directly to the teaching of God and
thus becomes a normative concept of action. For Zell, proper church activity,
oriented toward God, belongs to community life, like the correct leadership of
a household with the contribution of all its members according to their
strengths.
26 The household as a female sphere: Wunder, He Is the Sun, 37–62; Michael Mitterauer,
“Geschlechtsspezifische Arbeitsteilung und Geschlechterrollen in ländlichen Gesell
schaften Mitteleuropas,” in Aufgaben, Rollen und Räume von Frau und Mann, vol. 2,
ed. Jochen Martin and Renate Zoepffel (Kindheit, Jugend, Familie, vol. III/2), (Freiburg
and Munich: 1989), 818–914, here 821–842; Merry E. Wiesner, “Women’s Defense of Their
Public Role,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Literary and Historical
Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (New York: 1986), 1–27; on pastors’ wives: Luise Schorn-
Schütte, “‘Gefährtin’ und ‘Mitregentin’. Zur Sozialgeschichte der evangelischen Pfarrfrau
in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Wandel der Geschlechterbeziehungen zu Beginn der Neuzeit, ed.
Heide Wunder and Christina Vanja (Frankfurt a.M.: 1991), 109–153. – For a more extensive
treatment of the household as a specific concept of the church see Jancke, “Die Kirche als
Haushalt.”
142 Jancke
Directly after this passage about her church activities as household work,
she stresses that her involvement was highly regarded by the church authori-
ties (“all pastors and those related to the Church”). Similarly, the reasons her
late husband, Matthäus Zell, wanted to marry her are also grounded in his
appreciation of her work in the household of the church. Through marriage
she takes on the role of housewife in the Zell’s shared household and thus in
addition to household tasks she also gains responsibility and competence in
decision-making. But the author does not represent her role in the household
as independent; rather, she associates it with the double role her husband
holds as patriarch and church official (“to him I was also a loyal helpmeet in his
office and household”). She thus locates her function as helper to her husband
equally in the conjugal and in the churchly household; her conjugal role as
housewife therefore also consists of certain responsibilities and decision-
making functions in the household of the church. For her activity as house
wife in the church, the author also uses the notion of a church mother:
Since I was ten years old/I have been a Church mother,/an adorner of the
pulpit and of schools/loved all scholars/visited them often/and with
them was my talk/not about dance/worldly joys/wealth nor Shrove
Tuesday/but about the kingdom of God. Thus my father/mother/friends
and citizens/also many scholars/with whom I have discussed much,/
have had for me much love, honor and respect.
mckee, ed. 170
Here, as in other passages, it is important to the author to emphasize her close

relationships with men learned in theology.
(…) whatever work within and outside the house fell to me/those who
rest in God and those who still live will bear witness/to how I helped to
build the gospel/taken in the exiled/comforted the afflicted/church/pul-
pit and schools have I supported and loved/my good conscience in God
will be consoled/even if the world has already forgotten or never taken
note/how I have honored/loved/given shelter/to so many magnificent
learned men/with labor, work and costs visited them with my beloved
husband/in cities and countries far and near/I was not put off by all this/
heard their speeches and their sermons/read their books/their letters/
and they received mine with joy/and after my death all/will be left behind
me [as a legacy, G.J.]. In sum I write all of this because/I wish to show/
how in my young days I was so dear/to the old magnificent learned men/
and builders of the church of Christ/who rest in the Lord from their
work/and of whom several are still alive/so dear was I/their talk of holy
things was not kept from me/and mine very gladly heard.
mckee, ed. 171f.
These relationships – including that with her husband – have a symmetrical

and an asymmetrical part. At the level of communication the principle of equal-
ity presides: in conversation and letters the author learns from the theologians,
but also teaches and criticises them in turn. Such a symmetrical communicative
structure between laypeople and church officials stretches back to the early
Reformation, providing a consistent pattern for relationships. It was only rela-
tively recently that this relational form, created by the Reformation and now
become tradition, was rejected by young theologians like Rabus. This seriously
endangers an essential aspect of what the author formulates as an achievement
of the Reformation as well as a social prerequisite for her own personal identity.
Seen as part of this field of social relations, the autobiographical proof put for-
ward by the author makes not only a claim for consistency but also works as a
demand aimed at church officials on the other side of the relationship.
The asymmetrical aspect of the relationship between the author and the
theologians consists in the fact that she served such men as guests in the Zell’s
house. With regard to the bodily needs of the participants, as she emphasizes,
the role of the housewife has a serving function. In this light, fulfilling this role
means producing an inequality between the sexes as well as between laypeo-
ple and officials in these relationships. This serving function does not initially
result in any return for the housewife on the part of the men, but the descrip-
tion of the asymmetrical aspect of the relationship does again contain a
demand. The many years of intensive labor – especially for the benefit of the
addressee Rabus – should be taken into account and honored with a different
but equivalent return, namely by incorporating equality into communicative
structures.
By contrast, the author works on behalf of the poor, the exiled and the
afflicted without any demand for reciprocity. Indeed, she lists such activities
numerous times in the catalogue of her own works (“taken in the exiled/
comforted the afflicted”) and attaches a high value to them in Christian life.
Although in the preface she just mentions that her involvement in the church
is directed toward the needs of the weak, in the writings that follow she makes
it a reminder to the church authorities: in order to fulfill the requirements of
their roles, the church leaders must likewise prioritize the needs of the weak
and concentrate their activity on them, instead of forcing simple parishioners
into what Zell sees as excessive conformity with the details of their own theo-
logical interpretations.
144 Jancke
The second comprehensive autobiographical section comes in Zell’s letter

of reply to Rabus’s defamation, in a section where she engages with his
reproach that she caused unrest in the church and in her marriage from the
beginning. Again she uses autobiographical passages as evidence of the con-
stancy of her life. In the development of this section, it is particularly notewor-
thy that Zell extends the autobiographical argument, in opposition to the
biographical counter-argument (Rabus), into an admonition and theological
instruction. She first introduces a number of examples to highlight her con-
structive work in the development of the Reformation church – in contrast to
what Rabus alleges is her destructiveness. As a further autobiographical fact,
she recalls the erstwhile appreciation of her activities by the very person who
is now her opponent, Rabus. This is simultaneously a biographical claim about
Rabus that indicates a break in his attitude; a change, or lack of continuity is
thus manifest only on his side. She then describes the ongoing agreement
between herself and her husband, highlighting belief and doctrine in particu-
lar, and points to their way of keeping house together as their external manifes-
tation. This agreement between husband and wife consists of some obedience
on her part, but also consists of mutual consent between two independent,
equal people:
I have often and much wondered by myself/and for it thanked God/(who

gave it)/that we were so completely one in our orientation/mind and
understanding/in holy scripture/and even external things/as in conse-
quence our housekeeping/life and behavior proved/during the four-
and-twenty years/and five weeks/that we were together/(…)/Did I not do
from the beginning of our marriage/attended by the blessed Butzer/who
also gave us together,/what befit the gospel and its followers/and/since
our marriage vows/were not of dowry or morning gift/silver or gold/but
of fire and water/for the sake of confessing Christ/we also gave our body/
honor and goods/to God and Christ, His son/as sacrifice/after which he
also commanded me/to be mother/to poor and exiled people/as long as
God allowed us to be together/hence I have steadily fulfilled our marriage
vow/and my beloved husband’s command/with body/love and goods/
yes, a great unrest/that I made for myself and not for the Church/to honor
the LORD Jesus and of his preaching Him./
mckee, ed. 238f.
From the autobiographical refutation of the reproach that she created unrest,
the author turns this reproach against her opponent. It is he and not she who
caused unrest, that is, who disrupted the existing good order, by breaking with
what up until then had been the common liturgical habits and accepted behav-
ioral norms for pastors as shepherds of the community.
These textual passages make it clear that it is not possible to sharply sepa-
rate the autobiographical statements from the exhortative and didactic pas-
sages. Each flows into the other: what is in a narrow sense autobiographical
also always has a didactic function, while the didactic theological passages,
again in a narrow sense, are always at the same time autobiographical state-
ments about the position and life of the author. The autobiographical “I” and
the didactic “I” are likewise inseparable. Since the author is autobiographically
as well as didactically concerned with the continuity of certain church struc-
tures and roles, she inserts herself autobiographically in an adequate way. Brief
pieces of information, the accentuation of particularly important relation-
ships (to her husband, to church officials as such, to those who need support),
examples of her behavior in these relations – this is her chosen autobiographi-
cal form, which in its exemplary mode precisely corresponds to her exemplary
didactic intentions.
In its continuity, then, her entire life is important, although not in terms of
its chronological development, whether in respect of biographical processes of
change or in respect of the totality of her experiences and actions. The accent
falls rather on the “always again” and “always already” of particular behaviors
in selected social relationships. The selection of autobiographical information
is further limited by the object of her critical remonstrations. The preacher
Rabus and other young church authorities who want to teach her about her
proper role cannot relate to the life story of a woman as an exemplary model.
Because she intends to affect people who are different from her on account of
gender, education or status, the exemplary autobiographical fragment is the
appropriate form.
As a layperson she positions herself on the same level as the church officials
by reprimanding and teaching them. In reverse, she demands of the pastors
that they place themselves on the level of laypeople in their behavior by direct-
ing their activities, exactly as laypeople do, to the needs of the weak. The
author formulates a concept of social relations according to which the inequal-
ities that in fact exist be constantly shifted in the direction of equality. She
targets her demands particularly at those in the church who are privileged by
way of sex, education, material security and power. The “I” of the author thus
plays the part of a mediator between, on the one hand, parishioners without
influence and people in need of support, and on the other hand influential
church authorities. She thus highlights relationships in which she finds herself
dependent on men, specifically in the area of family or the church. She asks
the citizens of the city of Strasbourg to join in solidarity with her critique of
146 Jancke
hierarchies. To mediate between the sphere of influence allowed her by her

opponent and the sphere of influence she claims, she uses the image of the
household as an institution powerful in both spheres; as an indicator of her
own role, she adopts the (church) mother, and for the form she adopts
the letter.
Third Example: Jakob Andreae (1528–1590)27
(1) Communicative situation: The son of a blacksmith in Waibling, Andreae

received a stipend from his Württembergian territorial lord to study in
Tübingen in 1541. In 1546 he married Johanna Entringer of Tübingen and
became a deacon in Stuttgart, but as a result of the Interim he lost this position
in 1548. With ducal support he returned to study in Tübingen and received his
Dr. Theol. in 1553; in the same year he became pastor and superintendent, as
well as general superintendent, in Göppingen, a position he held until 1561.
During this time, the Duke appointed him to promote the Reformation in sev-
eral territories in southwest Germany. In 1562 he was provost, professor and
university chancellor in Tübingen. From 1568, on assignment from his territo-
rial lord, he worked as co-Reformer in Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel on the
model of Württemberg, and from 1576 to 1580 he was engaged as a Reformer in
27 Source: Leben des Jakob Andreae, Doktor der Theologie, von ihm selbst mit großer Treue und
Aufrichtigkeit beschrieben, bis auf das Jahr 1562, Latin and German, introduced, ed. and
translated by Hermann Ehmer (Quellen und Forschungen zur württembergischen
Kirchengeschichte 10), (Stuttgart: 1991). It should be noted that Ehmer’s translation is
unreliable; he consistently forgoes including the “D.” of Andreae’s self-designation “D.
Jacobus” in his German rendering. Albeit irregularly, this also occurs without any appar-
ent reason in appellations of others with “D.” Cf. additionally, for example, 66 (missing
sentence), 76 (two small omissions). Quotations are given after this edition, translated
into English by Hannah Elmer. – Secondary literature see Jancke, Quellenkunde, sv “Jakob
Andreae,” e.g.: Heinrich Gürsching, “Jakob Andreae und seine Zeit,” in Blätter für
Württembergische Kirchengeschichte 54 (1954), 123–156; Rosemarie Müller-Streisand,
“Theologie und Kirchenpolitik bei Jakob Andreä bis zum Jahre 1568,” in Blätter für
Württembergische Kirchengeschichte 60/61 (1960/61), 224–395; Robert Kolb, Andreae and
the Formula of Concord. Six Sermons on the Way to Lutheran Unity (St. Louis: 1977); Jobst
Ebel, “Jacob Andreae (1528–1590) als Verfasser der Konkordienformel,” in: Zeitschrift für
Kirchengeschichte 89 (1978), 78–119; Martin Brecht, Art. “Andreae, Jakob (1528–1590),” in
Theologische Realenzyklopädie 2 (1978), 672–680; Siegfried Hermle, Reformation und
Gegenreformation in der Herrschaft Wiesensteig unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des
Beitrags von Jakob Andreae (Quellen und Forschungen zur württembergischen
Kirchengeschichte, vol. 14), (Munich: 1996).
the Electorate of Saxony. Andreae took part in many debates on ecclesiastical

policy and sought, in service to the duke of Württemberg, to create agreement
amongst Protestants. After many years of unsuccessful effort, he attained suc-
cess, under the condition of excluding the Philippists, with the 1577 compila-
tion and 1580 publication of the Formula of Concord. Andreae authored some
200 theological writings, mostly written in German and based extensively on
Johann Brenz, the most influential Lutheran theologian of his time in the
Württemberg duchy. His concern was the institutionalization of the
Lutheran state church closely supervised by secular authorities (reformatio in
politicis).28
Jakob Andreae, one of the most influential Lutheran theologians of the sec-
ond generation, wrote his autobiography in Latin sometime around 1586, sev-
eral years before his death. It is thus set apart from his other, primarily
German-language theological writings. He reports his life story in chronologi-
cal order from his birth up to the end of 1561. With few exceptions, Andreae
writes about himself in the third person (he constantly refers to himself as
“D[octor] Jacobus”). This formal decision means that he relinquishes the
opportunity to say “I,” and instead gives the statements about himself the
stamp of impersonal, objective reports. With the use of the third person, he
avails himself of a form of autobiography, common in humanist circles, which
is based on models from antiquity (Caesar, Commentarii).29 Likewise, he
rejects any personal formulation of the communicative situation for this text.
He makes no direct or indirect address to his readership, refuses to specify
who the readership might be, and does not articulate the intentions behind
his writing.
Nonetheless, these features of Andreae’s autobiography can also be under-
stood as an attempt to create a communicative situation. The choice to write in
Latin – instead of the German he predominantly used to disseminate his theo-
logical positions – shows that the author is looking for a readership amongst
the narrower circle of scholars and that he wants to present himself as a
scholar, in clear distinction from the uneducated masses. A family readership
is not thereby excluded but in all probability is limited to male family mem-
bers, to the extent that they possessed a higher level of education. With his
autobiography, the author thus turns to academically trained addressees who
are quite likely to be theologians like himself, either from the immediate
(familial) or broader (in Tübingen, Württemberg) environment.
28 Gürsching, Jakob Andreae und seine Zeit, 131 and 153.

29 Cf. IJsewijn, Humanistic Autobiography, 211.
148 Jancke
The refusal expressly to name and address a particular readership, as well as

the choice of the third-person form, gives his text the appearance of being free
from attachment to a concrete person, writing with intentions and interests, as
well as free from being oriented to the particular expectations of a readership.
The social relationships in which the author positions himself, his text and his
addressees are not articulated in the direct form of “I,” “you” and “we,” in which
they would visibly belong to his own position and his personal concept of social
relations. Rather, through the use of the third person, the author withdraws
from his text as writer and remains there only as the one who is described. He
refuses to indicate himself as the person responsible for the concept of social
relations as narrated, and he removes himself as a conversation partner.
The intentions pursued by Andreae in his autobiography can thus only be
determined indirectly by examining the content. An initial indicator is the
period of his report, which stretches from his birth in 1528 to his return from
religious negotiations in France in 1561. This is the period in which he is edu-
cated, starts a family, takes up his first professional activities, and establishes
himself as one of the most influential theologians in the Duchy of Württemberg
and from there also in the Empire. This is also the period in which Andreae
“twice advanced his own initiatives, which threatened to bring him into antag-
onism with the existing church order and the theological orientation of
Württemberg.”30 On both occasions, Andreae conformed to the more influen-
tial position (1554 and 1559). From then on, he consistently represented the
territorial lord’s church policy, at times even more strictly than the sovereign
himself.31 The autobiography mentions neither point of conflict – one regard-
ing the organization of church discipline, in which Andreae was against a cen-
tral structure, the other regarding sacramental theology, in which Andreae
attempted to position himself more closely with Calvin and Beza.32 On the
contrary, the author describes this phase of his life as an unbroken chain of
obedient service to the wishes of his territorial lord.
A further indicator can be found in the highlighted themes. Family life plays
a marginal role in Andreae’s autobiography, only to the extent that it has
significance for his professional life. The focus, rather, is on his professional
life, where in turn the author throws far more light on his relationships with
influential people (those whose territories he co-reformed, the Duke of
30 Brecht, Art. Andreae, Jakob, 673.

31 Ibid. 678.
32 Müller-Streisand, Theologie und Kirchenpolitik, 257–266 (church discipline), 282–303
(doctrine of the Lord’s Supper).
Württemberg, city honoraries) than on his relationships with those for whom
the pastor Andreae served as a preacher, shepherd of souls or superintendent.
The author thus presents to his familial or extra-familial colleagues a life as his
own, whose focus falls particularly on assignments from his territorial lord
within his professional work, and he describes this work as constantly oriented
toward his superiors. Furthermore, he emphasizes the continuity of the creed
which he espouses.
In this autobiography written in the last years of his life, Andreae thus aims
to provide witness to his life and his belief, just as he did in verbal form numer-
ous times before his death.33 This account-taking, on the one hand, is meant to
serve as a defense against critiques of the life of this influential churchman of
Württemberg. On the other hand, his autobiography, particularly through his
self-presentation as a constant and loyal servant of his territorial lord, may
have been of use to the male addressees in his family circle, who may have
wanted to serve the territorial lord and could thus point to the performance
and loyalty of their forebear.34 Ultimately, the author presents his life story in a
form which excludes his “I” from the communicative situation and in many
respects makes his person invisible, even in terms of content. In the concept of
social relations as practiced through his writing, he seeks to make himself elu-
sive through his non-presence. His autobiographical self-description as a man
directed by the authorities of Württemberg lends this concept an argumenta-
tive basis in narrative form.
(2) Content: Andreae subdivided his autobiography into segments of differ-
ing lengths, each introduced by a heading. About a quarter of the text is
devoted to the years before 1553, when he received his doctorate and was called
to be pastor and superintendent in Göppingen. Prior to that, he reports on his
parents, his childhood, his education and his first employment as a catechist
and a deacon. He briefly alludes to his marriage, but without mentioning his
33 Ehmer, ed., Leben des Jakob Andreae, 8.

34 Such cases, where the son or nephew of a man employed in the prince’s service calls
upon the loyal service of his father or uncle in order to receive a position for himself,
a monetary payment or at least a letter of reference, can be found in: Hans Bachmann,
“Dr. Johann Peter Merenda. Aus dem Leben eines Innsbrucker Hofarztes, 1542 bis 1567,”
in Tiroler Heimatblätter 28 (1953), 5–10, here 9f. and n. 36; Maximilian Lanzinner, Fürst,
Räte und Landstände. Die Entstehung der Zentralbehörden in Bayern 1511–1598
(Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, vol. 61), (Göttingen: 1980),
138; Simon Teuscher, Bekannte – Klienten – Verwandte. Soziabilität und Politik in der Stadt
Bern um 1500 (Norm und Struktur, vol. 9), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 1998), 80 and n.
36, 107 and n. 168, 138 and n. 4; esp. ch. 8.2: “Besondere Beziehungen: Bitten und Verdienen,”
207–218, here 209f.
150 Jancke
parents again. In what follows, his growing family – 18 children were born to
the couple – is rarely mentioned. For the remainder of the period covered by
the autobiography (1553–1561), which exactly corresponds to his tenure in
Göppingen, his employment as pastor and superintendent finds next to no
mention in his text. By contrast, the author extensively discusses his work on
various assignments which he received from the Duke of Württemberg or for
which he was released from other duties by the Duke. Of greatest importance
to him is the reformation of the surrounding territories as well as his participa-
tion in religious debates.
In the representation of his activities as a reformer of the surrounding
territories, the author mostly mentions only his appointment by the relevant
territorial lords, such as by the Count of Öttingen in 1558:
And as Count Ludwig [XVI] of Öttingen, son of Count Ludwig [XV] the
elder, together with his brothers succeeded his father in the inheritance
of his part of the country, which still belonged to him after the reconcili-
ation with Emperor Charles V, he called D. Jacob a few times from
Göppingen to him at the castle of Alerheim and to Nördlingen.
ehmer, ed., 52 (Latin)/ 53 (German)
In the case of Öttingen, the first reformation assignment reported in his

autobiography, Andreae pointedly mentions that he had to be released by his own
sovereign for each task and that he also received special instructions from the
Duke with regards to his activity. In what follows, however, he mostly omits this:
The good and pious Duke Christoph of Württemberg, however, had given
him a separate, signed writing; if Count Ludwig were to think to take the
ecclesiastical goods of the convents and use them for his own conve-
nience, D. Jakob was not to assist with any advice, but should immedi-
ately return home.
ehmer, ed, ibid.
Andreae restricts himself to information about his activities on sovereign

assignments. He does not express his own ideas, initiatives or assessments; he
thus completely avoids providing his own perspective, which, as the author, he
could have introduced into the text well after the event. The author represents
the active Andreae as an instrument of his superiors and does not adopt any
stance, even retrospectively, on the description of his role.
In his autobiography, the author describes certain, selected parts of his
life. The criterion for such choices does not arise from the basics of his daily
life – his marriage and family as well as his work as pastor, shepherd of souls
and superior. These are precisely fields that he largely omits. The selection of
topics for his text has far more to do with two criteria: First, what the author
considers important is what takes him away from his daily life and work,
namely the particular assignments his sovereign has for him, which raise
Andreae above the crowd of common pastors as well as other superintendents.
Second, the author considers important those things that threaten to disturb
the functioning of his daily life and employment, such as his wife’s life-threat-
ening illness or his departure on a mission to France. In both of these cases, the
threat of the mother’s or father’s death causes the author to write down his
thoughts about how his house would continue to function.35
After the author leaves his wife’s sickbed on yet another official trip, he begs
God to extend her life, because – according to his reasoning in the text – he is
so frequently away from home that he himself could not adequately run his
house:
When D. Jakob saw this and was called at this time to Count Ulrich von
Helfenstein, he was most distressed by the mortal danger facing his
wife. Riding between the places of Grübingen and Wiesensteig, he
prayed fervently to God, that God have mercy on him [unclear – possi-
bly here also “her”] and his [or her] children, whose father could preside
over their daily upbringing only with great difficulty on account of his
frequent travels, by returning her to health and by extending the days of
her life.
ehmer, ed., 66/67
35 On the necessity of the mother and father of the house for its functioning, see Michael
Mitterauer, “Die Entwicklung zum modernen Familienzyklus,” in Vom Patriarchat zur
Partnerschaft. Zum Strukturwandel der Familie, ed. idem and Reinhard Sieder, 3rd edn
(Munich: 1984), 64–91; Wunder, He Is the Sun, 63–84. On the topic of house(hold) and on
the term of father connoting various notions of rule cf. Otto Brunner, “Das ‘Ganze Haus’
und die alteuropäische ‘Ökonomik’,” in Neue Wege der Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte,
ed. idem, 3rd edn (Göttingen: 1980), 103–127; Claudia Opitz, “Neue Wege der
Sozialgeschichte? Ein kritischer Blick auf Otto Brunners Konzept des ‘ganzen Hauses’,”
Geschichte und Gesellschaft 20 (1994), 88–98; Paul Münch, “Die ‘Obrigkeit im Vaterstand’ –
zu Definition und Kritik des ‘Landesvaters’ während der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Daphnis 11
(1982), 15–40; Joel F. Harrington, “Hausvater and Landesvater: Paternalism and Marriage
Reform in Sixteenth-Century Germany,” Central European History 25, 1 (1992), 52–75;
Kristin Eldyss Sorensen Zapalac, “In His Image and Likeness.” Political Iconography and
Religious Change in Regensburg, 1500–1600 (Ithaca and London: 1990); Lyndal Roper, The
Holy Household. Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: 1989).
152 Jancke
The threat to his house is differently articulated in the case of his own death.
Since his wife in any case stands in for him at home during his many trips, his
physical absence from the home is not the problem. His death, however,
could endanger the material wellbeing of the household, including wife, chil-
dren and servants. In addition to exhorting his children and servants to
respect the wife and mother of the house and to obey her, Andreae addresses
the question of maintenance in his farewell speech when he departs for
France: in case he himself should die, God the Father will take care of them;
further, they should not despair of receiving support from Duke Christoph of
Württemberg, since he has promised always to remember the services of
Andreae with gratitude:
He exhorted them above all to be pious before God, to listen frequently to

the sermons, to pray for him diligently and for the mother to devote her-
self above all to the upbringing of the children. The children should
revere and honor their mother and for fear of God obey her in everything;
they should not trouble her in any way, live peacefully, piously, chastely,
uprightly and humbly among themselves and with all others, inside and
outside of the house, and they should never doubt, should he not return
from France, that the Lord would be a true father to them and would care
for them even better than if the father were still alive. Furthermore, they
should not doubt the merciful disposition of Duke Christoph towards
them, who had promised him, D. Jakob, generously that even if the trip
should fail, he would always remember this service and would prove him-
self thus to his wife and children that they would recognize his Highness
as being very grateful for D. Jakob’s readiness for this trip.
ehmer, ed.,102f/103f.
Andreae represents his life in his autobiography as a chain of exceptional

events. By contrast, he describes ordinary life incidents only in cases of their
disruption. He thus characterizes the two areas of his life, family and career, in
terms of very different understandings of disruption. While the family is men-
tioned in terms of threats to its existence, the disruptions to his daily work are
consistently described as having a positive value for him – especially his work
on assignment for his sovereign. His autobiography is thus a formulation of the
process by which he was lifted out of the network of daily familial relations as
the father of the house and out of his daily occupation as pastor. Andreae’s
quotidian social relations, meanwhile, are given little weight in his text: he
barely mentions his family, his parish or the other pastors under his direction
in Göppingen.
Mentioned just as seldom in his autobiography are the effects his deeds
have on other people. In describing his reforming work in Jebenhausen, the
author accentuates his ability to evaluate the consequences of his acts and
attune himself accordingly. His cautiousness, however, relates exclusively to
the Lord of Jebenhausen, whose desires and notions he seeks to oblige (Ehmer
ed. 88–92). In a few passages of the text, the author does make clear that his
actions, recognizable to himself, also have an impact on people who are not
positioned at the level of lords and masters. I want to mention three examples,
each to do with a particular religious group with whom Andreae was involved.
The first example relates to the Anabaptists, who had obviously made
arrangements with the magistrate of the Electoral Palatinate in the region of
Worms.36 In 1557 a discussion between Brenz and Andreae on the one hand
and the Anabaptists on the other was to have taken place by command from
the Elector. From the beginning, it was not about a discussion between two
groups, but rather about the attempt of one group – the Württemberg theolo-
gians gathered by the Elector for this purpose – to overpower the other group
by means of debate:
For this, 39 representatives of the Anabaptists from the Palatinate

appeared in order to defend their errors. Since the bailiff in Alzey, a noble,
seemed inclined towards their side, after receiving permission from
Brenz, D. Jakob presented their leader the following question, for which
he demanded a clear answer: if the noble bailiff of the Palatinate Count
sitting here were to order a thief to be hung on the gallows and a robber
to be twisted on the wheel, could he be considered a Christian? The rep-
resentative long attempted to evade this and wanted to know why the
question was necessary. But when he was asked by D. Jacob if he consid-
ered that one in this office to be better than the Turk, the representative
answered that he did not consider him better than the Turk. When he
heard this, the bailiff flared up, scolded him rather sharply and afterwards
showed them no sign of favor any more but rather abhorred their
godlessness.
ehmer, ed., 72/73
36 Müller-Streisand, Theologie und Kirchenpolitik, 306f.: the instructions from Duke

Christoph to Andreae explained that he should at most listen to the conversation, but not
partake in it himself. According to Müller-Streisand, Andreae’s behavior in conversation,
here autobiographically described, is typical for the later Andreae, namely, “to show the
opponent to authority as ‘subversive against the state’, and, if possible, to demonstrate his
dangerousness,” ibid., 307 n. 257.
154 Jancke
In the case of the Palatinate Anabaptists, Andreae did not use his theological
training and his communicative capabilities with diplomatic regard for the
situation of his counterparts. Rather, he showed himself to be a merciless
opponent who strategically used his knowledge of the participants’ value sys-
tems to harm the Anabaptists in front of their direct superiors. A further effect
of his strategy was that the involved authority – the bailiff of Alzey – could
unambiguously be brought to the side of the Palatinate sovereign and the
Lutheran theologians from Württemberg whom the sovereign had fetched,
and that he could be made into a clear opponent of the Anabaptists he had
previously protected.37
Andreae’s approach makes it clear that, when it comes to the theological
differences between Anabaptists and Lutherans, it is not about exchanging
argument and counter-argument. In the actions of the secular and church
authorities, the religious difference of opinion acquires a significance that
exceeds religion and goes to basic questions of socio-political structures. As
the previously peaceful co-existence between the Anabaptists and the bailiff
in Alzey shows, it is only because of the authorities’ actions at this point and
the kind of approach they take that the differing religious views become a
political issue which poses the decisive question of loyalty to the superiors.
Andreae, similarly, does not report on his own theological argumentation; his
question refers exclusively to the political dimension of the antagonism. He
thus describes his role here in terms of being an effective instrument of the
political elite. In addition, he emphasizes his own initiative on this occasion:
he relates that he requested that the leadership role in the debate be trans-
ferred to him from his erstwhile superior Brenz, so that he could put his own
ideas about appropriate strategies into effect.
The second example has to do with two Jews who were arrested and con-
victed for burglary by the Catholic lord of Rechberg in Weissenstein. One of the
37 On the Pfeddersheim discussion of 1559, which took place still during the rule of Count
Palatine Ottheinrich and with his endorsement, cf. Ernst Friedrich Peter Güß,
Die Kurpfälzische Regierung und das Täufertum bis zum Dreißigjährigen Krieg
(Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für geschichtliche Landeskunde in Baden-
Württemberg, series B, vol. 12), (Stuttgart: 1960), 50f., where, of the Lutheran theologians,
only Marbach, representing the Strasbourg church, is named, and the entire episode
reported by Andreae goes unmentioned. For Johannes Brenz’s stance towards the
Anabaptists, which Andreae here clearly invokes, cf. Gottfried Seebaß, “An sint perse-
quendi haeretici? Die Stellung des Johannes Brenz zur Verfolgung und Bestrafung der
Täufer,” in Blätter für Württembergische Kirchengeschichte 70 (1970), 40–99; on Andreae’s
position towards the Anabaptists: Dennis Slabaugh, “Die Predigt als Waffe. Jakob Andreae
gegen die Täufer,” in Mennonitische Geschichtsblätter 52 (1995), 24–39.
two agreed to be baptized by a Catholic priest and was thus pardoned, while
the other remained true to his faith and was due to be hanged. The author
records that there were two reasons why he left Göppingen for nearby
Weissenstein:38
Moved by this news, D. Jacob also went there, desiring partly to see this
punishment and partly to know in which faith he would die.
ehmer, ed., 92/93
On the one hand, he thus wanted to see the special means of execution used
for Jews, which involved hanging the condemned man by his feet between two
dogs hanging to his right and left, who would then maul the delinquent.39 The
author describes this means of execution and comments, “Spectaculum mise-
rabile” (a wretched spectacle) (ibid.). On the other hand, Andreae wanted to
know which religion the Jew would embrace on his death. He thus assumed
that further conversion attempts by the local clergy could still lead to a “suc-
cessful” outcome, and he took a lively interest in the battle of wills between the
condemned man and the priests (“cupiens… cognoscere”: “desiring… to know”).
First he learns with appreciation that his Catholic counterparts have dispensed
with denominational specificity in their conversion attempts and are making
do with general statements of Christian belief, which meets with the Protestant
Andreae’s approval. (The notion of there being a common pool of Christian
doctrinal statements, as seen here, appears in Andreae’s autobiography only in
38 Cf. Müller-Streisand, Theologie und Kirchenpolitik, 267–271. – Ibid., 270f. n. 146, she cites
two opposing positions by Andreae on the use of violence in conversion attempts: in
respect of the Catholics, as potentially stronger party than his own, he urges their forgo-
ing the violence; in respect of the Anabaptists, as the weaker group, he maintains the right
to implement violence by his own group.
39 Stefan Schreiner, “Der Fall des Juden Ansteet − zugleich ein Beispiel protestantischer
Inquisition,” in: Judaica 37 (1981), 90–102 (contains Andreae’s report). – See also Guido
Kisch, “The ‘Jewish Execution’ in Mediaeval Germany and the Reception of Roman Law,”
in Historia Judaica 5 (1943), 103–132, repr. in: idem, Forschungen zur Rechts-, Wirtschafts-
und Sozialgeschichte der Juden. Mit einem Verzeichnis der Schriften von Guido Kisch zur
Rechts- und Sozialgeschichte der Juden. (Ausgewählte Schriften 2), (Sigmaringen: 1979),
165–193, on conversion during execution and clerical involvement with such “conver-
sions,” ibid., 192f. and 193 n. 3; further Markus J. Wenninger, Man bedarf keiner Juden mehr.
Ursachen und Hintergründe ihrer Vertreibung aus den deutschen Reichsstädten im 15.
Jahrhundert (Beihefte zum Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 14), (Vienna, Cologne and Graz:
1981), 57; R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder. Jews and Magic in Reformation
Germany (New Haven and London: 1988), 26 and n. 31; 28, illustration 3.
156 Jancke
this passage, on the occasion of collective Christian procedures against Jewish

people. By contrast, in his dealings with Protestant minorities like the
Anabaptists he simply does not apply this idea, which could have facilitated
tolerance.) The Jew’s faith, however, remains unshaken. Neither the priests’
addresses nor the biting of the dogs prevents him from singing Hebrew psalms
and calling on the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for mercy:
But nothing, neither the pain caused by the dog’s bites, nor the exclama-
tions of the priests [the Latin “sacrificuli” is clearly pejorative] brought
anything about with him.
ehmer, ibid.
After the Catholic theologians are not able to bring the Jew into line, the parish
priest requests Andreae to make an attempt:
When, however, the Weissenstein priest (who loved in his heart the
teachings of the Gospels but did not dare to confess this before his lord)
saw D. Jakob standing nearby, he came to him and urgently requested
that he speak to the poor Jew, that if perhaps the Lord showed him grace,
his soul could be snatched from the jaws of the devil. Even though D.
Jakob could only be persuaded with difficulty, since he was on foreign
territory and concerning his religion was of different faith from theirs, he
was nonetheless moved to address the Jew by the pleas of the friends
standing by him.
ehmer, ed., ibid.
The author stresses that it took much persuasion on the part of the Catholic
priests and bystanders to move him to action. He explains his hesitation on the
grounds that he finds himself in alien territory, where he is moreover not in agree-
ment with the predominant denomination. This argument relates to the difficul-
ties he could have experienced with the ruling powers there on account of his
unauthorized involvement. It remains, however, the only protest that the author
makes against undertaking to obtain a conversion under conditions similar to
torture. Andreae then extensively describes the train of thought behind his con-
version preaching. His attempt is successful, and the parish priest next secures
the permission of the regional lord for the baptism and carries it out. The execu-
tion is interrupted for this purpose and ends with strangulation. In conclusion,
the author emphasizes how many witnesses there were to his “successful” deed
and mentions that he wrote an extensive report about the conversion, at the
request of the Duke of Württemberg’s steward, and had it printed (Ehmer ed. 96).
The author obviously considers this episode of his life to be an achievement

that was justifiably appreciated by everyone and hence deserves to be high-
lighted again in his autobiography. The value of the enforced baptism is in no
way diminished for the author by the fact that, in his miserable situation, the
Jew who finally converted ultimately had, in all probability, no chance but to
succumb to the subjugating efforts of both denominations of the combined
Christian clergy. As he himself relates, Andreae was not alone in his assess-
ment of which behavior of Christians toward Jews was adequate and even
exemplary. He can invoke the support of a broad Christian consensus, up to the
highest levels of power: the steward (Landhofmeister) von Gültlingen requested
a written report from Andreae, upon which Gültlingen – as Andreae is at pains
to point out – had the brochure printed (Ehmer ed. 96).
Unlike the conflict with the Anabaptists, in this case the theological debate
is important to Andreae, so much so that he reproduces his argumentation in
detail. Against the Palatinate Anabaptists, who were assured of the support of
their bailiff until Andreae’s intervention, he refused to enter into theological
altercation, relying instead on the authorities’ fears of disloyalty amongst their
subjects. In response to the single Jew, who was executed after a protracted,
painful process and had already had to put up with attempts at conversion by
several other clergy, Andreae credits the theological argumentation with
enough persuasive power to be used as a suitable means to an end. Setting the
two passages of his autobiography side by side allows us to see the author’s
instrumental approach to theological content: depending on the power rela-
tions in a given situation, he decides either for or against the use of theological
arguments.
The third example relates to the nuns of the Cistercian convent in Lauingen.
At the instigation of Count Palatine Wolfgang von Zweibrücken, Andreae
worked as a reformer in his seat in Lauingen in 1560. As the crowning achieve-
ment of his efforts, he reports,
There were at this time also nuns in that city [Lauingen], in whose church
D. Jakob held sermons in which he explained the rule that the Savior and
his apostles had given all true believers and confessors of Christ. He
showed the ways this rule differed from the nuns’ rule through precise
comparison. Even though the nuns heard his sermons, and a few, espe-
cially the young ones, were not averse to this, the elder ones were none-
theless encouraged in their errors by the Dillingen papists and intended
to leave the convent. When this had happened, Duke Wolfgang gave it a
better assignment and established there an excellent school, in which the
youth were educated in all academic studies, especially theology [in the
158 Jancke
text: imprimis vero – i.e., theology was not part of humanitas and litterae
for him], so that he would have people, whose services he could use to
spread the true teachings in the churches and schools and to preserve
blissful unanimity therein [among the learned].
ehmer, ed., 98/99, with corrections
Once again, Andreae accentuates the theological aspect of his attempts at per-
suasion. He thus presumes that the addressees of his sermons can be won over
by the arguments, which in turn means that they must have their own theo-
logical opinion. However, it was obviously not the credibility of his argumenta-
tion which brought about the dissolution of the convent. Only a few of the
younger nuns took a somewhat more accommodating view than pure defen-
siveness (“quaedam… non abhorrerent,” “a few… were not averse”), while the
older nuns proved to be wholly unimpressed. The author ascribes this, how-
ever, only partly to them; rather, he emphasizes the influence of external
Catholics. As a result of his endeavors, he claims, the nuns ultimately left the
convent – how voluntarily they did so and how much of their possessions they
were allowed to take with them is something that he fails to mention.40
(Autobiographical reports from convents of the Reformation era describe in
detail the violence and injustices practiced on the side of the reformers.41)
40 On the Cistercian convent of St. Agnes in Lauingen cf. Siegrid Westphal, Frau und
lutherische Konfessionalisierung. Eine Untersuchung zum Fürstentum Pfalz-Neuburg, 1542–
1614 (Europäische Hochschulschriften III/594), (Frankfurt a. M. etc.: 1994) 131f., as well as
on the complex of incidents of the years 1561f., referred to by Andreae here (Ehmer, ed.,
98/99), which led to the nuns’ flight and the dissolution of the convent, ibid. 153–161;
Andreae is not mentioned here.
41 Cf. the autobiographical accounts by Wibrat Mörli, named Fluri, and Charitas Pirckheimer,
see Gabriel Meier, “Bericht über das Frauenkloster St. Leonhard in St. Gallen von der Frau
Mutter Wiborada Fluri 1524–1538,” in Anzeiger für Schweizerische Geschichte 46 (1915),
14–44; “Die Denkwürdigkeiten” der Caritas Pirckheimer (aus den Jahren 1524–1528), critical
ed. by Josef Pfanner (Caritas Pirckheimer-Quellensammlung 2), (Landshut: 1962); cf.
Alice Zimmerli-Witschi, Frauen in der Reformationszeit (Zurich: 1981), 22–29 (Mörli);
Angelika Nowicki-Pastuschka, Frauen in der Reformation. Untersuchungen zum Verhalten
von Frauen in den Reichsstädten Augsburg und Nürnberg zur reformatorischen Bewegung
zwischen 1517 und 1537 (Forum Frauengeschichte 2), (Pfaffenweiler: 1990), 61–63 and 81–85
(Pirckheimer); Paula S. Datsko Barker, “Caritas Pirckheimer: A Female Humanist
Confronts the Reformation,” in Sixteenth Century Journal 26 (1995), 259–272; Ulrike
Strasser, “Brides of Christ, Daughters of Men: Nuremberg Poor Clares in Defense of Their
Identity (1524–1529),” in Magistra 1, 2 (1995), 193–248. The project of a Lutheran convent-
reformation, which was developed by a part of the nuns of the Freiberg convent of the
order of St. Mary Magdalene is related to this. For more details see Gabriele Jancke,
The author concludes by noting the new purpose of the convent with clear
satisfaction. The count palatine transformed it (presumably including the
goods and revenues that belonged to it) into a school of higher learning for
young men, particularly for the purposes of theological education. Andreae’s
brief comments about this provide a very precise formulation of the effects
wrought by Reformation changes on the scope of action as well as educational
opportunities for women and men. The closure of the convent meant an irre-
placeable loss for the women who lived there, while in many cases the redesig-
nated convents, as in Lauingen, opened up additional educational and
advancement pathways for men, which they could reserve for themselves
without any return for the women who were shut out. The author has only
words of appreciation for this important structural change.
Andreae’s concept of social relations as narrated is graphically mani-
fested by the three exemplified representations of his dealings with other
religious groups who are fully without the support of the ruling powers
or who can be stripped of this support. The author presents himself as
an effective instrument of the ruling powers, who with his help seek a
wide-reaching, authoritative grip on various social areas. He rarely ascribes
initiative to himself; on only one occasion is an initiative of his critical of an
authority and then so as to establish its conformity with a higher authority.
By contrast, he presents himself as uncompromising and power-oriented in
his relations with weaker people. The content of his autobiography thus
positions him as being oriented toward his superiors, dependent and with-
out scope of action when it comes to those above him, but with scope of
action when it comes to those below. In his autobiography, the church offi-
cial Andreae describes his application of theology as an instrument of
power; here, too, he subjugates his own professional and personal identity to
his secular masters. The concepts of social relations presented through the
form and content of his text complement one another: Andreae offers a
model of a church politician who is fully dependent on his sovereign and
serves him loyally; he deals with underlings according to the ruling interests
of those in power on the one hand and their usefulness to the bureaucratic
apparatus of power on the other. Beyond the function of a legitimizing self-
representation, this model offers potential readers an unambiguous orienta-
tion in the system of territorial lordships.
“Ursula von Münsterberg und der Versuch einer Reformation des Freiberger
Magdalenerinnenklosters,” in “… so sie vermeinen/vns das maul gestopfft haben/Wir sagen
aber nein dazu.” Frauen in der Kirchengeschichte Sachsens. Ein Lesebuch, ed. Iris Schilke
and Ursula August (Dresden: 1997), 23–40.
160 Jancke
What has the analysis of these three examples shown? First and foremost, it
has made obvious that generalizing statements cannot be made about the
autobiographical text without taking the multiplicity of its forms, functions
and contents into consideration. Before any general statement can be made, it
is necessary to clarify the specific situation, the intention as well as the argu-
ment structure of each individual text.
Thus, careful analysis of the examples has led to the insight that all three
texts are firmly anchored in networks of relationships, a point which can be
differentiated in three respects. First, the sources reveal which relationships
provided the decisive impetus for each author to undertake writing her or his
autobiographical text. With Josel of Rosheim it is his involvement with the
Jewish community of Lower Alsace as well as the Jews of the Empire on the
one hand and his relationship with the Christian authorities as opponents and
negotiation partners on the other. He describes his role in this network of rela-
tionships as that of an elected Jewish representative and member of an execu-
tive committee in the specialized function of the shtadlan, who represents the
political interests of the Jewish community/ies to those outside it. With
Katharina Zell it is her relationship to Ludwig Rabus, now superintendent of
Ulm, as both his erstwhile patroness42 and a simple parishioner on the one
hand, and her relationship to her fellow citizens in Strasbourg on the other.
She describes her role in this network of relationships as an informal voice for
the parishioners of Strasbourg against Rabus, the holder of theological office,
as well as several of his colleagues; she is qualified to speak by her many years of
service in the parish, her autodidactic theological education, the recognition
42 For more on patronage as a crucial form of relationship in early modern society, see
Werner L. Gundersheimer, “Patronage in the Renaissance: An Explanatory Approach,” in
Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton: 1981),
3–23; Ronald Weissman, “Taking Patronage Seriously: Mediterranean Values and
Renaissance Society,” in Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. F.W. Kent and
Patricia Simons with J.C. Eade (Canberra and Oxford: 1987), 25–45; Guy Fitch Lytle,
“Friendship and Patronage in Renaissance Europe,” in ibid., 47–61. – The role of women in
patronage relationships has been analyzed up to now foremost for aristocratic patron-
esses; cf. among others: Sharon Kettering, “The Patronage Power of Early Modern French
Noblewomen,” Historical Journal 32 (1989), 817–841; Ina Schabert, Englische
Literaturgeschichte. Eine neue Darstellung aus der Sicht der Geschlechterforschung
(Kröners Taschenausgaben 387) (Stuttgart: 1997), ch. 3.2.: “Die Schreibordnung:
Autorisierende Frauen und männliche Autoren,” 98–121; eadem, “‘Artegall unter Radigund’
oder ‘Der Dichter, der wie eine Frau schreiben muß’,” in: Wunder/Engel, eds.,
Geschlechterperspektiven, 194–204; Catherine King, Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives
and Widows in Italy, 1300–1550 (Manchester: 1998); further Jancke: Autobiographie als
soziale Praxis, ch. 2.
accorded her by numerous theological officials and, not least, from force of
habit. With Jakob Andreae it is his connection to his territorial lord as the deci-
sive formative relationship that spans his entire life on the one hand and his
relationships with other theologians, characterized by competition and con-
trol as well as by theological and church-political disputes on the other. He
describes his role in this network of relationships as the unchanging, loyal ser-
vant of his sovereign, whose missions relating to the lords and subjects of other
territories, negotiation partners and opponents he is perfectly well able to
execute. In all three cases, a full, complex network of relations both constitutes
the environment of and provides the cause for writing the autobiographical
text. Territorialization, the Reformation and the bureaucratization of the state
and territorial churches are the broader social contexts that are condensed in
this network of relationships.
Second, the texts allow us to see that they were inserted into these networks
of relationships as communicative strategies with the objective of exerting
influence on the respective network from a self-selected position deemed to be
an important one. This is most clear in the case of Katharina Zell, but it is also
the case with Josel of Rosheim, even if this is less immediately clear. In his
repeated use of “we” throughout the memoir, he indicates that he is also includ-
ing other members of this group in the concepts of social relations and action
presented. In doing so, he manifests his own individual reminiscences as a col-
lective memory influenced by his social relationships.43 To the extent that he
transmits the described material “to memory,” he also reciprocally exerts influ-
ence on the social relationships of those who preserve this memory. Finally,
the approach of Andreae is completely indirect. His autobiography contains
neither statements about the intention of his text nor an address to his
intended readership; he does not even expressly designate himself in the first
person. By using the scholarly and humanistic language of Latin, which draws
on models from antiquity, as well as the third-person form and the particular
content selected, he purposefully seizes on a means that is well-suited for dif-
ferentiating between learned officials and the people, for disclaiming his own
positions and responsibilities, as well as for expressing his dependence on his
territorial lord. The conscious choice of such a means shows that he wishes to
influence the collective memory of those to whom the text is passed on, and
hence also their social relationships.
43 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago and London: 1992) (original in

French: Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, [Paris: 1925]); idem, The Collective Memory (New
York: 1980) (first French: La mémoire collective, [Paris: 1950]); Yerushalmi, Zakhor and
Funkenstein, Perceptions.
162 Jancke
Thirdly, the selves of the texts (including the autobiographical third person
in Andreae’s text) turn out to be bearers of different concepts of social rela-
tions. It is not sufficient, however, to derive such concepts directly from the
social position and role of those who articulate them and hence to see them as
automatic social standards, for this does not do justice to the individual spheres
of activity made manifest in these texts. Each of the three examples introduces
alternative possibilities for how such spheres might be navigated, although the
decision each author makes for her/himself is represented as the best or even
the only correct one. Josel of Rosheim shows this in the first part of his mem-
oirs, where, due to the lack of pan-Empire undertakings of the kind that he
himself would later conduct as shtadlan, Christian assaults of unmediated vio-
lence impacted on Jewish existence. Katharina Zell repeatedly emphasizes
that, unlike her, other women did not even attempt to engage with the church
in a theologically reflexive way and that she herself had to tackle restrictions
on how women were able to communicate. Jakob Andreae is admittedly silent
about the dissenting positions he at times took up against the prevailing direc-
tion of church politics and hence about the different course that his life could
have taken. However, the very fact that the general superintendent Andreae
has opponents to combat indirectly shows that alternative theological options
and concepts of social relations were possible in his environment and thus also
for him. In addition, several passages reveal that he did have scope for action
and indicate what he made of this scope, such as the description of his han-
dling of the Anabaptists as well as the Jew condemned to death.
For all the differences amongst the autobiographical texts analyzed here,
there are also similarities amongst the three. They are all concerned with the
power relations of church and state in their society, and they want to inter-
vene, from their various positions, in the processes of change within which
these power structures exist. Josel of Rosheim, who as a Jew belongs to a minor-
ity, aims to help the Jewish communities of the Empire escape banishment
and threats to their existence. He thus strikes back at the territorial lords and
cities that seek to eliminate the Jews as part of their politics of territorializa-
tion. His opportunities for action come with his interventions in (emergency)
case after (emergency) case, primarily addressing the emperor as the only rela-
tively reliable confederate on the Christian side. Ultimately, however, he is
directed alone toward God, who for him offers the only truly reliable guarantee
of help and support, and toward the rabbinical interpretation of the Torah.
Katharina Zell, acting as a pastor’s wife from a position of instability within
Christian majority society, aims to achieve egalitarian church structures. In
response to the hardening of hierarchical relations, her opportunity for action
comes with criticizing the holders of theological office in a series of graduated
steps. The verbal or written private remonstration is followed by the written

and public attempt to change power relations within the church by argumen-
tation. Her sphere of activity is the church, understood as a house, and the
city’s Christian public, which she seeks to mobilize as a critical entity. In
the process, she orients herself towards the interpretation of the Bible by the
Reformers as well as by herself. For her, too, God is the final and only reliable
guarantee of support and confirmation. Jakob Andreae, employed as pastor
and general superintendent in a stable position invested with considerable
power, seeks success within the newly developed territorial church bureau-
cracy of his territory. His opportunities for action are comprised of various
means of implementing his sovereign’s wishes as well as by his own scope for
decision-making with regard to the occasion and kind of interventions he
makes. He is thus directed toward his territorial lord – on whose decisions and
material resources he represents himself as being fully dependent – and toward
authority as such. This direction is not represented in his autobiography as
being grounded in theology; however, as he writes occasionally about God as
his helper, he nudges his activity indirectly toward the benevolent sphere of
divine support.
All three autobiographical texts thematize power relations and the shifts
they undergo. In doing so, the autobiographical perspective of these sources
makes the authors’ own experiences and desires within this process manifest.
It becomes clear that the historical change in this era is a differentiated phe-
nomenon with quite different effects for various groups of the population. For
some – who are not here fully represented by Josel of Rosheim and Katharina
Zell (in her assessment of the present) – aspects of suffering and constraint
come to the fore. For others, the opportunities created by the historical change
count as the most important – here, too, they are only partially represented by
Jacob Andreae and Katharina Zell (in her assessment of the early Reformation
period). At the same time, all three describe the shift, whether suffered ill or
gladly, as a process created by humans which has nameable agents. They thus
insert themselves into a network of relationships as the counterparts of other
actors; they highlight responsibilities, make demands and attempt to influence
this network of relationships with their autobiographical texts. In all three
cases, the concept of social relations presented also has a theological dimen-
sion. In equal measure, even if in different ways, the autobiographical activi-
ties draw God into the thematized network of relationships as the guarantor of
the authors’ own existence and the authority who is being called upon in vari-
ous conflicts.
The three sources analyzed here have shown that the autobiographical
self is directed toward social relationships. Further detailed analyses of the
164 Jancke
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would, I believe, confirm this finding and
could make further refinements. In addition, the autobiographical genre in
this period exhibits a wide range of writing situations, forms and argumenta-
tion strategies, which I have here been able to illustrate only with examples.
Following from both of these observations, it is possible to return to the ques-
tion raised earlier about individuality as the defining point of the genre. Misch’s
conception of individuality associated with a singular personality and its self-
consciousness – like the corresponding counter-notion of typology – erases
the decisively important dimension of relationships and may thus overlook
crucial aspects of texts in this genre. The notion of individuality thus has to be
reformulated in connection with this aspect of relationality. One would have
to examine in detail the representation of spheres of activity, decisions and
responsibilities as well as concepts of the distribution of power in relation-
ships, such as I have begun to do here. With reference to the religious texts of
the twelfth century, the American historian Caroline Walker Bynum formu-
lates her answer to the question, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the
Individual?,” as follows: “I have argued that twelfth-century religious thinkers
stress individual decision, lifestyle, and experience as part of a search for insti-
tutions and practices that embody these, and that the goal of development
to a twelfth-century person is the application to the self of a model that is
simultaneously, exactly because it is a model, a mechanism for affiliation with
a group.”44
With reference to the autobiographical texts of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, Natalie Zemon Davis has given the lead with her precise remarks on
boundaries, relations, and the person: “For sixteenth-century France I have
mapped the boundary of the partriarchal [!] family beyond the individual per-
son and have pointed to apertures in the boundary of the person as important
conditions in defining the self. Especially I have urged the view that embed-
dedness did not preclude self-discovery, but rather prompted it…. The example
of the sixteenth century suggests the importance of seeing the person as part
of a field of relations and of being open to paths and modes for the constitu-
tion of the self different from those in nineteenth-century thought.”45
44 Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?,” in eadem,
Jesus as Mother. Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Los Angeles
and London: 1982) 82–109, here 108.
Reconstructing Individualism. Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed.
Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna and David E. Wellbery with Arnold I. Davidson, Ann
Swidler and Ian Watt (Stanford: 1986), 53–63, 332–335, here 63.
Recently, discussion has moved onwards, including now more complex

explorations of ways of individualization (Individualisierungsweisen) or close
examinations of the “social self” in specific social and political contexts.46 All
this seems to indicate that the autonomous individual which has been made
the centre of autobiography studies and of Western societies’ modern history
is a highly specific and particular concept of person: It is situated rather in
modern contexts and their concepts of society and the individual than in early
modern history. Thus it may make sense, as has been suggested, to begin to ask
questions about concepts of person and, especially, to shift the focus of our
attention from a self-centered individual to relational persons, embedded in
their own contexts and organizing their lives and practices according to their
own concepts of person, of sociality, of action, and of making sense through
practices and relations.47
46 Selbstzeugnisse in der Frühen Neuzeit. Individualisierungsweisen in interdisziplinärer

Perspektive, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz in cooperation with Elisabeth Müller-Luckner
(Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, vol. 68), (Munich, 2007); David Gary Shaw, Necessary
Conjunctions. The Social Self in Medieval England (The New Middle Ages), (New York and
Basingstoke: 2005); cf. also Karl A.E. Enenkel, Die Erfindung des Menschen. Die Auto
biographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus von Petrarca bis Lipsius (Berlin and New
York: 2008).
47 See the contribution of Gabriele Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich in this volume.
Condemning Oneself to Death
The Semantics of Suicide in Self-Narratives of the German
Enlightenment1
Andreas Bähr
In 1751, Christian Friedrich Illing, son of a chirurgus from Thorn in West Prussia,
left his native town in order to study medicine in Leipzig. However, the univer-
sity in the Saxon metropolis proved to be a poor choice. Illing allowed himself
to be led astray into drinking sprees and fornication, and these increasingly
affected his academic performance. After three years, the situation had become
unbearable. In Easter of 1754, Illing’s conscience awoke and relentlessly
rebuked him for the sins he had committed. Conscious of having squandered
his salvation in Leipzig, Illing intended to continue his studies at Göttingen, a
university town which was known as a place in which hard work and duty were
the order of the day. However, Illing’s hopes of a new beginning were quickly
dashed. The diligence of the students and professors at Göttingen only demon-
strated to him the extent and the irreversibility of his own failings. Faced with
this situation, as Illing wrote in a letter to his father, he “thus had no grace with
God.”2 On August 21, 1754, a few days after his arrival in Göttingen, Illing
“despaired”3 and committed suicide by shooting himself with a pistol.
In this article, I will examine the issue of suicide during the German
Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century. Already in this
brief outline of Illing’s hopelessness, we can detect a fundamental model:
In taking his own life, Illing obeyed the voice of a ‘tender’ conscience which
had condemned him to death for his moral offences. Since, in the past, Illing
had failed morally, and since, given this failure, he would not be able to avoid
1 This article presents some of the main findings of my book Der Richter im Ich. Die Semantik
der Selbsttötung in der Aufklärung [Judge within the Self: The Semantics of Self-Killing
in the Enlightenment] (Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte,
vol. 180), (Göttingen: 2002). It is a modified English version of my essay “Selbsttötung und
Selbsterhaltung. Die Semantik moralischer Ausweglosigkeit in der Aufklärung,” Das
achtzehnte Jahrhundert 28 (2004), 65–82. It was translated from the German by Tom Lampert
and Peter Carrier.
2 “…ich habe bei Gott so keine Gnade”: Illing’s letter to his father (8.21.1754), University Archive
Göttingen, GA D XXII 26, in Andreas Bähr, “‘Ich habe bei Gott so keine Gnade’: Die
Abschiedsbriefe des Medizinstudenten Christian Friedrich Illing (1754),” Historische
Anthropologie 6 (1998), 151–159, here 151 ff.; the citation is on 153. All excerpts from Illing’s
correspondence are quoted from this edition.
3 Illing’s letter to his father, 152: “Mit einem Worte ich verzweifele.”

Condemning Oneself To Death 167
similar failure in the future as well, suicide appeared to him to be the final
opportunity for moral action. Such a pronouncement points to the basic con-
ditions of the modern conscience in the second half of the eighteenth century.
It also indicates something significant about that conscience, for a revealing
problem emerges from it: although Illing justified his suicide as a morally nec-
essary act, it was for him, at the same time, the “most prohibited” means of
escaping his miserable condition.4 Even for Illing, his own suicide was a ‘self-
murder’ or Selbstmord. Thus, the act had the same moral significance for him
that Enlightened contemporaries attributed to suicide in general: As German
theologians, philosophers and anthropologists emphasized tirelessly, a person
who took his own life had fundamentally violated his duties to God and to
society. These duties were based upon man’s duty to himself: With the
Enlightened individual’s capacity to act as an autonomous moral subject, the
conservatio sui became the principal moral precept. Man was obliged to pre-
serve himself in order to be able to fulfil his duty to others.5 Only a person
whose conscience was asleep could kill himself; scrupulous people, on the
contrary, chose to stay alive.
By killing himself, Illing followed the voice of his conscience and, at
the same time, did something which his conscience strictly forbade. In what
follows, I will attempt to explain this paradox of the scrupulous suicide. I will
try to show the extent to which this paradox is the key to understanding
the (paradoxical) possibility of being condemned to death by one’s own
conscience; and I will try to show the extent to which this paradoxical possibil-
ity is the key to understanding the Enlightened duty to self-preservation –
a concept of moral subjectivity in which the subject retains his emancipa-
tory dignity by subjecting himself to those laws which he himself has
made. Historicizing the question of suicide for the German Enlightenment
means, in this context, grasping the historical specificity of Enlightened
thought from the perspective of the problem of suicide. Suicide can be under-
stood as an act describing hopelessness. This hopelessness becomes evident in
the aporias of its own justification, and these aporias, in turn, make evident the
aporias and limits of those categories according to which this hopelessness
was justified.
4 Ibid.
5 In this context, see the paradigmatic work Immanuel Kant, Die Metaphysik der Sitten
(Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6), ed. Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften
(Berlin: 1907), 203–491, in particular 417ff. [for an English translation, cf. Immanuel Kant, The
Metaphysics of Morals, introduction, translation, and notes by Mary Gregor (Cambridge and
New York: 1991)].
168 Bähr
I examine the principle of self-condemnation on the basis of self-narratives in

which Enlightened authors in Germany offered justifications as to why they
had decided to take their own lives. These texts represent different facets of the
modern conscience, a conscience whose genesis has been described by Heinz
D. Kittsteiner as a specifically modern process of the internalization of God.
Between Luther and Kant the search for grace [Gnade] by the repentant sinner
was transformed into the virtuous [tugendhaft] self-control of the autonomous
subject. Kittsteiner describes this development as a transformation of the con-
science’s temporal line of vision: if the Lutheran Reformational conscience,
according to Kittsteiner, simply looked into the past to those sins which a per-
son would always have to commit, the Kantian conscience looked forward.
This Kantian conscience thus demanded that those sins – for which the
Lutheran had had to request remission – not be committed in the first place.6
The self-descriptions which I have chosen here as representative7 examples
offer important insights into the temporal structure of the modern conscience,
for they present both lines of vision: in addition to Illing’s backward-looking
conscience, a voice is also expressed which justifies its own suicide through
virtuous foresight – with reference to Kant.
The examination of these examples, in turn, throws light upon the philo-
sophical-historical presuppositions underlying Kittsteiner’s own interpreta-
tion. We could cite Kittsteiner’s thesis of the modern internalization of
conscience in order to explain the possibility of condemning oneself to death
in categories of a histoire des mentalités, that is, to explain it as the result of a
process of “culpabilization,” as Jean Delumeau has described it for the late
Middle Ages and the early modern period.8 According to Delumeau, Protestant
religiosity played a major role for the “emergence of a Western guilt culture”
between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. It was in 1920 that Max
6 Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner, Die Entstehung des modernen Gewissens (Frankfurt a.M. and Leipzig:
1991), part B, 159ff. David Warren Sabean has further developed Kittsteiner’s thesis from a
historical anthropological perspective: Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village
Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: 1984), Chapter 2, in particular 91f.; cf. also
idem, “The Production of Self during the Age of Confessionalism,” Central European History
29 (1996), 1–18.
7 On the question of representativity, see below.
8 Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries
(New York: 1990), in particular 554. Kittsteiner refers to the term “culpabilization” e.g. in
Entstehung, 94ff., 356, 396ff.
Weber had associated the Protestant consciousness of guilt with a “disenchant-

ment of the world”: with the loss of magical and sacramental means to salva-
tion which left Protestant believers internally isolated and lonely.9 Even those
critics of the “Weber thesis,” who stress that the world of the early modern
Protestants had been further enchanted rather than disenchanted, hold the
Protestants’ search for salvation responsible for a specific increase of anxiety:
the increasing fear of the power of the devil.10 Aside from the debate over
when the beginning of the “disenchantment of the world” is dated – whether
during the Reformation or, according to Kittsteiner, during the Enlightenment11
– such interpretations suggest that the possibility of condemning oneself
arises in relation to a process of individualization, which, according to most of
these researchers, is directly connected with the spread of a Protestant con-
sciousness of sin and with an enlightened secularization of such a conscious-
ness in terms of moral and psychological self-reflection.
Already in the sixteenth century, critics addressed this Protestant notion of
inwardness leading into religious despair. Catholics of the Reformation era,
and then Robert Burton,12 for example, and finally Enlightenment thinkers
repeatedly observed Protestant believers who, in their search for justification,
had fallen into a religious melancholy which could have fatal consequences.
Emile Durkheim investigated this phenomenon and formulated a sociological
explanation for it.13 Markus Schär has further developed this thesis from a
psychohistorical perspective. Schär argues that the loss of direct external
authorities of grace – a loss which could bring scrupulous souls, desperate over
their own damnation, to implement the divine judgment themselves by com-
mitting suicide – was responsible for the long-term increase of the suicide rate
in early modern Zurich. For Schär as well, the demise of demonic-religious
9 Cf. Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, in idem,
Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen: 1988), vol. 1, 93–98 [for an English
translation cf. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated
by Talcott Parsons, with an introduction by Anthony Giddens (London and New York:
2001)].
10 Cf. in particular Robert W. Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the
‘Disenchantment’ of the World,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993), 475–494,
here 486f.
11 Cf. Kittsteiner, Entstehung, 31.
12 Cf. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), vol. 3, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner,
Nicolas K. Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford and New York: 1994), 411ff., in
particular 419.
13 Cf. Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, book 2, Chapter 2, transl. from the
French by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, ed. George Simpson (London: 1952).
170 Bähr
interpretations in the eighteenth century merely signified a secularization of

the internal surveillance authority.14
In the present article, I will examine the causal connection between suicide
and (Protestant) inwardness. In order to do this, I will leave the domain of his-
toire des mentalités and psychohistory and critically investigate the categories
employed in such causal explanations.15 This critique will be also directed
towards Jeffrey R. Watt, who criticizes the causal relation between Calvinist
religiosity and suicide from a psychohistorical perspective. Watt argues that
the basis for the increase in the number of suicides in the second half of the
eighteenth century does not lie in internalization, but rather, conversely, in a
secular dissolution of religious ties. Watt points, on the one hand, to the pre-
Enlightenment fear of the devil and the divine punishment of suicides, on the
other hand, to the integrative power of Reformation parishes.16 Against that I
will point to the cognitive possibilities which arise when we stop asking about
the ‘real’ causes of hopelessness.
Over the past decades, cultural historians have discovered the subject of sui-
cide as a special key to understanding the realities of historical societies. One
of the fundamental assumptions here has been that we should not regard the
causes, motivations and assessments of an individual’s final act as anthropo-
logical constants, but rather as cultural-historical variables. With this in mind,
the historical transformation of the world in which we live can be traced
through the changing reasons and assessments as to why humans either were
no longer able to live or no longer wanted to continue living in this world.17
14 Cf. Markus Schär, Seelennöte der Untertanen. Selbstmord, Melancholie und Religion im
Alten Zürich 1500–1800 (Zurich: 1985). Cf. also Samuel E. Sprott, The English Debate on
Suicide. From Donne to Hume (La Salle: 1961), in particular 48f.
15 The causal connection between Protestantism and suicide has already been contested by
H.C. Erik Midelfort, “Selbstmord im Urteil von Reformation und Gegenreformation,” in
Die katholische Konfessionalisierung, ed. Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling (Münster:
1995), 296–310. Midelfort stresses that the association of suicide and Protestant religiosity
in the Reformation era grew out of confessional polemics. Thus, according to Midelfort,
this association does not represent real causes of suicide, as Durkheim claims to discover,
but rather social perceptions of suicide. Against this background, however, Midelfort’s
considerations also presuppose that there are real suicides and real causes of suicide. For
more details see the following paragraphs.
16 Cf. Jefrey R. Watt, Choosing Death: Suicide and Calvinism in Early Modern Geneva
(Kirksville, mo: 2001), 277ff., 288, 318–325. On this, cf. also Michel Porret, “Mourir l’âme
angoissée: Les ‘Reflexions sur le suicide’ de l’orloger genevois J.-J. Mellaret (1769),” Revue
d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 42 (1995), 71–90.
17 Cf. in particular Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in
Early Modern England (Oxford: 1990).
Both for research on suicide in particular and for historiography in general,

these studies indicate an important change of perspective. However, they, too,
assume a general presupposition, one which I would like to investigate here on
the basis of findings drawn from my own research: these historicizations of
suicide themselves presuppose firmly established knowledge about what the
act of suicide is. Whoever attempts to explain acts of suicide causally – whether
in terms of sociology, social-psychology or individual psychology – and who-
ever follows the historical transformations of the views on suicide has himself
adopted an essentialistical understanding of the act of suicide and attributed
a historically invariable meaning to the notion of ‘suicide’.
In contrast to this, I will regard the act of suicide here as a linguistic con-
struction, as a product of texts which narrate conceptions of values within his-
torical societies. A brief review of the different possibilities in the German
language for designating an act as ‘suicide’ illustrates the extent to which lan-
guage transports values: with the term Selbstmord or ‘self-murder’, the act of
suicide is condemned; with the term Freitod or ‘voluntary death’, it is emphati-
cally proclaimed; with the term Suizid or ‘suicide’, the act is pathologized; and
with the term Selbsttötung or ‘self-killing’, it is presented as a value-neutral act.
Deconstructing the act of suicide semantically, however, does not mean read-
ing the historical transformation of such designations as a process of secular-
ization and de-criminalization (for example, in the replacement of the
condemnatory term ‘self-murder’ with the more lenient designation ‘sui-
cide’).18 Rather, this means questioning the essentialism which is implicit, on
the one hand, in Durkheim’s moral statistics, and, on the other hand, in the
phenomenological and symbolic-interactionist critique of Durkheim’s theory
of anomie.19 An examination of the changing designations of suicide does not
18 This de-criminalization of suicide is evident in England and France as well as in Germany,

in spite of temporal shifts. For England, see MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls; for
Germany, see Vera Lind, Selbstmord in der Frühen Neuzeit. Diskurs, Lebenswelt und kul-
tureller Wandel am Beispiel der Herzogtümer Schleswig und Holstein (Veröffentlichungen
des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, vol. 146), (Göttingen: 1999). Cf. also Georges
Minois, Histoire du suicide (Paris: 1995), part III; Ursula Baumann, Vom Recht auf den
eigenen Tod. Geschichte des Suizids vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Weimar: 2001),
Chapters I–III; Paolo Bernardini, “Dal suicidio come crimine al suicidio come malattia:
Appunti sulla questione suicidologica nell’etica e nella giurisprudenza europea tra Sei e
Settecento,” Materiale per una storia della cultura giuridica 24 (1994), 111–131; From Sin to
Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jeffrey R. Watt (Ithaca, N.Y.: 2004).
19 Cf. Andreas Bähr, “Zur Einführung: Selbsttötung und (Geschichts-) Wissenschaft,” in
Sterben von eigener Hand. Selbsttötung als kulturelle Praxis, ed. Andreas Bähr and Hans
Medick (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2005), 1–19, here 4–13.
172 Bähr
imply an attempt to describe the normative implications of the different lin-

guistic representations of this act, but rather to investigate the extent to which
suicide as an act only emerges through the fact that it is spoken of – which
means implicitly that the act is assessed or evaluated. Justifications and expla-
nations of this act appear, then, as a part of such evaluations. We cannot iden-
tify an act of suicide without, at the same time, implicitly explaining it and, by
explaining it, evaluating it as well. If we understand causal attributions not as
explanations of suicide acts, but rather as a part of the linguistic construction
of such acts, then the norms and values implicit in them provide us with infor-
mation about the culture in which they are formulated.
In what follows, I will seek to demonstrate the extent to which suicide, as an
act, can only be understood from the semantic unity of its justification and
evaluation. In order to do this, I will first direct my attention to the language of
those people who took their own lives. I will examine self-narratives (espe-
cially farewell letters), in which authors justified why they could no longer live.
I contextualize these justifications within contemporary Enlightened debates
about the causes and religious-moral evaluations of suicide. In doing so, I
examine the extent to which subjective justifications of hopelessness them-
selves are formulated in those languages which outsiders used to speak about
suicide. In turn, this shows to what extent this semantic context must be con-
sidered as a conditio sine qua non for the authors of these self-descriptions to
argue the way they did. To do this, however, it is not necessary to quote as many
cases as possible, but rather to analyze those instances which provide as many
significant semantic elements as possible. Against this background, the self-
descriptions I have chosen here are representative not in quantitative but in
qualitative terms.20
The subjectivity of consciousness and sensory perception according to
which authors in the second half of the eighteenth century justified their acts
of suicide were formulated in a language which condemned these suicides in
moral terms. Given this tension, the act itself does not appear as a conse-
quence, but rather as part of its justification, that is, not as a consequence of a
feeling of hopelessness, but rather as a component of the description of such a
feeling. Here, I would like to show the extent to which subjectively justified and
subjectively evaluated hopelessness arose within this justification and evalua-
tion, that is, within the narratives in which such justifications and evaluations
were presented. My thesis is that hopelessness is not represented, but rather is
constituted in this linguistic articulation. The possibility of this articulation
20 For further comparable self-descriptions see Bähr, Der Richter im Ich.

necessarily occurs through an invisible grammar. This grammar is a semantic

order which is not conscious and which determines the conditions of plausi-
bility and probability for individual statements.21 Against this background, the
meaning of statements is not disclosed through a single diachronic and trans-
temporal meaning, but rather through the cultural-historical context. Specific
meaning, in other words, is not disclosed through identity, but rather through
difference, that is, through its respective opposite.
Against this background, the constitution of Enlightenment reason can be
understood through its ‘other’, that is, through that which it distinguishes itself
from, through ‘unreason’, through vices and passion represented by corporeal-
ity. This ‘unreason’ manifested itself in ‘hypochondria’, ‘melancholia’, and
‘insanity’: in an isolated and dark perception of the world, a perception which
had become an illness, a metaphor of negation and a loss of a reality defined
through reason and virtue [Tugend].22 From the perspective of contempo-
raries, cases of suicide appeared, as a rule, as the final stage of such a melan-
cholic insanity. The attempts of Enlightened reason to explain the most
extreme negation of itself by means of such illness can best be understood
through the negative moral judgments which proponents of the Enlightenment
made about this illness. Against this background, the de-criminalization of
suicide appears to have a rather different meaning than that which most histo-
rians of this era have attributed to it. I need to explain this somewhat more
precisely.
With the Enlightenment’s anthropologization of man, in particular in the
second half of the eighteenth century, demonic interpretations of suicide
came to be replaced increasingly by purely medical ones. As a consequence, it
appeared less and less possible to attribute moral responsibility to desperate
individuals who had taken their own lives. People committing suicide
were no longer regarded as criminals who should be condemned mercilessly;
rather, they were diseased ‘melancholics’, whose fatal developments were to
be explained in physiological or psychological terms, and whose suffering
was supposed to evoke sentimental empathy. In light of this transformation,
the traditional criminal sanctioning of ‘suicide’ was increasingly criticized. In
addition to legal-pragmatic and criminal-theoretical arguments, it was, above
all, the issue of the unsoundness of mind which made such punishments
21 Cf. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated from the French by
A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: 1972); Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discours (Paris: 1972).
22 Cf. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason,
transl. from the French by Richard Howard (New York: 1973). The differences between the
three historical concepts of insanity are not significant here.
174 Bähr
appear to be no longer justified and which introduced a more liberal view of

suicide.
In what follows, we should bear in mind that this argument about the
unsoundness of mind leaves untouched the question of religious-moral judg-
ments about an act of suicide. Even when a suicide could, in practice, be
pathologized, German Enlightenment writers did not doubt the fact that
this act should be condemned a priori in moral terms. Understanding this
contradiction is fundamental for understanding the modern conscience’s
moral condemnation of the self. As I have already implied, one key to under-
standing this lies in the moral significance of melancholia as a disease. Those
anthropologists – who, through a re-evaluation of man’s lower spiritual facul-
ties (i.e. sensory perceptions and emotions), sought to formulate an integrated
relation between the body and soul – did occasionally understand suicide as a
purely medical problem, describing the genesis of the fatal hypochondriac and
melancholic insanity as arising from the interplay of physical and psychologi-
cal disturbances. The prima causa of the circular breakdown of the body and
mind, however, was supposed to be the passions [Leidenschaften]. Even if
sufferers – owing to the inevitability of this development – could not be held
legally responsible, their final step should not be morally sanctioned, since it
was the free and responsible subject who stood at the beginning of
this cycle of decline.23 The pathological nature of this development only con-
firmed the reprehensibility of its results. Judgments about the unsoundness of
mind not only did not place the reprehensibility of suicide in question; they
necessarily presupposed this reprehensibility as well.
As the opposite of reason, suicide stood in opposition to the Enlightened
understanding of the good life. This understanding included the duty to dedi-
cate one’s life to virtue; it placed moral existence above physical existence. The
aim of human beings might not be to continue living; the aim should rather be
to live properly. The moral prohibition of suicide was grounded in this duty to
perfection, a duty which might indeed become the duty to die a physical death
23 See for example “Selbst-Mord,” in Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-
Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste, vol. 36 (Halle and Leipzig: 1741), 1595–1614, here
1597, 1604f. (online: http://www.zedler-lexikon.de/); Denis Diderot, “Suicide,” in
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des artes et des métiers, par une société
de gens de lettres, vol. 15 (Neuchâtel: 1765; Reprint Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: 1967), 639–
641. Cf. Bähr, “‘Ich habe bei Gott so keine Gnade’,” 154ff.; id., Der Richter im Ich, 76ff.
Recently, Julia Schreiner has stressed this argument: Jenseits vom Glück. Suizid, Melancholie
und Hypochondrie in deutschsprachigen Texten des späten 18. Jahrhunderts (Ancien
Régime, Aufklärung und Revolution, vol. 34), (Munich: 2003), 280f.
voluntarily, if one’s virtue could only be preserved through such a measure,

thereby avoiding a moral death.24 As I will attempt to demonstrate here, the
meaning of the moral prohibition of ‘self-murder’ or Selbstmord is also dis-
closed through its opposite: the possibility of a duty to die a ‘voluntary death’
or freiwilliger Tod. The moral prohibition of ‘self-murder’ and the duty to die a
‘voluntary death’ were unthinkable without each other; they mutually consti-
tuted one another. In the remainder of the article, I will work this out in detail
by examining the paradox of the conscience’s condemnation of the self: a self-
condemnation which Enlightenment writers regarded as an indication of a
(religious) exaggeration of conscientiousness, a scrupulous awareness of sin
and morality, which, in their eyes, permitted them to presume that an indi-
vidual’s powers of imagination were afflicted with a melancholic disease.
II
Christian Friedrich Illing had neglected his studies for two years. Beginning in
Easter of 1754, he was no longer able to continue this way of life. His conscience
awoke and reminded him of his violations of duties so relentlessly that Illing
had already attempted to take his own life twice before moving to Göttingen.
In his final letter to his father, which he composed in his room in Göttingen in
August of 1754, Illing described these first stirrings of his desperate conscience
as part of a hypochondriac illness. One element of the contemporary picture
of hypochondria and (religious) melancholia – which Illing himself as medical
student was aware of – was grief about one’s own sins, a grief which, when
pathologically exaggerated, could have fatal consequences: “Easter…aroused
my conscience; I questioned myself and examined myself with appropriate
severity to ascertain whether I had learned something, and found that it
amounted to nothing. …After Easter I became hypochondriacal and, since this
illness has the quality of making the patient sad, thus I became sad, and even
24 Cf. e.g. Moses Mendelssohn, Phädon oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele, ed. Dominique
Bourel (Hamburg: 1979); cf. also Gottfried Leß, Vom Selbstmorde (Göttingen: 1786), 9ff., 44;
Immanuel Kant, Eine Vorlesung über Ethik, ed. Paul Menzer (Berlin: 1924), 190f. [for
an English translation, cf. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and
J.B. Schneewind, transl. by Peter Heath (New York: 1997)]; Johann Friedrich Teller,
Vernunft- und schriftmäsige Abhandlung über den Selbstmord (Leipzig: 1776), 49ff.; Johann
Lorenz Mosheim, Sittenlehre der Heiligen Schrift, vol. 6 (Helmstedt: 1762), 250ff., 265ff.;
Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, Lehrbuch der Praktischen Philosophie (Göttingen and
Gotha: 1770), 171; Johann Gottlieb Burkhard, Briefe über den Selbstmord (Leipzig: 1786), 14f.
176 Bähr
began to despair and imagined that my sins were so abominable that I turned
to the most forbidden means; I ate 2 portions of poison in order to take my own
life.”25 For Enlightened anthropologists, such diagnoses of melancholia pro-
vided an opportunity to criticize Protestant and especially Pietist devoutness,
in which the grief about one’s own depravity appeared as a necessary compo-
nent of the individual process of salvation: for Pietists, only complete self-
remorse through an internal dialogue with God could provide the certain sign
that one had changed one’s ways. Scrupulous souls, however, did not appear to
find a liberating re-birth through this, but rather to lose all hope of God’s grace.
They did not despair of themselves, which was required by theologians in
order to attain the certainty of grace; rather, they despaired of God: they
despaired of that very grace which was to be attained by despair (of them-
selves). As this despair itself was highly sinful, it could lead them to become
even more convinced of their own eternal damnation. Thus, the uncompro-
mising search for one’s own sins repeatedly seemed to lead to a melancholia in
which every realistic evaluation of the world had been lost.26 If unhappy
believers could no longer find any escape in such a world, then, according to
Enlightened anthropologists, it was not they who should be held responsible,
but rather the fatal doctrine – a doctrine which, by threatening to punish sui-
cide with damnation in hell, appeared to induce that very suicide which it
threatened to punish.27 Against this background, Illing’s reference to his own
25 Illing’s letter to his father, 152: “Ostern…wachte mir mein Gewissen auf; ich fragte mich
und untersuchte mich nach gehöriger Strenge ob ich etwas gelernet, und fand daß es
nichts war. …Von Ostern an wurde ich hypochondrisch, und wie diese Kranckheit die
Eigenschaft hat, daß der Patient traurig ist, so wurde auch ich es, ja ich wurde verzwei
felnd und stellete mir meine Sünden so schrecklich vor, daß ich nach den unerlaubtesten
Mitteln griff; ich fraß 2 mahl Gifft um mir das Leben zu nehmen.”
26 On this, cf. also Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Die Melancholie der Literatur. Diskursgeschichte
und Textfiguration (Stuttgart and Weimar: 1997), in particular 143ff.
27 Cf. in particular Leß, Vom Selbstmorde, 51f. The preacher Adam Bernd in Leipzig explained
his own attempt to take his life from his religious-melancholic awareness of the sinfulness
of ‘self-murder’ [Selbstmord]. Cf. Adam Bernd, Eigene Lebens-Beschreibung (Leipzig: 1738)
[Reprint edited by Volker Hoffmann (Munich: 1973)], 129, 183, 202ff. On this, cf. Martina
Wagner-Egelhaaf, “Melancholischer Diskurs und literaler Selbstmord. Der Fall Adam
Bernd,” in Trauer, Verzweiflung und Anfechtung: Selbstmord und Selbstmordversuche in
mittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Gesellschaften, ed. Gabriela Signori (Forum
Psychohistorie, vol. 3), (Tübingen: 1994), 282–310. Wagner-Egelhaaf appears to be the only
scholar to interpret the desperate self-descriptions of the eighteenth century in terms
of a discourse analysis. However, her perspective is specifically that of literary criticism.
And as Bernd did not actually take his own life, his case concerns only (religious) melan-
cholia, rather than the particular problematic of suicide. On the subject of religious
hypochondria can initially be understood as an attempt to absolve himself of

culpability for attempting suicide.
However, it is not Illing’s descriptions of his suicide attempts in Leipzig
which are decisive for understanding his despair, but rather his description of
his imminent suicide in Göttingen. Illing traced his own hypochondria (and
the fatal stirrings of conscience which corresponded with this) back to his way
of life: the excesses and dissoluteness had ruined his physical powers. This
weakening of powers, in turn, had reduced his ability to study to such an extent
that his conscience was finally left with no choice: Illing had so “besmirched”
his conscience and “forgotten God,” that he was now “finally forced to murder
himself.”28 He was no longer able to break out of this cycle of moral failure and
illness. This means, however, that Illing’s view of his past suicide attempts in
Leipzig was not the same as that of his imminent suicide in Göttingen. When
Illing justified his final step, he described it not as the expression of a diseased
conscience, but rather as the dictate of a morally sound conscience. For Illing,
the definitive despair in Göttingen did not arise from a hypochondria, but
rather from his knowledge of those sins which had led to the hypochondria in
Leipzig. In the end, this despair was not the symptom of an illness, but rather
the sign of that which had made him ill. If Illing described himself as melan-
cholic, this was not in order to absolve himself culpability for his final act. The
fact that Illing looked back at his hypochondriac grief, at the illness represent-
ing the actual aberrant behavior, indicated that for him this hopelessness was
grounded in real guilt.
Given this guilt, Illing “thus had no grace with God.” And this, in turn, had
consequences for the meaning of ‘grace’, for it raised the following problem:
How was it possible that Illing, given this personal guilt, had lost God’s grace?
The awakening of Illing’s conscience bore traits of Protestant penance, in
which insight into one’s own sins guaranteed divine remission. Illing now con-
fessed his sins completely, yet still could not receive grace. We can explain this
through the fact that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, moral
actions attained a decisive significance in retaining or losing grace. The Pietist
doctrine already had conceded a greater importance to practical works in the
world for the process of salvation than Luther’s theology of justification had
melancholia, cf. also Hans-Jürgen Schings, Melancholie und Aufklärung. Melancholiker

und ihre Kritiker in Erfahrungsseelenkunde und Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart:
1977), 73ff.
28 Illing’s letter to his university friend Christoph Hurtig, 154: “[das] Gewissen beflecket, Gott
vergessen, und endlich Selbstmörder von sich werden müssen.” Cf. also the letter to his
father, 152.
178 Bähr
done. As mentioned before, Pietist influence initially seems to be evident in

Illing’s letters: the awakening of conscience, followed by mournful contrition
[Bußkampf].29 However, the final step of the Pietist process was missing here.
The Pietist’s contritio cordis was to lead to a re-birth [Wiedergeburt]: to a funda-
mental change by denying and overcoming one’s former sinful life. Even this
fundamental re-birth, however, was grounded in God’s predestination: it
appeared to be both the condition and the result of salvation, forcing believers
to constantly pray for that grace they were dependent on in order to achieve
divine remission.30
Illing was aware of his sins, but re-birth seemed to be impossible for him. We
may not conclude from this fact that Illing misunderstood the Protestant theo-
logia crucis, as contemporary theologians might have assumed, but rather that
his letters have to be read as (early) Enlightenment texts. It was not only that
Illing did not maintain God’s grace: in his farewell letters he did not even pray
for it. Furthermore, in these letters we do not find those instigations of the
devil with which agents of religious suicide in the sixteenth, seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries explained their desperate temptation to kill them-
selves.31 It was Illing himself who pathologized his religious grief about his
own sins in categories of Enlightenment anthropology.
29 For reasons of methodology, and because there is no further information about Illing, this
evidence must be drawn from Illing’s letters. It is underlined, however, by the fact,
that there was a strong Protestant and pietistic influence among the German-speaking
upper classes in Thorn; cf. Stanisław Salmonowicz, “Königsberg, Thorn und Danzig.
Zur Geschichte Königsbergs als Zentrum der Aufklärung,” in Königsberg und Riga, ed.
Heinz Ischreyt (Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung, vol. 16), (Tübingen: 1995), 9–28,
here 10, 18ff.
30 On the model of pietistic rebirth, see esp. the collection of (auto)biographical texts by
Johann Henrich Reitz, Historie Der Wiedergebohrnen. Vollständige Ausgabe der Erstdrucke
aller sieben Teile der pietistischen Sammelbiographie (1698–1745) mit einem werkgeschichtli-
chen Anhang der Varianten und Ergänzungen aus den späteren Auflagen, 4 vols., ed. Hans-
Jürgen Schrader (Tübingen: 1982).
31 See for example Paul S. Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth
Century London (London: 1985), 15ff.; Reitz, Historie, vol. 1, 38ff.; for further examples cf.
Lind, Selbstmord, 159ff.; Watt, Choosing Death, 252ff.; rather ambivalent is Bernd, Eigene
Lebens-Beschreibung. There is a paradox in this context: the more intensely the authors
pleaded for divine support in the fight against the challenge of the devil, the more the
devil tempted them to take their own lives; cf. e.g. Augustin Güntzer, Kleines Biechlin von
meinem gantzen Leben. Die Autobiographie eines Elsässer Kannengießers aus dem 17.
Jahrhundert, ed. Fabian Brändle and Dominik Sieber (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 8),
(Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2002), 186–191, 280.
Against this background, Illing’s letters first of all provide evidence of an

Enlightened notion of virtue: the divine grace – which Lutheran believers had
received sola fide because their own actions in themselves could never be ade-
quate to God – became for Illing the complete responsibility of the moral sub-
ject. Whoever saw himself as fundamentally capable of avoiding sin could no
longer, after committing sins, be saved by regretful insight after the fact: “thus I
end up in this excess [of suicide]. I have deserved it, the God who is forgotten
by us in Leipzig, forgets us too, and I am worthy of being sent to the devil.”32
Illing’s God was no longer the God of Early Modern providentia; Illing’s God
merely did to man what man did to him. This means that while it initially
appeared to be an external, transcendental divine authority which denied
Illing further life through grace, it was, in practice, Illing’s own inner con-
science which, faced with his responsibility for the loss of grace, commanded
the act of suicide. In sum, diabolical instigations were no longer responsible
for Illing’s suicide; the devil whom Illing thought he deserved did not occur
before but after the deed; this devil was to be found not outside but inside his
own heart and conscience.33 However, in the end Illing’s suicide was likewise
not pathological, nor was it – as, following Schär’s interpretation, one might
have presumed – the realization of a divine judgment.34 Illing’s suicide was a
voluntary act, for which he alone could be held morally accountable. And this
meant two things:
1. Illing’s final act was reprehensible. By “reaching for the most prohibited
means,”35 Illing had fundamentally violated his own moral principles. Initially,
Illing’s conscience looked exclusively back into the past. Faced with the fact
that he had forgotten God, there was no longer any possibility for him to act
morally, and without this possibility, a future in this world as well as in a world
beyond was blocked: he had given himself over to the devil. This was evident in
the fact that Illing had become “self-murderer on his own.” To formulate this
pointedly, Illing committed ‘self-murder’ [Selbstmord] because he had made
himself into a ‘self-murderer’. Illing’s hopelessness was evident in the paradox
that he was morally compelled to do that which was morally most prohibited;
32 Illing’s letter to Johann Michael Siefert, 153: “so gerathe ich endlich auf diese
Ausschweiffung [der Selbsttötung]. Ich habe sie verdient, der Gott der von uns in Leipzig
vergessen wird, vergisset uns auch, und ich bin eines andern werth.”
33 Cf. Kittsteiner, Entstehung, 311.
34 God would have contradicted himself if he had imposed an act upon a person for which
he would then have had to condemn that person. This point is also overlooked by Wagner-
Egelhaaf, Melancholischer Diskurs, 304.
35 Illing’s letter to his father, 152: “ich ergreiffe ein Mittel, welches das unerlaubteste ist.”
180 Bähr
and his hopelessness consisted in the fact that he was not able to resolve this
contradiction.
2. However, this also means that Illing’s suicide was not only a reprehensible
moral act, but also a positive moral act. Illing’s conscience proved its moral
integrity by the fact that, once awoken from an all too long sleep, it became
aware of this and proved ready to draw the fatal consequences from these pre-
vious violations. Faced with his experiences of himself in the past, Illing knew
that he would not be able to accord with his own ideal of himself in the future.
It was not external conditions which were the decisive obstacle here. Initially,
Illing had indeed made adverse conditions in Leipzig responsible for the fact
that he had not been able to achieve what he believed himself, with his “ambi-
tion” [Ehrbegierde], to be capable of. The decisive problem, however, was an
internal one. Although the external conditions were much better in Göttingen
than in Leipzig, Illing himself was not able to make use of them. His omissions
of the past years appeared to be too great to allow him to ever make up for
them.36 Given these conditions, suicide also proved to be a possibility – if the
only possibility – to avoid contradicting his own moral self-image in the future.
In addition to this, Illing also suggested that his death might protect others
from a similar fate: “…and offer myself as an example for others who have not
made better use of their time at the university….”37
To the extent that Illing’s suicide was a moral act, it also represented the
possibility of receiving divine remission – not only for those sins which had led
to the ‘self-murder’, but, with this, for the ‘self-murder’ itself as well. The closing
sentence of Illing’s letter – “I thus have no grace with God” – is therefore a
statement not only about the past, but also about the future. God could regard
Illing’s ‘self-murder’ mercifully, because through his suicide Illing had proved
his own insight into the fact that he had squandered away divine grace by ‘mur-
dering himself’. Even when Illing spoke of God and the devil, or of sin and
mercy, his despair was ultimately a specifically moral kind of despair. Illing
despaired insofar as he had to refuse himself mercy. But whoever was able to
refuse himself mercy could also grant mercy on himself for committing this
very act.
Illing’s death was inevitable. This inevitability, however, was not strictly
physical, as his reference to his own illness initially might lead us to presume.
Rather, it was a moral inevitability, in which the illness was merely a building
36 Cf. Illing’s letter to his father, 152f.

37 Illing’s letter to Hurtig, 154: “und stellet mich anderen zum Exempel vor die ihre Zeit auf
Universitaeten nicht besser angewandt.” Cf. also the letter to his father, 152.
block.38 The moral necessity of this suicide – as will also be the case in our
second example – had a fundamentally aporetic structure. The suicide repre-
sented both the possibility of breaking out of the cycle of sin and, at the same
time, the irreversibility of that sin. In his voluntary action, Illing had subjected
himself to a compulsion which ultimately left suicide as the only possibility for
free action. Illing’s integrity is evident in the fact that he did not continue his
sinful way of life, but rather drew the consequences from the compulsions
placed upon him. Conversely, both his failure and his hopelessness were evi-
dent in the fact that, since he himself was responsible for these compulsions,
suicide was the only consequence which he could draw from them. In practical
terms, Illing’s conscience was that of a virtuous subject who no longer saw
itself as dependent upon a transcendental divine authority for grace. As Kant
put it forty years later, in order to stress his concept of mercy, this conscience
did not want to arrive at “virtue through remission, but rather at remission
through virtue.”39 In the case that this conscience was forced to concede that it
had not been virtuous, then it could not find exoneration for itself. It could not
find this remission because it itself was the authority which pronounced
remission.
Thus, Illing’s backward-looking search for grace also had that forward-look-
ing dimension in the avoidance of sin which Kittsteiner has identified with the
Kantian concept of conscience. With this in mind, it appears – contrary to
Kittsteiner’s interpretation – that the conscience’s ‘looking-backward’ and
‘looking-forward’ were not two steps in a diachronic process of secularization;
rather, they formed a synchronic semantic unity. This conclusion is confirmed
in two ways.
First of all, it is confirmed by pre-Enlightenment texts: the Protestant consci-
entia of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not consist in a conscience
looking to the past, consistently bad and despairing, which a forward-looking
38 Cf. Andreas Bähr, “Die Paradoxie moralischer Ausweglosigkeit und die (Un-)Verfügbarkeit
des eigenen Körpers,” in Grenzen der Aufklärung. Körperkonstruktionen und die Tötung des
Körpers im Übergang zur Moderne, ed. idem (Aufklärung und Moderne, vol. 7), (Hanover:
2005), 47–69.
39 Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, ed. Königlich
Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6), (Berlin: 1907),
1–202, the citation is on 202: “zum Beweise, daß es nicht der rechte Weg sei, von der
Begnadigung zur Tugend, sondern vielmehr von der Tugend zur Begnadigung fortzu
schreiten.” [For an English translation, cf. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries
of Mere Reason and Other Writings, ed. and transl. by Allen Wood and George Di Giovanni
(Cambridge and New York: 1998).]
182 Bähr
Enlightenment claimed to overcome. It was not the selective moral conscious-

ness of one’s own sins, but the consciousness of one’s own sinfulness: one’s
personal relation to God within the scope of divine providence.40 In other
words: only an Enlightenment conception of continual moral foresight could
enable the early modern conscience to become one that reminisced.
Moreover, and yet above all, this conclusion is confirmed by texts in which
suicide was explicitly justified by means of a Kantian notion of conscience. In
my second example, I will demonstrate that the forward-looking justification
of moral hopelessness also implied a moment of backward-looking sanction,
that it, too, was based upon a retrospective moral condemnation of the self.
In 1800, the Kant specialist Bernhard Georg edited the anonymous
Vorbereitungen eines Unglücklichen zum freiwilligen Tod [Preparations of an
Unhappy Person to Die a Voluntary Death]: a seventy-five-page long justifica-
tion of the author’s own suicide together with a farewell letter addressed to
four friends, the end of which the author promises a meeting “in another life”,
and describes the place in which his corpse should be buried.41 This text ini-
tially placed a different accent on the issue of suicide than that found in Illing’s
letters. It appeared to depart from the broad German consensus concerning
the prohibition on suicide: the anonymous author, who introduces himself as
an educator, claimed that he had the right to take his own life. He tried to jus-
tify this right on the basis of Kant’s moral philosophy. It was this provocative
claim which moved the editor to present this text before a philosophical public
for it to be critically tested: not “in order to extract a few fruitless tears over the
grave of a man who might have deserved a better fate, not in order to encour-
age young and soft souls…to such a death.”42
40 Even though Heinz Kittsteiner himself notes this (“Von der Gnade zur Tugend. Über eine
Veränderung in der Darstellung des Gleichnisses vom verlorenen Sohn im 18. und frühen
19. Jahrhundert,” in idem, Gewissen und Geschichte. Studien zur Entstehung des mora
lischen Bewußtseins [Heidelberg: 1990], 171–201, here 195), he resorts – significantly – to
the terminology of Enlightenment texts in his examination of conscientia consequens and
conscientia antecedens: for example, to that of Friedrich Erdmann August Heydenreichs
Über den Charakter des Landmannes in religiöser Hinsicht (Leipzig: 1800); see Kittsteiner,
“Von der Gnade zur Tugend,” 172; Entstehung, 309.
41 Vorbereitungen eines Unglücklichen zum freiwilligen Tode, aus des Verfassers Papieren, ed.
Bernhard Georg (Königsberg: 1800), the citation is on 18; cf. also 94f. For a thorough analy-
sis of this text, see Bähr, Der Richter im Ich, Chapter 7.2.
42 Georg, Vorbereitungen, XIf.: “[nicht] um dem Publikum einige fruchtlose Thränen auf das
Grab eines Mannes zu entlocken, der ein besseres Schicksal verdient haben mochte,
nicht, um junge weiche Seelen…zu einem solchen Tode…zu ermuntern.”
Implicitly calling upon more liberal philosophes such as David Hume, Paul
Thiry d’Holbach or Charles de Montesquieu,43 the anonymous author disputed
the right of religion and morality to bind a human being to a life which had
become hopeless and unbearable. Thus he did not accept Kant’s idea in one
particular respect: the destruction of corporeal life did not necessarily stand in
contradiction to self-love.44 This re-valuation was expressed in a renaming:
this suicide was not ‘self-murder’ or Selbstmord, but rather a ‘voluntary death’
or freiwilliger Tod. However, in order to recognize the particular significance of
the demand for such a right to suicide (as well as the relationship of this anon-
ymous text to Illing’s letters), we should not consider this right in isolation, but
rather must also examine the justifications of the act of suicide, for which that
right had been claimed. When we investigate the conditions under which such
a right was to become effective, we see that the ‘right’ to ‘voluntary death’ was
grounded in the specific aims of morality: “Voluntary death is permissible for
that person whose organization [i.e. body] excludes every possibility of being
employed for moral purposes. Death itself is objectively right.”45 Given this
presupposition, the right to suicide became a duty to suicide: “If the organiza-
tion is an insurmountable obstacle to a person’s morality, then reason forbids
the preservation of this obstacle….”46 This means that the moral subject was
only justified in taking his own life if he was morally bound to do so. ‘Voluntary
death’, in other words, was not grounded upon a “freedom to be able to do with
one’s life what one wants”;47 given its basis in Kantian philosophy, it stood
rather for the moral subject’s capacity to continue to follow the moral law in
his actions, even if his own physical existence had to be sacrificed in order to
do this.
43 Cf. David Hume, Of Suicide, in idem, Essays. Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene
F. Miller, revised edn (Indianapolis: 1987), 577–589; Paul Thiry d’Holbach, Système de la
nature ou Des loix du monde physique et du monde moral (London: 1771), part I, 327ff.;
Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Persian Letters, transl. Christopher J.
Betts (Harmondsworth: 1973), 152ff.
44 Cf. Georg, Vorbereitungen, 31ff; cf. also 16f.
45 Ibid., 48: “Der freywillige Tod ist demnach der Person, deren Organisation jede Möglichkeit
des Gebrauchs derselben zum sittlichen Zwecke ausschließt, erlaubt. Der Tod selbst ist
objektiv recht.”
46 Ibid., 49 (emphasis not in original): “Ist also die Organisation ein unüberwindliches
Hinderniß der Moralität der Person, so verbietet die Vernunft die Erhaltung dieses
Hindernisses.” Cf. also ibid., 54.
47 Teller, Abhandlung, 54: “Freyheit, mit seinem Leben machen zu können, was man will”; cf.
Georg, Vorbereitungen, 16.
184 Bähr
Given the precept of self-preservation, the moral duty to take one’s own life
arose only when no other path to virtue existed. This duty presupposed that
the virtue to be preserved was, in fact, still intact. The anonymous author of the
Preparations initially ascribed such a virtuousness to himself.48 The author’s
conscience did not look back into the past, but rather forward into the future:
his ‘voluntary death’ was not a sanction for sins he had committed, but rather
an act to avoid committing imminent sins in the future. It was, in other words,
not the consequence of a grace which had been lost, but rather a means to
avoid such a loss.
We must, however, examine the conditions of such a duty more closely.
What kinds of sin were supposed to be avoided here? The citation above pro-
vides an important indication: If the body – itself the servant of morality – has
become an obstacle to morality, then the soul must free itself from that body in
order to save itself from the dangers of succumbing to a moral death. According
to the anonymous author, his own body could become a moral obstacle
through an illness which would completely prevent him from fulfilling his
vocational duties as educator in the future. Thus, the author considered him-
self to be responsible for preventing the unavoidable and immanent illness –
regardless of the fact that, in his own eyes, the effects of this disease could not
be attributed to him.49 However, the fact that, faced with the inevitability of
such a disease, it was morally necessary for him to take his own life presup-
posed that this disease (and its inevitability) themselves had moral causes.
From this, we can explain the fact that, for the anonymous author, the only
case in which one was obligated to a ‘voluntary death’ was that of inevitable
and imminent “insanity” [Wahnsinn]. The loss of human understanding pre-
vented him from fulfilling his vocational duties: it prevented him from educat-
ing and perfecting people and thus signified the annulment of morality.50
This has the following significance for the conscience’s temporal structure:
The anonymous author could only be certain about the future loss of his own
virtue if he had already had experiences with himself on the matter. His cer-
tainty, in other words, had to be based upon a retrospective judgment. The
author’s predicament could only endanger his own virtuousness when that
predicament could be traced back to the fact that the author had committed
offences against virtue. If the author was responsible for the avoidance of his
own imminent illness, then he was also responsible for the fact that this illness
was itself imminent. Insanity was conceptualized as the negation of reason
48 Cf. Georg, Vorbereitungen, in particular 94f.

49 Cf. ibid., 79f., 86.
50 Cf. ibid., 53f., 83, 87f.
and virtue. It was, therefore, the author’s knowledge of his own passion he had
been suffering from since the day he was born, and of his “seducibility,” his
Geschlechtstrieb which provided him with certainty about the inevitability of
his own insanity.51 This becomes clear when the author defines the physical
dimension of his illness solely in terms of his suffering from hypochondria: a
“disorder of the innards” which was said to have prevented the teacher from
mixing with his pupils on account of his resulting “daily fear.”52
A person had to fulfill his duties for as long as his powers permitted. If these
powers left him through no fault of his own, then his demise was God’s will. If,
on the contrary, that person, when faced with the foreseeable impossibility of
fulfilling his duties, determined the moment of his own death himself, then
this allowed to place the responsibility for this impossibility upon himself and
thus upon his own failures in the past. Suicide could be (the final means) for
protecting innocence only when that innocence had already been lost.53
III
The obligation to a ‘voluntary death’ – as the forward-looking demand to sacri-

fice oneself for virtue – presupposed a backward-looking moral condemnation
of the self. In this sense, the anonymous author’s ‘voluntary death’ was also
a ‘self-murder’, for it demonstrated that the author had, in his sinfulness,
violated the duty to self-preservation. In light of this, a ‘self-murder’ such as
Illing’s – which also represented the violation of duty – was, conversely, impli
citly a ‘voluntary death’ as well: Illing sanctioned his violation of the duty to
self-preservation by ensuring that he would never violate this duty again in the
51 Cf. ibid., 87ff., the citation is on p. 93.

52 Ibid., 83. On madness and hypochondria, see Foucault, Madness. For the history of mad-
ness in the early modern era, see David Lee Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State in
Early Modern Europe: A Bavarian Beacon (Cambridge: 2006).
53 The paradoxical structure of moral hopelessness can be found not only in male but also
in female self-descriptions – despite the fact that in the second half of the eighteenth
century the language of ‘passion’ and ‘virtue’ was gendered in many different ways.
Although in these discourses, passionate offences against virtue appeared to be ‘materi-
ally’ different with regard to gender (the loss of sexual honour of women existed along-
side the loss of professional honour of men), women and men, when describing moral
hopelessness, shared the underlying concept of moral subjectivity. Cf. Andreas Bähr, “Die
tödliche Verletzung weiblicher Ehre. Emilia Galotti im Kontext der aufklärerischen
Problematisierung von Selbsttötung,” in Sterben von eigener Hand, ed. Bähr and Medick,
65–88.
186 Bähr
future. The Enlightened postulate of conservatio sui meant that ‘self-murder’

and ‘voluntary death’ mutually implied one another: ‘voluntary death’ was only
a duty on condition that this act was also ‘self-murder’; and one’s own suicide
could only be designated as a ‘self-murder’ on the condition that it also was a
‘voluntary death’ which had arisen from duty.
The relation between action and language, as discussed at the beginning of
the article, should be understood in this specific sense. Those authors who
morally justified the fact that they could no longer live killed themselves
not despite the fact, but rather on condition that they were not permitted to
do so. The moral prohibition of ‘self-murder’ appears as the semantic condi-
tion of the possibility for moral hopelessness. This prohibition and the moral
justification of hopelessness did not constitute a contradiction, but rather a
complementary semantic unit. The German Enlightenment debate about the
prohibition of and the right to suicide during the second half of the eighteenth
century was a moral debate; no one argued consistently that the issue of sui-
cide should be considered independent of moral criteria. In such arguments,
the moral right to take one’s own life arose only on the condition that it was a
reasonable act, that is, that one was morally obliged to do so. This implied that
in all other cases one was morally prohibited from killing oneself. The fact that
one’s own ‘voluntary death’ was implicitly counted among these prohibited
cases can be seen in the fact that only a retrospective moral self-condemnation
by one’s conscience could, in practice, justify such a duty.54
54 This is also evident in Karl August Bischof, Versuch über den freywilligen Tod (Nuremberg:
1797). The connections developed in the present contribution apply specifically to the
area under the influence of the German Enlightenment in which the religious and moral
ban on suicide was little questioned. Such consensus, as researchers have correctly
pointed out, could not be found in Scotland, England and France, since Montesquieu,
Hume, and d’Holbach hold that a person had the right to end life if this life had become
unbearable. Despite this criticism, however, my research on “voluntary death” in the
German Enlightenment suggests that it is necessary to subject these liberal English and
French texts to a different reading: Hume, Of Suicide, 580ff., d’Holbach, Système de la
nature, 330f., 334ff.; also Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, in Œuvres complètes,
vol. 2, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: 1990), part III, letters 21 and 22,
377–393, in particular 382ff. The central argument of these texts criticizes the condemna-
tion of suicide by pointing to an all-comprehending providentia: Here suicide is consid-
ered just to be fulfilling the intentions of Providence. However, the examples used to
illustrate these ideas show that, in practice, suicide was fulfilling the will of Providence in
case the person committing suicide had become a burden on others. Only those people
seemed to have a right to free themselves from an unbearable life who, by liberating
themselves, were liberating society from an unbearable burden. Thus, a liberal attitude
Thus, the common point of reference in debates about the right to ‘volun-
tary death’ was not what it initially appeared to be, that is, it was not the act of
suicide itself, but rather the possibility of a fatal moral condemnation of the
self. The question was not how one should evaluate the act of suicide (and thus
it was also not whether the virtuous final act was a suicide at all). Rather, the
question was how life could be sacrificed to virtue in the future, when such a
sacrifice had not occurred in the past. The shared presupposition in such a dis-
pute was that opponents agreed about the necessity of such a sacrifice. Given
this agreement, the dispute about ‘self-murder’ and ‘voluntary death’ was irre-
solvable. This irresolvability referred not to a material foundation about the
fact that one was not able to continue living, but rather to an aporia in the argu-
ments employed by participants in the dispute. The paradoxical structure of
the duty to self-preservation became evident in the moral justification of hope-
lessness, since in this justification, the duty to self-preservation was at once
questioned and confirmed, violated and fulfilled. The fact that such arguments
were drawn into (and had to be drawn into) this justification of hopelessness
– which, at the same time, justified the reprehensibility of that hopelessness –
indicated the boundaries of these moral categories. We can see this particularly
clearly when the anonymous author of the Preparations invokes Kant – that is,
when he invokes a moral philosophy in which ‘self-murder’ appears to be the
most extreme violation of the principle of morality – as the paradoxical and
thus morally impossible self-transcendence of moral subjectivity.55 Kant him-
self described the entire problem in the most pointed manner: “Whoever is
prepared to take his own life is no longer worthy of living.”56
Those authors who have connected Protestant religiosity and Enlightened
morality to an increase in suicide rates in the early modern period explain this
like that of Hume and d’Holbach, who had recourse to stoical arguments, linked the
power to decide over one’s own life to the fundamental principles of reason, virtue and
moral subjectivity. For a thorough study of this, see Bähr, Der Richter im Ich, Chapter 7.7;
on Hume see also Baumann, Vom Recht auf den eigenen Tod, 132. Further research is
needed in this field in order to explore the question which specific paradoxes arose in
self-descriptions influenced by Hume’s categories.
55 Cf. Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, in particular 422f. [English: Kant, Metaphysics of Morals];
Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. Königlich Preußische
Akademie der Wissenschaften (Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4), (Berlin: 1903), 385–463, the
citation is on 421f. [for an English translation, cf. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals, edited and translated by Mary Gregor, with an introduction by
Christine M. Korsgaard (Cambridge, U.K. and New York: 1998)].
56 Kant, Vorlesung, 191: “Derjenige aber, der bereit ist, sich sein Leben zu nehmen, ist gar
nicht mehr wert zu leben.” [English: Kant, Lectures on Ethics].
188 Bähr
connection in terms of a historical process of secularization and “disenchant-

ment of the world,” that is, like Watt, in terms of liberaliziation and de-crimi-
nalization or, like Schär, through an internalization of moral authority.57 The
semantic paradox of moral hopelessness, as demonstrated in this article, can-
not solve the controversy between Watt and Schär, for it can tell us nothing
about the correctness of such claims. However, this paradox does enable us to
question their categorical presuppositions. I have attempted to show here the
extent to which this historical conception of hopelessness should be under-
stood in terms of its historical justifications and evaluations, and to show the
extent to which, in turn, these justifications and evaluations provide us with
insights into the realities of historical life. It becomes clear that one necessary
condition of moral hopelessness was the comprehensive moral prohibition of
‘self-murder’ (and not its casuistic questioning), in other words, that it was the
prohibition of ‘self-murder’ as a prohibition which first made possible that
which it prohibited. In view of this fact it is impossible to claim, as Watt does,
that the ban on ‘self-murder’ (be it religious or moral) prevented suicidal
actions. Consequently, vice versa, it is also not possible to claim that the cri-
tique of the rigid religious condemnation of suicide or the criminal liberaliza-
tion was suitable to cause a suicidal flood. Both are descriptions of causes
which do not say anything about subjective explanations of suicides. The
Enlightenment critique of religion threatening suicides with eternal condem-
nation did not detach people from their commitments. This critique liber-
ated them from religious dogmas just to give them the freedom of moral
self-commitment.
These findings, however, should not let us conclude that the causal relation
has to be inverted. We should not understand these findings psychologically:
they do not point to an internalization of rigid norms through a process of
social disciplining. Rather, we should understand them semantically, that is, in
terms of the complementary semantic units of a backward-looking and for-
ward-looking conscience, of the prohibition of ‘self-murder’ and the duty to
‘voluntary death’, and of seduction and virtue. Our analysis of the tempo-
ral structure of the moral conscience has demonstrated that the backward-
looking and the forward-looking conscience were not, as Kittsteiner argued,
two stations in a process of secularization, but rather two complementary
57 The internalization thesis is also evident in Bodo von Borries, Vom ‘Gewaltexzess’ zum
‘Gewissensbiss’? Autobiografische Zeugnisse zu Formen und Wandlungen elterlicher
Strafpraxis im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: 1996), Chapters 8–12, 47ff.; Christian Begemann,
Furcht und Angst im Prozeß der Aufklärung. Zu Literatur und Bewußtseinsgeschichte des 18.
Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt a.M.: 1987).
sides of a single Enlightened-sentimental semantics of conscience – the

semantics of a conscience in which the subject could not only award himself
divine grace, but could also deprive himself of it. The fact that inwardness was
not connected one-dimensionally to the forward-looking conscience indicates
that this conscience’s fatal condemnation of the self does not refer to a histori-
cal process of the internalization of divine authority, but rather to a semantics
of inwardness. Psychological interpretations of the paradox sketched above
are based upon precisely that Enlightened construction of melancholic ‘self-
murder’ from which this paradox arose, and thus they cannot adequately com-
prehend its significance. Schär’s interpretation – referring to the dark side of
the process of “culpabilization” welcomed by Kittsteiner – leads to the pathol-
ogization of an entire culture. This pathological explanation of suicide over-
looks the particular heuristic significance of those aporia which arose when
hopelessness became grounded in a semantics of religious-moral inwardness.
Schär’s interpretation overlooks these aporia because it presupposes this
inwardness as an anthropological fact: In locating the action-directing author-
ity of humans in a timeless psychic structure, Schär overlooks the specific his-
torical location of this authority.
Not only pointing to supposed fatal consequences of individualization, as
Watt does, but also pathologizing hopelessness prevents us from recognizing
that human hopelessness does not lie beyond historical reality. Hopelessness is
itself a component of this reality to the extent that it indicates the limits and
boundaries of that reality. Whoever ‘murdered’ himself with a moral justifica-
tion appeared to the world of the German Enlightenment to be at once morally
inferior and morally superior. The fact that ‘self-murder’ could be the only pos-
sibility for moral action does not point to something beyond, but rather to the
boundaries of that morality. My reflections have, I hope, shown that it is not
the dangers (and also not the dignity) of moral autonomy which become clear
in Enlightened hopelessness,58 but rather the (historical-) theoretical presup-
positions of attempts to explain acts of suicide through a diachronic process of
secularization. If hopelessness is understood not as an explainable anthropo-
logical phenomenon, but rather as a semantic aporia, then the contingency of
historical and cultural reality becomes evident in that aporia. And in indicat-
ing the boundaries of past histories, this hopelessness can also show us the
limitations of our own histories as well. As an aporia, this hopelessness itself
eludes being named; through it, however, the boundaries of explanation
become evident.
58 Verena Lenzen sees such a danger in her book Selbsttötung. Ein philosophisch-theolo-
gischer Diskurs mit einer Fallstudie über Cesare Pavese (Düsseldorf: 1987), 189f.
Pitfalls in Reading Popular Self-Narratives
Biographical Reconfigurations and Self-Censure in the Autobiography
of a Pedlar, Small Farmer and Weaver from Eastern Switzerland,
Gregorius Aemisegger (1815–1913)1
Fabian Brändle
Introduction
In 1829 Gregorius Aemisegger experienced a “severe blow.”2 This 24-year-old

farmhand and day-laborer lost his beloved sister Elisabeth, who passed away
after a long period of suffering. In his autobiography, Aemisegger writes how
he lovingly cared for his suffering sister, consoling her and trying to give her
courage. When his mother and brother wanted to cane the young woman for
hallucinating, he was outraged and tore the rod from their hands. How could
one possibly treat a severely ill person in this manner? The desperate sister
sought succor from her brother:
Three weeks before she died she was moved by an inner urge to confess
to me where she had failed. However, I was unable to find anything evil in
what she confessed to. Then she indicated the day to me, on which she
would die, which actually happened the way she had predicted it, down
to the hour.3
Elisabeth Aemisegger had led a more or less irreproachable life.

Nonetheless, she died early. Her brother Gregorius concluded that God’s
will was not always transparent. Even so, Elisabeth Aemisegger was able to
predict the date of her death. Her brother, too, was a person who sensed
more than most people. He often dreamt of occurrences and accidents
which then actually took place: “[…] For many years after this, objects and
accidents appeared to me while I slept, which later actually came about.”4
1 This article was translated by Kaspar von Greyerz and Misha Kavka.
2 Das lange Leben eines Toggenburger Hausierers. Gregorius Aemisegger (1815–1913), ed. Fabian
Brändle (Wattwil: 2007), 46.
3 Ibid., 46.
4 Ibid., 47. On religious dreams in self-narratives of the early modern period, cf. Sebastian
Leutert, Religiöse Träume und visionäre Prophetie in der frühen Neuzeit. Dargestellt unter
besonderer Berücksichtigung deutschsprachiger Selbstzeugnisse und Visionsberichte
(Unpublished Lizentiatsarbeit, University of Zurich: 1996). For a summary, see also Kelly
Bulkeley, Dreaming in the World’s Religions. A Comparative History (New York: 2008).

Pitfalls in Reading Popular Self-Narratives 191
This gift seems to have been a particular attribute of the Aemisegger

family. What is more, Gregorius Aemisegger was a friend to men and ani-
mals, somebody ready and willing to save them from peril. That, at least, is
the self-image projected by his autobiography, which consists of approxi-
mately one hundred manuscript pages. Shortly before his death the author
entrusted his text to Hieronymus Torgler, the curator of the Toggenburg
museum at Lichtensteig, and asked him to take good care of it.5 In his fore-
word, Aemisegger addressed his children as his readership, which among
authors of popular autobiography was a frequently used rhetorical device
and means of demonstrating humility.6 But the fact that he entrusted his
text to a curator indicates that he probably envisaged a broader reading
public. How does Gregorius Aemisegger present himself to his readers?
How does the author shape his long and industrious life, which lasted for
almost a hundred years?
For a long time, historians of popular culture have had a tendency to
interpret the life histories of common people as ‘authentic’ documents. In
hunting for sources of popular culture, as if for a ‘shy deer’ (Peter Burke),
they have been excited to come across first-hand accounts, for such docu-
ments remain relatively rare to this day and represent a real find, at least
with regard to the early modern period and the early nineteenth century.
Older, fragmentary editions are testament to the tendency to treat popular
self-narratives as quarries rather than as texts located between experience
and discourse.7 This is why an otherwise notable Alsatian historian and
editor of the late nineteenth century, the parson Julius Rathgerber (1833–
1893), could claim that he wanted to reconstruct “the voice of the people.”
According to him, the account of the Alsatian shoemaker Mathias Lauberer
was that of a “simple and modest burgher.”8 However, like other editors, he
did not hesitate to modify the original text and to delete passages he did
not like or which he considered unfitting. His aim as an editor was to throw
light on the opposition of the burghers of Colmar to the annexation of the
5 Das lange Leben, ed. Brändle, 33.

6 Amelang, The Flight of Icarus. Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford:
1998), 25.
7 For a summary, see for example Fabian Brändle et al., “Texte zwischen Erfahrung und Diskurs.
Probleme der Selbstzeugnisforschung,” in Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich.
Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500–1850), ed. Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans
Medick and Patrice Veit (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 9), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna:
2002), 3–31.
8 Julius Rathgeber, ed., Colmar und Ludwig XIV. (1648–1715). Ein Beitrag zur elsässischen
Städtegeschichte im siebenzehnten Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: 1873), 62.
192 Brändle
Alsace by France.9 Only more recently have modern editions10 and thor-
ough research11 drawn our attention to the complexity of, and discursive
strategies inherent to, such texts. We now know that some of the authors in
question were social outsiders, whose texts for that reason do not offer a
view of ‘typical’ popular mentalities.12 They are not ‘average’ peasants or
craftsmen. On the contrary, to a certain extent they represent ‘special
cases’. This should remind us not to conceive of early modern popular cul-
ture as one idiosyncratic block, but to convince us to look at the different
lifestyles of common people, as well as at the processes by which popular
and elite cultures diffused into one another. Those who wrote often existed
at the periphery of their society, as ‘from below’ reading and writing were
frequently considered wasteful and suspicious activities. I do not intend to
recreate the myth of a common people completely alien to written culture.
The many self-narratives written by popular authors, men and women,
9 Amelang, Flight of Icarus, 52–79. Cf. also James Amelang, “The Dilemmas of Popular
Autobiography,” in Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich. Europäische
Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500–1850), ed. Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans Medick
and Patrice Veit (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 9), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna:
2002), 431–438.
10 Cf. for instance Bauernleben im Zeitalter des Dreissigjährigen Krieges. Die Stausebacher
Chronik des Caspar Preis (1636–1667), ed. Wilhelm A. Eckhardt and Helmut Klingelhöfer
(Beiträge zur hessischen Geschichte, vol. 13), (Marburg an der Lahn: 1998); Ulrich Bräker,
Sämtliche Schriften ed. Andreas Bürgi et al. (Munich and Bern: 1998–2005); Augustin
Güntzer, “Kleines Biechlin von meinem gantzen Leben.” Die Autobiographie eines Elsässer
Kannengiessers aus dem 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Fabian Brändle and Dominik Sieber
(Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 8), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2002); Mathias
Lauberer [father and son], “Mein haussbiechlein.” Schreibende Schuhmacher im 17.
Jahrhundert, ed. Fabian Brändle and Sebastian Leutert (Selbst-Konstruktion, vol. 2),
(Basel: 2004).
11 Cf. for instance, Amelang, Flight of Icarus; Daniel Schmid, Heinrich Bosshard – Ein Leben
zwischen zwei Welten (Travaux sur la Suisse des Lumières, vol. 4), (Geneva: 2002); Mit Pflug
und Gänsekiel. Selbstzeugnisse schreibender Bauern. Eine Anthologie, ed. Jan Peters
(Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 12), (Cologne: 2003); Sigrid Wadauer, Die Tour der
Gesellen. Mobilität und Biographie im Handwerk vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Studien
zur historischen Sozialwissenschaft, vol. 30), (Frankfurt a. M.: 2005).
12 On this, cf. Fabian Brändle, “‘Darmit ich aber etwas freide habe auf erden, so thue ich
lesen undt schreiben’. Populare soziale Aussenseiter des 17. Jahrhunderts als
Selbstzeugnisautoren,” in Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich. Europäische
and Patrice Veit (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 9), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna:
2002), 439–457.
prove its inadequacy.13 Nonetheless, there was mistrust in premodern

Europe of persons who engaged in reading and writing.14
However, in Germany around 1900 the number of self-narratives written by
members of the lower classes increased. There were texts written by petty
criminals, vagabonds, prisoners, prostitutes and persons living on the margins
of society, which were devoured by a public hungry for sensations. This explains
the frequently high number of copies printed.15 Several of these texts, such as
the typical worker’s autobiography, were politically motivated, expressing a
growing political and socialist sense of identity amongst male and female
authors.16 A similar development in Switzerland is less well documented.
My impression is that at this time in Switzerland self-narratives written by
members of the petty bourgeoisie still dominated the genre of popular
13 For the nineteenth century, also cf. Isa Schikorsky, Private Schriftlichkeit. Untersuchungen
zur Geschichte des alltäglichen Sprachverhaltens “kleiner Leute” (Germanistische
Linguistik, vol. 107), (Tübingen: 1990); Klaus Bergmann, Lebensgeschichte als Appell.
Autobiographische Schriften der “kleinen Leute” und Aussenseiter (Opladen: 1991). For the
tradition of peasant writings in northern Germany, cf. Jan Peters, Hartmut Harnisch and
Lieselott Enders, Märkische Bauerntagebücher des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Selbstzeugnisse
von Milchviehbauern aus Neuholland (Weimar: 1989); Marie-Louise Hopf-Droste, ed.,
Katalog ländlicher Anschreibebücher aus Nordwestdeutschland (Münster: 1989); Helmut
Ottenjahn and Günter Wiegelmann, eds., Alte Tagebücher und Anschreibebücher. Quellen
zum Alltag der ländlichen Bevölkerung in Nordwestdeutschland (Münster: 1982).
14 See Alfred Messerli, Lesen und Schreiben 1700 bis 1900. Untersuchung zur Durchsetzung der
Literalität in der Schweiz (Tübingen: 2002).
15 Cf. Klaus Bergmann, Lebensgeschichte als Appell; a case study by Ralf Thies, Ethnograph
des dunklen Berlin. Hans Ostwald und die “Grossstadt-Dokumente” (1904–1908) (Cologne:
2006).
16 See the proletarian ‘model biographies’ of Wenzel Holek, Adelheid Popp or M.W.T.
Bromme: Wenzel Holek, Lebensgang eines deutsch-tschechischen Handarbeiters (Jena:
1909), ed. Paul Göhre; Adelheid Popp, Die Jugendgeschichte einer Arbeiterin von ihr selbst
erzählt. Mit einführenden Worten von August Bebel (Munich: 1909); Moritz William
Theodor Bromme, Lebensgeschichte eines modernen Fabrikarbeiters (Jena and Leipzig:
1905), ed. Paul Göhre. On the proletarian autobiography cf. Michael Vogtmeier, Die prole-
tarische Autobiographie 1903–1914. Studien zur Gattungs- und Funktionsgeschichte der
Autobiographie (Frankfurt a. M.: 1984); Proletarische Lebensläufe. Autobiographische
Dokumente zur Entstehung der Zweiten Kultur in Deutschland, ed. Wolfgang Emmerich,
2 vols. (Reinbek bei Hamburg: 1975–1975); Georg Bollenbeck, Zur Theorie und Geschichte
der frühen Arbeiterlebenserinnerungen (Kronberg: 1976). For the perspective prevailing in
the gdr, see Ursula Münchow, Frühe deutsche Arbeiterautobiographie (East-Berlin: 1973).
On the autobiography of the German artisan, see Anja Dörfer, Autobiographische Schriften
deutscher Handwerker im 19. Jahrhundert (Halle: 1998); Sven Halse, Eine Reise für das
Leben. Deutsche Handwerker-Autobiographien 1700–1910 (Bremen: 2002).
194 Brändle
autobiography and that texts stemming from the margins of society were
rare.17 Gregorius Aemisegger’s account can neither be counted among the
worker’s autobiographies – as a small entrepreneur he was decisively opposed
to strikes – nor is it a classical case of an outsider’s text. Despite his poverty, the
author sets out to create an aura of respectability for himself; he is eager to
appear to his readers as a hard-working man who will not pass up any occasion
to earn money in an honest way.
People
Even as a child, Aemisegger claims, his demeanor was chivalrous. Although he

was not as studiously pious as many of his classmates who prayed up to eleven
times per day,18 he tried to be helpful wherever he could. One day, young
Gregorius and other children watched the spectacular sight of timber rafting
near the crossbar. A girl lost her hat, which fell into the river. She began to weep
bitterly, all the more because this amused the other children. Young Gregorius
felt pity for her and jumped in the ice-cold water, unaware of the danger. Large
blocks of wood swept past him, threatening his life and limb. However, in the
end he managed to catch the hat and hand it back to its owner. The girl was
charmed and Aemisegger was delighted “to have offered my services to an
unknown person.”19
In adolescence the author once cared for a dying friend and his mother:
“I took the hand of the heartbroken mother, for whom my friend had cared
unfailingly, asking her that she should let me do the same for her. I fulfilled this
as much as was in my power.”20 Two years later, he dreamt about the same
mother, who was now severely ill. As a result, he undertook a long journey in
order to console the dying woman. She had also dreamt about Aemisegger at
exactly the same time and longed to see him, although she lacked the courage
to send for him. After he had comforted her, she died in peace. When another
poor woman, a friend of the family, died, Aemisegger and his sister called on
the destitute, mourning family:
17 Cf. the edition of the dish pedlar Peter Binz’s autobiography: Unstet. Lebenslauf
des Ärbeeribuebs, Chirsi- und Geschirrhausierers Peter Binz, von ihm selbst erzählt, ed.
Albert Vogt (Zurich: 1995). For further Swiss examples around 1880, see Fabian Brändle,
“Über Stock und Stein, bei Wind und Wetter. Schweizerische HausiererInnen in (auto)-
biographischen Texten,” Bayerisches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde (2006), 93–102.
18 Das lange Leben, ed. Brändle, 41f.
19 Ibid., 38.
20 Ibid., 42f.
At the house of the deceased we encountered great poverty. The sick

woman did not even have a bed on which to lie. […] At the sight of
the children tears sprang to my sister’s eyes. […] The fact that they
now had nothing left but an apathetic father made me feel melan-
choly, too.21
Aemisegger took the only daughter with him back to his parents’ house. He
initially claimed that he wanted to keep the child only for a fortnight, but was
successful in overcoming the skepticism of his mother and talking her into
keeping the girl and looking after her as if she were her own child. The rather
poor family thus took in another little boarder and so lived up to the Christian
imperative of charity.
When the author married and started his own family, he again faced a simi-
lar situation. The couple only had one adolescent child, for a son had died in
infancy. Aemisegger was working as a weaver in the canton of Appenzell22
when a woman in trouble implored him for help.23 Like others of his acquain-
tances before her, this woman sensed her impending early death:
When I took my leave and promised to return soon, she took my hand,
looked at me and in her [lap] lay a child. I began to feel strange. It seemed
to me as if her inner person spoke to me, saying: ‘Be thou to this child
what it is losing in me.’ With such thoughts I took leave of her. 24
Again, Aemisegger had a dream, on which the poor man acted immedi-
ately, for dreams appeared to him to be divine messages. This is why he
decided to take in the woman’s child without even asking for expenses. His
wife supported him in doing so. Together, the couple concluded that the
child should decide once it was older whether it wanted to stay with them.
Aemisegger’s wife had been rather skeptical at first, but later proved to be
a good substitute mother:
And I am sure that she fulfilled her duty vis-à-vis this small orphan
entrusted to her by God and that my daughter helped and cared for the
21 Ibid., 45.
22 On the long-standing textile industry in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden, cf. Albert
Tanner, Spulen, Weben, Sticken. Die Industrialisierung in Appenzell Ausserrhoden (Zurich:
1982).
24 Ibid., 77.
196 Brändle
child, as if it were a beloved little sister. All three of us experienced much

joy with this little soul due to her attachment to us.25
Again, Aemisegger portrayed himself as a compassionate person. He consi

dered it his Christian duty to offer shelter to an orphan. At the same time, he
had yet another dream. A young woman, who was a friend of his daughter, was
bedridden and severely ill. Once again, Aemisegger dreamt of an early death
for the sick person, and again he was to be proven right. The dying patient
asked to see him and informed him of her wish to spend her last days at his
house, as it seems that her own sick-bed was far from ideal. Aemisegger was
happy to concur: “During three days and nights I was unable to leave her for my
absence disturbed her. When her last hour was upon her, I noticed that her
eyes were seeking her people.”26 On the verge of death, the young woman
looked into her protector’s eyes before dying peacefully: “Afterwards I laid her
into the coffin and adorned her with moth and roses. And she lay there just as
she had appeared to me in my dream a year ago.”27
Aemisegger’s talents did not remain hidden. Again and again the sick and
dying sought him out. At one point, at the advanced age of sixty, Aemisegger
turned his calling into a profession. He became an overseer at the city hospital
(Bürgerspital) of St. Gall.28 There he looked after the grounds, but also after the
men in care:
I always got along well with the old men. Some, whose last hour had
come, asked me not to take them to the sick station for they preferred to
die at my side. I happily concurred and was glad to be able to fulfill their
last wish.29
But the generally popular author did not stay long in St. Gall. He moved on,
always in search of work. He again worked as a weaver and then, at an
advanced age, as a pedlar hawking textiles produced by his daughter. From
his adolescence onwards, he considered himself called to care for the weak
25 Ibid., 77f.
26 Ibid., 78.
27 Ibid.
28 Aemisegger was in charge of the nursing position at the city hospital for five years
between 1861 and 1866. Cf. Stadtarchiv St. Gall, oga II, 8, 6, Protokoll der Spitalkom
mission, 14. June 1861 and oga II, 8, f, Protokoll der Spitalkommission, 18. May 1866. On
the hospital, see Vom Heiliggeist-Spital zum Bürgerspital, ed. Stefan Sonderegger et al.
(St. Gall: 1995).
and the sick. In his youth he had visited the chapel dedicated to William
Tell on the shore of the lake of the Four Cantons. There he had made a sol-
emn pledge to follow in the footsteps of the Swiss national hero “…in pro-
moting good and in resisting evil. I wanted to be Tell’s equal.
A helper in distress, a savior in danger, as much as was in my power.”30 The
popularity of William Tell resulted not least from the fact that, according to
the myth, he came from a modest background. In the iconography con-
cerned with the legendary tyrannicidal Tell, there are pictures which show
him saving children from drowning. Aemisegger wanted to emulate Tell by
helping the weak. Thus, he faithfully adhered to his pledge, at least accor
ding to his own account. What is more, he felt called upon directly by God
to do good: “I prayed to God that he should make me his instrument, should
anybody be in peril and danger […].”31 This is why he once left his house in
the middle of the night during a snowstorm because of the thought that
“a human life might be in danger.”32 He sneaked outside unnoticed and
walked on until, following a fervent prayer, he heard a desperate call for
help. A young woman had lost her way in the dark and become stuck in the
deep snow. Fearlessly, Aemisegger helped her out of her distress and
accompanied her to the next village. When the woman attempted to pay
him for his help, he refused her money graciously. She wanted to know who
he was. “I replied that she had implored God for help and not me.”33 At two
o’clock in the morning, Aemisegger was back home and thanked God that
He had responded to his prayer. He went to sleep, comforted by the fact
that nobody at home had noticed his rather suspicious departure from the
house in foul weather: “I wanted to keep it secret, for I feared people mock-
ing me. It was only a few years later that I told the story to my father.”34
Aemisegger thus acted in God’s name and even became an ‘instrument’
of His providence. His belief in providence, in God’s direct interventions
into the fate of mankind,35 ran very deep. In the introduction to his
30 Ibid., 44. On the influential Swiss myth of Tell, cf. for instance, Martin Fenner, “Die
Bedeutung der Tellfigur im 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhundert,” Der Geschichtsfreund 126/127
(1973/74), 33–84; Jean-Francois Bergier, Wilhelm Tell, Realität und Mythos (Munich: 1991);
Fabian Brändle, “Wider die eigenen Tyrannen. Tell als Widerstandsfigur von unten, 16. bis
18. Jahrhundert,” Historisches Neujahrsblatt Uri n. F. 59 (2005), 61–75.
32 Ibid., 49.
33 Ibid., 50.
34 Ibid., 51.
35 On the belief in Providence as a constitutive element of early modern English self-
narratives, cf. Kaspar von Greyerz, Vorsehungsglaube und Kosmologie. Studien zu
englischen Selbstzeugnissen des 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: 1990).
198 Brändle
autobiography he inserted a long poem proverbially addressing God’s pre

sence on earth:
Even when the sun shines on you gently, do not forget that it will again
disappear. When you cry from distress and sorrow, call upon God in your
prayers, remain still and be aware that God is directing all.36
Aemisegger even considered himself called upon to assist divine providence

on earth. Like Jesus, who, in the wake of the many miracles he performed, usu-
ally appealed for reticence and discretion, Aemisegger wanted to keep his
talents more or less secret and only shared them with his father. In his autobio
graphy, however, he wrote about them in detail and with some pride, obviously
in an attempt to gain the respect of his readers.
Such an upright person and benefactor could expect to have enemies among
the evil and dejected. Aemisegger fell in love with a southern German Catholic
who worked as a maid in eastern Switzerland. His love was requited, but inter-
confessional relationships and marriages were rare at that time. This is why
the Catholic mistress of the maid, assisted by a dubious Italian and a criminal
woman who hawked eggs, made it her business to thwart the lovers’ plans. When
her intrigues failed, she even tried to poison the unsuspecting Aemisegger.
The latter suffered hellish pains but luckily survived the attack. However, there
was no happy ending for the lovers because the parents were resolutely opposed
to the liaison. “What I considered the work of a higher being was forcefully
destroyed”37 – thus goes Aemisegger’s apparently resigned commentary.
Animals
During his childhood he had been an enemy of ‘noxious animals’, wrote

Gregorius Aemisegger, adding that he had hunted such animals and killed
them whenever he could catch them. The wasps were among these:
When I was young, I was a great enemy of wasps. Eradicated them where
I could. But they frequently stung me. […] I set them on fire, watched for
a while as their wings burnt and they wallowed on the ground. Then I felt
compassion for them, extinguished the fire as quickly as I could. Looked
around me to find out whether somebody had seen me. Thereupon

37 Ibid., 54.
I made a pledge, never to hurt a wasp any more. Since then none has
stung me.38
Aemisegger ended up feeling guilty when, as a child, he tortured wasps and

killed a multitude of them. He felt remorseful and refrained from further ani-
mal cruelty – and behold, the stings stopped. His behavior toward mice fol-
lowed a similar pattern, as he tells us in the appendix entitled “Observations
I have made on animal life.”39 The small rodents constantly bit holes into
the fabric he wove in the cellar, thereby causing considerable financial dam-
age. A wise old man told the author to refrain from setting up traps and to spare
the lives of mice. As a result, the mice actually stopped attacking the fabric.
This is how Aemisegger came to be in favor of a peaceful relationship
between men and ‘noxious animals’, and for a coexistence between man and
nature. If the animals were left in peace, they would refrain from plaguing men
and causing damage. He was convinced that animals were sensitive to who was
bent on evildoing and who was not. At the same time he had interesting
notions about mice and snakes. He mentions that he had once read that snakes
could mesmerize their prey with their eyes and, thus, catch them without
effort. He immediately tried this out. He fixed his eyes on those of a mouse and,
lo and behold, the mouse immediately became tamed and even allowed him to
stroke its back. This revealed to him that he could hypnotize animals. A farmer
advised him to kill the mouse. Aemisegger replied that “one should not kill
hypnotized animals.”40
He was also the only human being who was able to approach an especially
‘evil’ cow. This cow threatened to attack unwelcome persons with her horns,
injuring them badly. It also refused to be milked. But Aemisegger had been at
hand when the cow calved and had remained on watch at the stable. As a result,
the cow was friendly and trusted him: “I caressed her a bit, whereupon she licked
me. Then she continued to graze. From that point onward I did not need to watch
out for her anymore.”41 The cow was able to remember him; she had a memory.
When he was a youth, Aemisegger also experienced some problems with dogs
who, while he was still young, bit him no less than eight times. But as time went by,
he developed an affinity with them. He writes about dogs who saved people’s lives,
whose attachment lasted to the death of their master and who even had tears in
their eyes at their master’s demise. He knew how to communicate with dogs and
38 Ibid., 97.
39 Ibid., 97–102.
40 Ibid., 97.
41 Ibid., 98.
200 Brändle
other animals and to gain their respect. Recent research tells us about centuries of
close relationships between man and dog. Human love for animals is thus not a
child of modernity, but reaches back to the beginnings of mankind.42
Last but not least, the pedlar writes about a crow which spent its entire life
on Aemisegger’s plot. The author came to like it and even took care of the crow
when it was hungry by feeding it potatoes every now and then. At one point a
cat attacked the crow as it was picking on potatoes and chased it away. The
crow retaliated immediately and returned in the company of two magpies,
which took revenge by teasing the cat: “While the cat had to pay attention to
the magpies, the crows got to the potatoes and flew away with them. As a sign
of gratitude they left some for the magpies. These were not afraid of the cat.”43
Aemisegger, a precise observer of nature, thus relates about alliances
between different kinds of birds against their natural enemies, the cats. He was
of the opinion that animals had a memory and were even capable of showing
emotions. One proof for this was that cows were able to find their way to a
specific Alp independently, while the herdsmen spent time at the inn. Today,
farmers in Appenzell still assume that animals can be homesick.44 As a practi-
cian, Gregorius Aemisegger got involved in the debate as to whether animals
have a consciousness. The French philosopher René Descartes had claimed
that animals are only machines and, unlike humans, not capable of rationality.
Even in the eighteenth century there were critics of this theory. In the nine-
teenth century some quite influential scientists were of the opinion that dogs
were intelligent beings. A follower of Darwin even thought they were ‘human
by two thirds’. He praised their common sense, memory, attachment, grati-
tude, alertness and love for their master and pointed to the hate that dogs
express against enemies of their masters. These positive attributes of dogs also
made it into Edmund Brehm’s Tierleben.45
We know little about what Aemisegger actually read. As a believer, he must
have known the Bible and probably also some works of religious edification. It
could be that he was also familiar with certain zoological tracts or at least such
discourses. As a farmer and a ‘man in touch with nature’ (Naturmensch) he was
in any case convinced that animals, too, had common sense, and even a soul.
42 Cf. Erhard Oeser, Hund und Mensch. Die Geschichte einer Beziehung (Darmstadt: 2004);
Erhard Oeser, Katze und Mensch. Die Geschichte einer Beziehung (Darmstadt: 2005);
Florian Werner, Die Kuh, Leben Werk und Wirkung (Munich: 2009).
44 Cf. Roland Inauen, “För Hitz und Brand,” in Kräuter und Kräfte im Appenzellerland, ed.
Walter Irniger (Herisau: 1995), 47–69, here 50, n. 16.
45 Oeser, Hund und Mensch, 14–18.
On the whole, Aemisegger presents himself as a man who deeply respects all
of creation and finds himself in such close connection with it that he is even
able to communicate with animals. In modern Western society we have
become estranged from nature and its secrets. Earlier, people followed the
rhythm of nature much more closely in their lives and were better able to
understand its signs. As late as the 1970’s, when I was an adolescent in rural
Toggenburg, one Herr Elmer, a very old farmer, was known to know more than
‘the rest’, for he was better able than a doctor to recognize the illnesses of man
and beast and to heal them with herbs and benedictions.46
‘Reality’
In reading Gregorius Aemisegger’s autobiography one has the impression of

getting to know a sensitive, helpful and peace-loving man, someone who was
always there when men, women or beasts found themselves in distress. His
entire text is marked by accounts of the author’s good deeds towards men and
animals. This creates great sympathy on the part of the reader, all the more so
because Aemisegger himself experienced great penury and deprivation on
more than one occasion, but never gave up and always found a way out of his
misery. Incidentally, there is no mention of the author’s name in the original
text; it was written anonymously. I had to go to some trouble in order to iden-
tify Gregorius Aemisegger as the author, and luck helped, too. In the older, par-
tial edition of the text edited by Armin Müller, which appeared in 1972, no
specific author is named.47 However, archival sources offer evidence for
Aemisegger’s account of his life, at least as far as they confirm the year of his
birth and marriage, the birthdates of his children and, by and large, also his
frequent moves to new places. Considering that these facts can be confirmed
and that we can thus exclude the possibility of the report being purely fic-
tional, we tend to lend credence to Aemisegger’s portrayal of himself as a noble
helper. I was all the more surprised, then, when by chance I came across his
obituary in the Neujahrsblatt des Historischen Vereins des Kantons St. Gallen,
an annual publication chiefly addressed to the educated middle classes. I was
46 Also cf. Rebekka Wechsler, Mit Gebeten heilen. Interviews mit acht heiltätigen Personen aus
der Ostschweiz (Unpublished Lizentiatsarbeit, University of Zurich: 2002); Kurt Lussi, Im
Reich der Geister und tanzenden Hexen. Jenseitsvorstellungen, Dämonen und Zauberglaube.
Mit einem Beitrag von Christian Rätsch (Aarau: 2002).
47 Cf. Armin Müller, “Erinnerungen eines 95järigen Hausierers, genannt ‘Boten Goris’ (etwa
1815–1910),” Toggenburgerblätter für Heimatkunde 29 (1972), 11–20.
202 Brändle
surprised, initially, that such a distinguished organ of the educated bourgeoisie

would report the death of a simple pedlar. To be sure, Aemisegger was well
known throughout the region as a result of his advanced age as well as his
undiminished will to work. However, I was even more surprised by the content
of the short obituary:
In Bütswil died at almost 98 years of age Gregor Aemisegger of Hemberg,

his family’s village (Heimatgemeinde), where he was born in 1815. At the
age of thirty, he participated in the military campaign of volunteers (1845)
against the government of the canton of Lucerne, which championed the
Jesuits, and later in the campaign [1847] against the league of the conser-
vative cantons (Sonderbund). As a pedlar he travelled up and down the
Rhine valley and the Appenzell well into the final period of his life.48
I knew from the autobiography that Aemisegger hawked wares up to a very old
age and that in doing so he moved across large parts of eastern Switzerland. At
the end of his diary-like entries he notes with some pride that with his 86 years
of age he is the oldest pedlar of the canton of St. Gall:
When I was 86 years old I once more went to St.Gall to get a new patent for
pedlary. Being the oldest pedlar of the canton, I received it free of charge,
which I enjoyed all the more because it allows me free movement.49
Nonetheless Aemisegger always opted for the same route, the so-called Strich.50
At his old age this ensured him of a steady clientele and thus of a more or less
regular income.
As I have already pointed out, the information gained from Aemisegger’s
obituary about his role as a pedlar is compatible with what we learn from the
autobiography. What is entirely new, however, is the additional information
about his participation in the two military campaigns of 1845 and 1847. If his
participation in the Sonderbund war, the short civil war between the Swiss
Catholic and Reformed cantons which led to the foundation of the modern
Swiss Confederation in 1848,51 can be understood as a fulfillment of duty, then
48 Neujahrsblatt, published by the Historischer Verein des Kantons St. Gallen (1914), 83.
50 On this, cf. Martin Rheinheimer, Arme, Bettler und Vaganten. Überleben in der Not 1450–
1850 (Frankfurt a. M.: 2000), 31.
51 On this, cf. Erwin Bucher, Die Geschichte des Sonderbundskrieges (Zurich: 1966); Joachim
Remak, A Very Civil War. The Swiss Sonderbund War of 1847 (Boulder: 1993).
the Freischaren campaign two years earlier must be looked upon as an entirely
voluntary undertaking. About 3,500 men participated in marching against
Catholic Lucerne. Their main motivation was their fierce opposition to the call
issued by the Lucerne government on the order of the Jesuits to come and
assume the responsibility of higher education. After some initial success the
army of volunteers was soon dissipated. About 700 citizens of the canton of
Lucerne, who had fought against their own government, received jail sen-
tences, while the prisoners from other cantons were released on payment of a
high ransom.52 I have not tried to find out whether Gregorius Aemisegger was
among the prisoners. If the assumption is correct that he participated in the
campaign of 1845 as a volunteer, this casts a shadow over the picture which the
pedlar presents in his autobiography. His voluntary participation in a war can-
not be easily squared with the image of a caring and sensitive man who, from
his childhood onwards, saved lives and comforted the sick. War means carrying
a weapon and, if need be, killing. This contradicts the Biblical commandment
“Thou shalt not kill.”
We have seen, however, that young Aemisegger adopted William Tell as his
model. The legendary Tell was not only a helper to those in distress, but mainly
a tyrannicidal fighter against iniquity and servitude. Radical circles within the
Reformed community perceived the Jesuits as tyrants who had to be opposed
at any price. Thus, Aemisegger was not just a Tell who helped, but also a Tell
who fought.
Aemisegger, however, did not devote a single syllable to this aspect of his
character, his militant anti-Catholicism. We are thus faced with a relatively
spectacular case of self-censorship. This is not uncommon in popular self-nar-
ratives, especially when they come into written form by the methods of ‘oral
history’. The Tübingen cultural anthropologist Bernd Jürgen Warneken pointed
this out as early as 1985.53
Conclusion
In the introduction to this contribution, I referred to the fact that popular

authors, men and women, are frequently seen, even today, as ‘the people’s voice’.
52 Cf. Karl Bühlmann, Der zweite Freischarenzug. Motive und soziale Ursachen anhand der
Prozessakten (Luzern, 1985); Kurt Münger, “Freischarenzüge,” Historisches Lexikon der
Schweiz (online: March 11, 2009, 9, www.hls.ch).
53 Cf. Bernd Jürgen Warneken, Populare Autobiographik. Empirische Studien zu einer
Quellengattung der Alltagsgeschichtsforschung (Tübingen: 1985), 43–48.
204 Brändle
Given the lack of other sources their accounts are regularly taken to reflect the
inner life of a ‘people’ at a particular time. I have myself relied on the evidence
provided by self-narratives in an attempt to reconstruct the worlds of pedlars of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as Swiss street-football in
the 1930’s.54 There can be no doubt that research on popular cultures remains an
important task for historical scholarship. In this pursuit, self-narratives often fill
lacunae left by other sources. The fascinating example of Gregorius Aemisegger
demonstrates, however, that our interpretations should proceed with caution. In
this particular case, the presentation of the self does not in all respects coincide
with ‘reality’. Aemisegger portrays himself as ‘God’s instrument’, an executor of
the will of providence, a helper in adversity, a peace-loving and caring person
who strives to assist men and animals in distress by deed and good counsel. In his
dreams he was able to see the future and acted accordingly. His model was
William Tell, the legendary and mythical founding father of the Swiss Confederacy.
One is able to detect in his account a sense of being among the elect, due most
likely to having reached a biblical age and to the admiration this undoubtedly
caused among his contemporaries. In his youth, Aemisegger escaped almost
unscathed from a dangerous fall from a high mountain, which greatly astonished
witnesses.55 This may have strengthened his sense of election as well. As his
account is deeply moving, we are tempted to believe the image drawn of himself
by this poor man. But Aemisegger also participated in two wars, one of which he
engaged in fully as a volunteer without any pressure to fight. In the fierce fighting
against the Jesuitical ‘tyrants’ he similarly tried to emulate the legendary national
hero, William Tell.
The otherwise talkative author shrouded his military experience in silence,
a fairly obvious case of self-censorship. What about the very positive image
which Aemisegger’s readers have acquired? Do we have to consider his text as
nothing but a lie and therefore useless? I would not go that far. It is true that we
cannot now find evidence of Aemisegger’s good deeds. On the other hand, the
author was a Christian believer and as such committed to being truthful.
Wise men and women, who know more than the rest of the population, have
existed and continue to exist in every rural society and in every religion.56
54 Brändle, Über Stock und Stein, 93–102; Fabian Brändle, “Tennisbälle, Dolen und zerbro-
chene Scheiben. Zur Geschichte des Schweizer Strassenfussballs vor dem Zeitalter
des Automobils (1920–1945),” SportZeiten. Sport in Geschichte, Kultur und Gesellschaft, 7
(2007, 3), 7–20.
56 Cf. for instance, the ethnomedical works by Katja Sündermann, Spirituelle Heiler im
modernen Syrien. Berufsbild und Selbstverständnis, Wissen und Praxis (Berlin: 2006); Anton
And Aemisegger’s special relationship with animals can be explained as well.

However, there were also dark sides to his personality, which he evidently fails
to address.
All this should remind us to heed the aspects of construction in popular
self-narratives and not to overlook among the texts we edit those that may
shed a different light on a one-sided picture. Do we not tend to be sensitive to
such aspects of construction in the memoirs of great politicians, military com-
manders and artists, which we scrutinize with skepticism? It is undoubtedly
more difficult to evaluate similar passages in accounts written by less well-
known persons. Their correspondence has rarely survived; at most we might
come across an obituary in a newspaper. And even that was only possible in
this case because the deceased person was of some local notoriety, being by far
the oldest pedlar in the region. Self-narratives, as fascinating as they may be, do
not lack pitfalls, whether they are popular or elite accounts.
Quack, Hexer, Heiler und Schamanen. Die Religion der Stammeskulturen (Darmstadt:
2004); Bernhard Wörrle, Rituale und Patienten. Schamanismus in den Anden Ecuadors
(Berlin: 2002); Thomas Hauschild, Magie und Macht in Italien. Über Frauenzauber, Kirche
und Politik (Gifkendorf: 2003). For a summary from a historical perspective, cf. Robert
Jütte, Ärzte, Heiler und Patienten. Medizinischer Alltag in der frühen Neuzeit (Zurich: 1991).
PART 3
Cartography
∵
Family and House Books in Late Medieval German-
Speaking Areas
A Research Overview1
Claudia Ulbrich
“In nomine domini amen. Anno domini 1360, then I commenced to write this
booklet about my family lineage, as I have been part of it and experienced it.”2
With this sentence the merchant and later mayor of Nuremberg Ulman
Stromer begins his “booklet of my family lineage and of adventure,” which cov-
ers the period between 1349 and 1407.3 Ulman Stromer, member of a patrician
family, is considered to be the first Nuremberg chronicler as well as the first
middle-class author of a text with autobiographical characteristics.4 His work,
which was simultaneously a trade account, a family book and a history book,5
is also regarded as the earliest evidence of a family book in German-speaking
1 This article was translated by Misha Kavka. It was first published in an Italian translation in
Memoria, famiglia, identità tra Italia ed Europa nell’età moderne, ed. Giovanni Ciappelli
(Annali dell’Instituto storico-germanico in Trento Quaderni, vol. 77), Bologna 2009, 39–61.
The german original was published in Claudia Ulbrich, Verflochtene Geschichte(n).
Ausgewählte Aufsätze zu Geschlecht, Macht und Religion in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed.
A. Griesebner et al., (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2014), 201–218. For Swiss Family books
from the 16th to 19th c. see the contribution of Lorenz Heiligensetzer in this volume.
2 Ulman Stromer, Püchel von mein geslechet und vom abentewr, ed. Karl Hegel in: Die Chroniken
der fränkischen Städte. Nürnberg, vol. 1 (Die Chroniken des Jahrhundert, vol. 1), Leipzig 1862
(Reprint Göttingen 1961), 3–312.: “In nomine domini amen. Anno domini 1360 do hub ich an
zu disem puchel zu schreiben von mein geslecht, alz ich es gehort und ervaren hab.”
3 Ulman Stromer, Püchel von mein geslechet und vom abentewr. No critical edition exists for this
text; a few excerpts have been published in facsimile: Ulman Stromer, Püchel von mein
geslecht und von abentewr. Partial facsimile of the manuscript Hs. 6146 of the Germanisches
Nationalmuseum in Nürnberg, ed. Lotte Kurras, 2 vols., (Nuremberg: 1990). For a comprehen-
sive information on the life and work of Ulman Stromer see: Gabriele Jancke: Selbstzeugnisse
im deutschsprachigen Raum – Autobiographien, Tagebücher und andere autobiographische
Schriften, 1400–1620. Eine Quellenkunde. Unter Mitarbeit von Marc Jarzebowski, Klaus Krönert
und Yvonne Aßmann (2008, August 13, www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/jancke-quellenkunde).
4 VL2 9 (1995) 457–460 (Lotte Kurras).
5 Joachim Schneider, “Typologie der Nürnberger Stadtchronik um 1500. Gegenwart und
Geschichte in einer spätmittelalterlichen Stadt,” in Städtische Geschichtsschreibung im
Spätmittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Peter Johanek (Cologne,Weimar and Vienna:
2000), 181–204, here 183.

210 Ulbrich
areas that was passed down as comprehensive codex.6 Unlike the Italian libro di
ricordanze or libro di famiglia, there has never been a single term in German for
such writings, large numbers of which have been produced and passed down in
German-speaking areas since the late medieval period.7 For this reason, German
research on house and family books struggles with problems of definition. The
texts in question are objects of historical and literary study concentrating on
the Late Middle Ages and the early modern period. They are also used as sources
in socio-historical and historical-anthropological research.8 A notable feature
of family and house book scholarship in German-speaking areas is that all of
the studies, in one way or another, draw on an older scholarly tradition regard-
ing the self and the individual, a tradition strongly influenced by the history of
ideas. In the last third of the twentieth century, however, the various scholarly
strands separated into different research areas, which touch on one another
but have remained unconnected to a large extent until today. House and
family books are currently attracting the interest of historians of urban and
dynastic society and culture. They are examined in the context of research on
self-narratives and they serve as sources for information about everyday and
family life, as well as information about the history of emotions, sexuality and
gender relations.9 Depending on one’s research interests, completely different
genres are being collected to form a corpus and various claims are made about
the social location, proliferation and function of family books. A research
overview of house and family books must thus take into consideration autobi-
ography studies as well as studies of urban and dynastic history. It must also
trace the common roots back to earlier studies of individuality, which are
6 Birgit Studt, “Haus- und Familienbücher,” in Quellenkunde der Habsburgermonarchie (16.-18.

Jahrhundert). Ein exemplarisches Handbuch, ed. Josef Pauser, Martin Scheutz and Thomas
Winkelbauer (Munich and Vienna: 2004), 753–766, here 755.
7 Ibid., 753.
8 Birgit Studt, “Einführung,” in Haus- und Familienbücher in der städtischen Gesellschaft des
Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. eadem (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: 2007), IX–XX,
here X.
9 For an introduction, see: Fabian Brändle et al. “Texte zwischen Erfahrung und Diskurs.
Probleme der Selbstzeugnisforschung,” in Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich.
Hans Medick and Patrice Veit (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 9), (Cologne, Weimar
and Vienna: 2001), 3–31 Sabine Schmolinsky, “Einleitung,” in Das dargestellte Ich. Studien
zu Selbstzeugnissen des späteren Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Arnold, Sabine
Schmolinsky and Urs Martin Zahnd (Selbstzeugnisse des Mittelalters und der beginnenden
Neuzeit, vol. 1), (Bochum: 1999), 13–17. For example cf. Sünje Prühlen, “alse sunst hir
gebruchlich is.” Eine Annäherung an das spätmittelalterliche und frühneuzeitliche Alltags-
und Familienleben anhand der Selbstzeugnisse der Familien Brandis in Hildesheim und
Family and House Books 211
occasionally explicitly thematized but often only implicitly influence the inter-
pretation of sources. I will first outline the earlier tradition belonging to the his-
tory of ideas and then introduce some new research fields in which house and
family books are used and described as sources. In a concluding section, I will
take the research on house and family books in a more narrow sense as a starting
point for summarizing the findings and identifying directions for further work.
Research in the Tradition of the History of Ideas
Since the days of Jacob Burckhardt and Georg Misch, autobiographical writing
of the late medieval and early modern periods has had a high significance
in German-language scholarship.10 Both authors connected autobiography
closely with questions of human individuality. Jacob Burckhardt, with a view
to Italy, pointed to the link between the emergence of a greater self-conscious-
ness of the indivdual and the development of autobiography. Georg Misch, a
student of Dilthey, directly took up these considerations in his History of
Autobiography, completed in 1904, and formulated what has since become a
common claim in autobiography studies that autobiography as “a means of
expression of the autonomy of human beings” experienced its “actual found-
ing” in the Renaissance.11 According to Misch, it was the citizens of the free
cities who were the first to write “family histories of a more or less clearly auto-
biographical character.”12 Although Misch’s interest lay in the “development
of personality consciousness in Western humanity,”13 he paid special attention
to all cultures that were influenced by the creative traditions of antiquity. A
comparison with Byzantine and Arabic traditions made it possible for him to
Moller in Hamburg (Selbstzeugnisse des Mittelalters und der beginnenden Neuzeit,

vol. 3), (Bochum: 2005).
10 Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ein Versuch, ed. Konrad Hoffmann
(Stuttgart: 1988 [11th edn]; first appeared: 1860; 2nd 1869), especially IV. Section, chapter 5;
Georg Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, 4 vol. (Bern: 1949 and Frankfurt a.M.: 1950–1969).
11 Georg Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, vol. IV. 2: Von der Renaissance bis zu den auto-
biographischen Hauptwerken des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt a.M.: 1969), 573. This
volume is a reprint of the edition published by Misch in 1904. (“Ausdrucksmittel für die
freie Selbständigkeit des Menschen”).
12 Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, vol. IV. 2, 585.
13 Georg Misch, “Begriff und Ursprung der Autobiographie,” in idem, Geschichte der
Autobiographie, vol. I: Das Altertum, 3rd edn (Bern: 1949), 3–21, repr. in Die Autobiographie.
Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung, ed. Günter Niggl (Wege der Forschung,
vol. 565), (Darmstadt: 1989), 33–54, here 36: “Entwicklung des Persönlichkeitsbewusstseins
der abendländischen Menschheit.”
212 Ulbrich
delineate the particular characteristics of occidental Christian culture, which

was the only culture where he recognized a “development turned to the
future.”14 Whereas Misch was interested in understanding autobiographical
texts “in the universal historical context of the development of the human
spirit in European culture,”15 fifteen years later, Adolf Rein sought to establish
the German roots of autobiography. In his essay on “The Self-Biography in the
German Late Middle Ages,” which first appeared in 1919, he claims that modern
‘self-biographies’ developed from the house and family books introduced in
the late Middle Ages.16 Like Misch and Burckhardt, he presumes that the begin-
nings of modern ‘self-biography’ are to be found in urban culture. The sense of
family that was strongly marked in middle-class circles, he argues, naturally
meant that merchants incorporated much family-related information into
their log books alongside business-related matters. This resulted in family
chronicles, from which the ‘self-biography’ eventually developed. Rein cites as
important examples the chronicle of Augsburg by Burkhard Zink, written in
1466,17 and the life story of Ludwig von Diesbach, begun in 1488.18 Similarly,
Werner Mahrholz emphasized that ‘self-biography’ “faithfully reflects the for-
tunes of the German bourgeoisie as the estate actually upholding culture,”
whose understanding of life is marked by individualism.19
14 Georg Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, vol. III.2: Das Mittelalter. Das Hochmitttelalter
im Anfang (Frankfurt: 1962), 747. Misch’s intensive engagement with texts from non-
European cultures, such as the Baburnama, led him to consider the “emergence of a
reflexively self-conscious personality” (Die Entstehung der sich ihrer selbst bewussten
Persönlichkeit) to be a “panhuman” (gesamtmenschliche) possibility (ibid., 961).
15 Misch, Begriff und Ursprung der Autobiographie, 36: “in dem universalgeschichtlichen
Zusammenhang der Entwicklung des menschlichen Geistes in der europäischen Kultur.”
16 Adolf Rein, “Über die Entwicklung der Selbstbiographie im ausgehenden deutschen
Mittelalter (1919),” in Niggl, ed. Die Autobiographie, 321–342, here 341. Rein refers back to
Burckhardt and Misch, who saw similar origins in Italy of the Renaissance and ancient
Rome, but as a conservative national historian, Rein concentrates on setting out the
national framework of this development (ibid., 341, n. 47).
17 “Chronik des Burkhard Zink. 1368–1468,” Book 3, in Die Chroniken der schwäbischen Städte.
Augsburg, vol. 2, ed. F. Frensdorff, (Die Chroniken der deutschen Städte vom 14. bis ins 16.
Jahrhundert, vol. 5), (Leipzig: 1866; reprint Göttingen: 1965), 122–143. For biographical and
bibliographic references see Jancke, Quellenkunde.
18 Urs Martin Zahnd, Die autobiographischen Aufzeichnungen Ludwig von Diesbachs. Studien
zur spätmittelalterlichen Selbstdarstellung im oberdeutschen und schweizerischen Raume
(Schriften der Berner Burgerbibliothek, vol. 17), (Bern: 1986), 26–115; for biographical and
bibliographical references, see Jancke, Quellenkunde.
19 Werner Mahrholz, “Der Wert der Selbstbiographie als geschichtliche Quelle,” in Niggl, ed.,
Die Autobiographie, 72–74. (=Excerpt from the introduction by Werner Mahrholz, Deutsche
Even though some aspects of the works of Burckhardt, Misch, Rein, Mahrholz
and several other earlier authors20 have attracted criticism, their studies con-
tinue to influence the ideas on which more recent scholarship of autobiogra-
phy is based.21 The individual, person and self are frequently taken to be
essentialist: only forms of self-consciousness change.
Self-consciousness is closely tied up with individuality, whose history is
described as a history of the discovery or unfolding of the individual. In par-
ticular historical situations, the self ventures forth and demands recognition.
David Sabean, in his considerations of personhood, has summarized just how
problematic such a one-sided approach to the self is: “It fails to understand
that at any period there are alternative ways of being, practicing and perceiv-
ing the self. It accepts a view of the matter promulgated by pastors, priest,
therapists, petits fonctionnaires, and professors. In most of these accounts the
state is missing and power is left out of the equation.”22 In spite of all of the
criticism of this earlier model, questions regarding the development of indi-
viduality continue to dominate Selbstzeugnisforschung, while other notions of
the person remain unconsidered. This holds true above all in literary studies of
autobiography, which take autobiography from around 1800 as the basis for
their theoretical formulation.23 Texts are frequently read in order to answer
“whether a particular stage of consciousness or of personality has or has not
yet been reached, whether an author has become independent of traditions
as well as of religious and social relations, what significance is accorded to
a person’s “inner life,” and the degree to which a self-representation reveals
Selbstbekenntnisse. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Selbstbiographie von der Mystik bis zum
Pietismus (Berlin: 1919), 7–9, here 8: “getreulich die Geschicke des deutschen Bürgertums
als des eigentlich bildungstragenden Standes”).
20 It is also worth mentioning Marianne Beyer-Fröhlich, Die Entwicklung des deutschen
Selbstzeugnisses (Darmstadt: 1970; reprint of the edition Leipzig: 1930).
21 For example, Michaela Holdenried, Autobiographie (Stuttgart: 2000), 94–118, largely takes
Rein’s theses on board uncritically. For those who argue for a historicization of the con-
cept of individuality, see Stefan Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellung in
deutschsprachigen Autobiographien des 16. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zur historischen
Psychologie (Literatur -Imagination – Realität, vol. 6), (Trier: 1993); Hans-Rudolf Velten,
Das selbst geschriebene Leben. Eine Studie zur deutschen Autobiographie im 16. Jahrhundert
(Frankfurter Beiträge zur Germanistik, vol. 29), (Heidelberg: 1995).
22 Claudia Ulbrich and David Sabean, “Personkonzepte in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Etablierte
Wissenschaft und feministische Theorie im Dialog, ed. Claudia von Braunmühl (Berlin:
2003), 99–112, here 101.
23 See also Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Autobiographie, 2nd edn (Sammlung Metzler, vol.
323), (Stuttgart: 2005).
214 Ulbrich
self-reflective intellectualization.”24 In the process, Eurocentric concepts such

as nation and family are often imported into the discussion without being
examined. At the same time, the spectrum of authors is limited to male elites.
This is not just the case in German scholarship. For Georges Gusdorf25 and Roy
Pascal26 autobiography was unquestionably a typical European form of writ-
ing. Whereas Georg Misch considered the emergence of a consciousness of
personality to be “possible for all humanity,”27 Georges Gusdorf, drawing on
the widespread theories of cultural stages in the 1950s, limited the possibility
of autobiography unequivocally to the post-Renaissance Western societies.
It was only there, he believed, that man developed and expressed conscious-
ness about himself.28
II New Approaches
Since the 1980s, questions about (auto) biography and individuality have been
given a new impetus, bringing house and family books once again to the fore.
The renewed impetus for the investigation of late medieval house and family
books in German-language scholarship initially came from individual studies
which attempted to do justice to their texts. Thus, Urs Martin Zahnd, the editor
of the new edition of the autobiographical account of Ludwig von Diesbach,
points to the amazing complexity of these genres, which are used on the one
hand as a source of information about the social, economic and legal histories
of individual families, while on the other hand they make it possible to investi-
gate the beginnings of self-narratives.29 Using Nuremberg and Bern as exam-
ples, he shows that a comparative examination of family books opens up
different insights into the elites of the cities. He is able to uncover and correct
24 See the contribution of G. Jancke and C. Ulbrich in this volume, 23. Extensive criticism of
the orientation in self-narrative research to the current concept of the individual can be
found in Gabriele Jancke, Autobiographie als soziale Praxis. Beziehungskonzepte in
Selbstzeugnissen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum (Selbstzeugnisse
der Neuzeit, vol. 10), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2002), 2ff.
25 Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie,” in Formen der Selbstdarstel
lung; Analekten zu einer Geschichte des literarischen Selbstportraits: Festgabe für Fritz
Neubert anlässlich seines 70. Geburtstages, ed. Erich Haase and Günter Reichenkron
(Berlin: 1956), 105–123. The English translation of this article was published in. Auto
biography, essays theoretical and critical, ed. James Olney,. (Princeton, N.J.: 1980), 28–48.
26 Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, ma: 1960).
27 Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, vol. 3,2: Das Mittelalter.
28 Gusdorf, Conditions, 29.
29 Zahnd, Die autobiographischen Aufzeichnungen, 279.
many of the assumptions imported from earlier research. Zahnd does not
understand family only as a biological, economic or social unit, but also as the
bearer of normative systems and meanings.30 The family is understood to be
part of a comprehensive community, like the city.31 Thus, the individual does
not represent itself as an independent, autonomous person, but rather as a
being bound into networks of relations.
In addition, Zahnd points out that the concentration on commercial logs
and family books is too shallow, as it does not allow for a clear separation from
the family chronicles of landlords. He insists that family books must be seen in
a broader literary context. Although family books share similarities of form
and content with the Tuscan ricordanze, the extent to which the latter serve as
a model is not clear. It is true that German merchants of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries were frequently educated in Italy, but the educational cen-
ters were concentrated in Venice, Milan or Genoa, not in Tuscany.32 This can be
seen in the writing of Ulman Stromer, whose little book recalls the structure of
the Tuscan ricordanze although he himself has no detectable biographical
links to Tuscany. It is much more likely that Stromer was familiar with the auto-
biography of Charles IV, since the Nuremberg Council, to which Ulman Stromer
belonged, had decided in 1378 to have this text translated into German.33
That Stromer does not mention this is not particularly surprising, as his
political activities are not a topic of his “booklet.”34 At the center of his self-
representation we find not the autonomous individual, but rather the social
status derived from his family background and encapsulated in the family
crest.35
Barbara Schmid, in her 2006 dissertation, also emphasizes that the early
writing of autobiography was regarded as an act of social and political self-
assertion. Her investigation, however, is based on a much broader range of
sources than earlier research. Schmid also included records from the milieu of
the royal courts, compiling a databank of 670 titles.36 In an exemplary analysis,
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., 310.
32 Urs Martin Zahnd, “Einige Bemerkungen zu spätmittelalterlichen Familienbüchern aus
Nürnberg und Bern,” in Nürnberg und Bern. Zwei Reichsstädte und ihre Landgebiete, ed.
Rudolf Endres (Erlanger Forschungen, Reihe A, Geisteswissenschaften, vol. 46), (Erlangen:
1960), 7–38.
33 Zahnd, Die autobiographischen Aufzeichnungen, 314.
34 Ibid., 315.
35 Ibid., 317.
36 Barbara Schmid, Schreiben für Status und Herrschaft. Deutsche Autobiographik in
Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Zurich: 2006). Schmid refers to this databank, but does
not present any quantitative evaluations supported by the databank.
216 Ulbrich
she shows that the genre of autobiography can be traced back to two different
traditions, the bourgeois as well as the courtly tradition. What the two have in
common is that the authors from both sets strove for social recognition: “It is
not the struggle for self-knowledge that stood at the center of writing, but
rather the contention for status and authority which would guarantee the suc-
cess of lineage and dynasty.”37
Birgit Studt, too, insists on the representative function of family books.38 In
her research on the writing of urban family books, she connects them to earlier
urban history writing, which revolved around the subject of memoria.39 In her
work, the self-understanding of the late medieval city is no longer based only
on the circumstance that it is a community governed by the rule of law based
on the oath. She points out that an additional feature linked to the city’s iden-
tity is memoria, which inscribed itself into numerous media, including pic-
tures, symbols, monuments, rituals and ceremonies, liturgy and theatre, as
well as history writing, which became a concern of the citizens.40 For the urban
elites, writing about lives, family traditions and communal history belonged
together.41 The composition of a chronicle offered the opportunity to write
something about one’s own lineage and family. Conversely, the need to leave
important details about business life to one’s heirs also allowed space to write
something about the city. It is not until modernity that the alleged hybridity of
the family book becomes a problem. Based on these considerations, Studt
interprets the writing of urban family histories as a social practice “undertaken
by that homogeneous, exclusive social group of leading families which today
[…] we designate as the patriciate or city nobility.”42 It is not the “autonomy of
the person” but rather a firm connection to the city and urban value system
that led the elites to writing down aspects of their lives: “In the setting of the
city […] fostering family tradition was simultaneously part of one’s identity
and of representation. Competitive behavior and the pursuit of distinction led
37 Ibid., 185: “Nicht das Ringen um Selbsterkenntis, vielmehr die den Erfolg von Geschlecht
und Dynastie garantierende Auseinandersetzung mit Status und Herrschaft standen im
Mittelpunkt des Schreibens.”
38 Studt, Einführung, XIIf.
39 Cf. for example, the articles in: Peter Johanek, ed., Städtische Geschichtsschreibung im
Spätmittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit (Städteforschungen, Reihe A: Darstellungen,
vol. 47), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2000).
40 Ibid., Introduction, VII–XIX, here XVII.
41 This has already been emphasized by Heinrich Schmidt, Die deutschen Städtechroniken
als Spiegel des bürgerlichen Selbstverständnisses im Spätmittelalter (Göttingen: 1958).
42 Birgit Studt, “Erinnerung und Identität. Die Repräsentation städtischer Eliten in spätmittelal-
terlichen Haus- und Familienbüchern,” in eadem, ed., Haus- und Familienbücher, 1–31, here 30.
to a great writing output, which, because of the established and long-defended

social role of the patriarch as representative of house and family, developed
into its own genre.”43
That it should be precisely medieval urban history writing which led to the
emergence of family books defined by their relation to a group is closely tied to
discussions in medieval studies about the self and the individual. The fact that
the Middle Ages were taken to be an uninteresting period for the study of the
person and the self triggered productive disagreement from medieval studies.
Otto Gerhard Oexle, for instance, considers the claim that individuality was
unknown in the Middle Ages to be a product of modernity, which understands
itself in terms of such a theory of individuality. For him, medieval society is a
group society, in which he sees “people who, as individuals, form groups in
conflict and consensus, and who constantly bind themselves into groups in
order to realize their value systems and goals.”44
Such ideas are also echoed by Pierre Monnet, who, reaching back to Maurice
Halbwachs, is concerned with the significance of space for autobiographical
remembering.45 Monnet shows that the urban space in the family books ful-
filled a wide variety of functions. Lucas Rem (1481–1542), for instance, gave his
chronicle the character of a journey,46 centering not on Augsburg but rather on
43 Ibid., 31: “Im städtischen Ambiente […] war die Pflege der Familientradition Bestandteil
der eigenen Identität und der Repräsentation zugleich. Konkurrenzverhalten und Streben
nach Distinktion führten hier zu einem großen Ausstoß von Schriftlichkeit, die sich auf-
grund der tradierten und über lange Zeit erfolgreich verteidigten sozialen Rolle des
Hausvaters als Repräsentant von Haus und Familie zu einer eigenen Gattung formiert
hat.”
44 Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Soziale Gruppen in der Ständegesellschaft: Lebensformen des
Mittelalters und ihre historischen Wirkungen,” in Die Repräsentation der Gruppen. Texte,
Bilder, Objekte, ed. idem and Andrea von Hülsen-Esch (Veröffentlichungen des Max-
Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, vol. 141), (Göttingen: 1998), S. 9–44, here 43f. “Menschen,
die als Individuen in Konflikt und Konsens Gruppen bilden, und die sich dauerhaft in
Gruppen binden, um ihre Wertvorstellungen und ihre Ziele zu verwirklichen.”
45 Pierre Monnet, “Das Selbst und die Stadt in Selbstzeugnissen aus den deutschen Städten
des Spätmittelalters: Einige Überlegungen zum räumlichen Rahmen der Erinnerung,” in
Kommunikation mit dem Ich. Signaturen der Selbstzeugnisforschung an europäischen
Beispielen des 12. bis 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. Heinz-Dieter Heimann and Pierre Monnet
(Europa in der Geschichte, vol. 7), (Bochum: 2004), 19–37.
46 Tagebuch des Lucas Rem aus den Jahren 1494–1541. Ein Beitrag zur Handelsgeschichte der
Stadt Augsburg; mitgetheilt, mit erläuternden Bemerkungen und einem Anhange von noch
ungedruckten Briefen und Berichten über die Entdeckung des neuen Seeweges nach Amerika
und Ostindien versehen, ed. Benedikt Greiff (Augsburg: 1861), 1–110. For additional biblio-
graphic references, see Jancke, Quellenkunde.
218 Ulbrich
the condition of being in transit. By contrast, Burkhard Zink (ca. 1396–1474/75)

fits his personal record into the form of a city chronicle.47 His record, as Monnet
emphasizes, is a document about social upward mobility and his integration
into the society of a city where he was intially a stranger. In his chronicle, the
urban space appears on the one hand as an area clearly divided according to
privileges, while on the other hand it is also “the social and concrete space of
the family and his professional life, the location for the observation of differ-
ences and expediencies – in short, a spatial framework simultaneously for life
and thought.”48 Ulman Stromer’s “booklet,” by contrast, aims to legitimate the
power of the social groups to which he belongs. In Monnet’s view, the city
appears as a second agent, and the author decides how much space to allot to
the individual person and the family, and how much space to allot to the com-
monwealth of the city.49 Personal and official histories were so tightly inter-
twined that one can speak of a constant alternation between the public and
the private. Personal memory and the memory of the social environment
(“L’écriture de soi et du chez-soi”50) complement one another. Against this
backdrop, what is actually new about the late medieval period is the process of
group formation in the cities.51 In his interpretation, Pierre Monnet works
from the assumption that there was a city-based sense of community – at least
amongst the elites – which was marked by a clear boundary between the city
and the surrounding countryside. This is particularly clear in his analysis of the
chronicles and self-narratives of the noble urban family of the Rohrbach.52
Based on the fact that integration into the nobility of the city required not just
wealth and assets but also marital ties and family longevity, it seems only logi-
cal that the practice of writing family books would become established
amongst the elites. The family book is one of the places where the nobility can
constitute their ‘kind’ (genealogy, genus, roots). It is not the ‘natural’ meaning
of family, but a combination of real, imaginary and taken-for-real moments
47 Cf. Chronik des Burkhard Zink, for biographical and bibliographical references, see Jancke,
Quellenkunde.
48 Monnet, Das Selbst und die Stadt, 26: “der soziale und konkrete Raum der Familie und
der Berufstätigkeit, jener Ort der Wahrnehmung von Unterschiedlichkeiten und
Zweckmäßigkeiten – kurzum ein räumlicher Lebens- und Denkrahmen zugleich.”
49 Ibid., 27. For space as a useful category for the analyses of self-narratives see: Andreas
Bähr, Peter Burschel and Gabriele Jancke, eds., Räume des Selbst. Selbstzeugnisforschung
transkulturell (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 19), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2007).
50 Pierre Monnet, Les Rohrbach de Francfort. Pouvoirs, affaires et parenté à l’aube de la renais-
sance allemande (Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, vol. 317), (Genève: 1997), 351.
51 Monnet, Das Selbst und die Stadt, 36.
52 Ibid., 26.
that, with the help of memory, are knitted together into an image that decides
the status of the noble families.53 Considering the number of studies which
stress the blurred lines between city and the surrounding country, and between
nobility and non-nobility, the question as to whether this always led to a clear
distinction between urban and rural nobility, in the sense that the city in every
case was a clearly demarcated, identity-generating space, is something that
requires more research.54 Furthermore, with reference to notions of family,
kinship, lineage, memory and space, there are numerous new approaches in
more recent historical and literary scholarship which could profitably be inte-
grated into family book scholarship. While we began with the implicit correla-
tion between family book writing, autobiography and the emergence of the
modern individual, the most illuminating approaches are those which inter-
pret family books in the context of group formation processes.55
III Review and Perspectives
Memoria, writes Oexle, is a culture of individuality, even when it is borne by or

refers to groups.56 If one accepts this claim that memoria and individuality are
inextricably related, then it renders obsolete the widespread practice in earlier
autobiography studies of representing the difference between the Middle Ages
and modernity as an opposition between collectivity and individuality. For
studies of house books this means no longer asking questions about the begin-
nings of individuality, but rather taking the changing forms of memory into
more careful consideration, thus bringing new and other social groups and tra-
ditions into view.57 In the process, it is surely not sufficient to limit oneself to
53 Oexle, Soziale Gruppen, 20f.

54 Cf., for instance, the article by Gerhard Fouquet, “Stadt-Adel. Chancen und Risiken sozi-
aler Mobilität im Mittelalter,” in Sozialer Aufstieg. Funktionseliten im Spätmittelalter und in
der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Günther Schulz (Munich: 2002), 171–192.
55 With regard to family book scholarship, the works on Nuremberg, Frankfurt and Augsburg
are particularly worth mentioning. See also: Thomas Zotz, “Der Stadtadel im spätmittelal-
terlichen Deutschland und seine Erinnerungskultur,” in Adelige und bürgerliche
Erinnerungskulturen des Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Werner Rösener
(Formen der Erinnerung, vol. 8), (Göttingen: 2001), 145–162.
56 Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Memoria als Kultur,” in Memoria als Kultur, ed. idem
(Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, vol. 121), (Göttingen: 1995),
9–78, here 49f.
57 This is particularly the case if one does not include stand-alone self-narratives in the
analysis when interpreting and evaluating the texts. The strict separation between
220 Ulbrich
city literature, which is at the center of family book research. Rather, writings
produced in the mercantile milieu have to be considered in relation to ques-
tions of memory, self- and group-oriented identity and individuality in the
context of other kinds of writing. This also includes, as Barbara Schmid has
shown, courtly records. Religious texts have been mostly excluded, on the
grounds that they arose within the interpretive jurisdiction of the sacred and
should be differentiated from the city and courtly history writing emerging in
the late Middle Ages. Thus, for instance, Gregor Rohmann speaks of a desacral-
ization of the past, of a transformation from memoria, relating to God, to a
kind of secular memory.58 But even this presupposition is put into doubt by
medieval writings. Caroline Walker Bynum, for instance, has drawn attention
to the fact that religious texts allow a “discovery of the self” to be recognized in
the twelfth century, which makes it necessary to examine the parallels, conti-
nuities and breaks in their development up to the Renaissance.59 Andreas Bähr
has emphasized that, for the early modern period, biographical remembering
took place within the framework of a cosmic order centered on divine provi-
dence: “Unlike a modern subjective reconstruction of the past as the basis for
one’s own present, early modern autobiographical reminiscences were not
based on a paradigm of linear and chronological development from a singular
past into an open future; rather, they posited a concept of time in which the
reminiscence recalls something that has always already happened. In a certain
way, they are memories of a future, in the sense that this future is not open but
is already grounded in cosmic providentia; their future thus is not one that
does not yet exist but merely one that is as yet unknown.”60 If one brings this
chronicle writing and self-narratives can be questioned on this basis. Cf. Sabine
Schmolinsky, “Introduction,”in Das dargestellte Ich. Studien zu Selbstzeugnissen des
späteren Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Arnold, Sabine Schmolinsky und
Urs Martin Zahnd (Selbstzeugnisse des Mittelalters und der beginnenden Neuzeit, vol. 1),
(Bochum: 1999),13–17.
58 Gregor Rohmann, “Eines erbaren Raths gehorsamer amptman.” Clemens Jäger und die
Geschichtsschreibung des 16. Jahrhunderts (Studien zur Geschichte des Bayerischen
Schwaben, vol. 28), (Augsburg: 2001), 122: “innerweltlichem Gedächtnis.”
59 Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?,” in Jesus as
Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Los Angeles and
London: 1982), 82–109.
60 Andreas Bähr, “Furcht, divinatorischer Traum und autobiographisches Schreiben in der
Frühen Neuzeit,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 34, 1 (2007), 1–32, here 27: “Anders
als eine moderne subjektive Rekonstruktion des Vergangenen als Grundlage der eignen
Gegenwart basieren frühneuzeitliche autobiographische Erinnerungen nicht auf einem
Paradigma linearer und zeitlicher Entwicklung aus einmaliger Vergangenheit in eine
consideration to bear on family book research, then it becomes clear that it is

necessary to analyse the texts more precisely as well as to inquire about reli-
gious notions. Possibly, these texts are not about a ‘desacralization’ but about a
change of form. Such a consideration would also affect corpus formation.
A comparison of the work of Barbara Schmid and Gabriele Jancke will help
to show how much findings can vary, depending on whether one looks only at
urban and/or courtly family book writing or takes on all texts in which people
write about their own lives.
In her work on German autobiography in the late Middle Ages and early
modern period, Barbara Schmid claims that the autobiographical writing
which has emerged since the second half of the fourteenth century in German-
speaking regions can mostly be traced back to two very different lines of
descent. In addition to the autobiographical writing of the bourgeoisie and the
patriciate, there are autobiographies which originate from the milieu of the
German courts. She pays no attention, however, to writings which do not come
from these milieus. As mentioned above, the basis of her investigation is a
databank, not described in any greater detail, consisting of 670 published and
unpublished texts written between 1350 and 1700. The city-based authors use a
variety of different genre models to write down their lives: house books, stand-
alone life writings, personal reports of travel and events, lineage registers,
indexes of children, almanac diaries, letters as well as administrative records,
account and trade books, tax records, testaments and inventories.61 In the
courtly context, the life descriptions of the sovereigns took the form of chron-
icles and panegyric portraits as well as autobiographical eyewitness and dele-
gation reports.62 What both groups have in common is that writing is used for
status and authority.
Gabriele Jancke has taken a different approach to early autobiography. She
attempted to collate all of the texts between 1420 and 1600 in which the history
offene Zukunft; vielmehr setzen sie einen Zeitbegriff voraus, in dem die Erinnerung etwas
erinnert, das immer schon geschehen war. Sie sind gewissermaßen Erinnerungen an eine
Zukunft, und zwar insofern, als diese Zukunft keine offene, sondern eine bereits in kos-
mischer providentia gegründete war, mithin keine noch nicht existente, sondern lediglich
eine noch nicht erkannte.”
61 Schmid, Schreiben für Status, 13f.
62 Ibid., 117. In their Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd edn
(Minneapolis and London: 2010), 253–286 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point to the
fact that there were “numerous autobiographical forms produced over centuries”: They
offer a glossary of sixty genres of lifewriting- For the variety of early modern texts see, as
a single example, the contribution of G. Jancke in this volume.
222 Ulbrich
of a life is fully or partially represented.63 Since it is nearly impossible to imag-

ine conducting a systematic investigation of all texts in the German-speaking
regions,64 she limited herself to printed sources. Her sample comprises 234
autobiographical texts by 178 authors, eight of whom were women.65 The
overwhelming majority of the authors are scholars, who used their writing
to express and validate their affiliation with a group culture.66 Merchants
represent only a small minority in Jancke’s sample, while a third of the authors
63 Jancke, Quellenkunde; Eadem “Autobiography as Social Practice in Early Modern German

Speaking Areas. Historical, methodological, and theoretical perspectives,” in
Autobiographical Themes in Turkish Literature: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives,
ed. Olcay Akyildiz, Halim Kara and Börte Sagaster (Istanbuler Texte und Studien, vol. 6),
(Würzburg: 2007), 65–80.
64 In her Selbstzeugnisse der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges. Beschreibendes Verzeichnis
(Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 6), (Berlin: 1997) Benigna von Krusenstjern provides
informations about the self-narratives of 226 male and nine female authors. For further
information see Inge Bernheiden, Individualität im 17. Jahrhundert. Studien zum autobio-
graphischen Schrifttum (Literarhistorische Untersuchungen, vol. 12), (Frankfurt a.M. et al.:
1988), with an index of 127 authors of autobiographical texts and Magdalena Buchholz,
Die Anfänge der deutschen Tagebuchschreibung (Reihe Tagebuch, vol. 1), (Münster: no
year [1981], Diss. Königsberg: 1942). In this context, see also the editing project by Hans
Medick and Norbert Winnige, Mittelhochdeutsche Selbstzeugnisse (September 22, 2011,
http://www.mdsz.thulb.uni-jena.de). For Switzerland: Kaspar von Greyerz, “Deutschsch
weizerische Selbstzeugnisse (1500–1800) als Quellen der Mentalitätsgeschichte. Bericht
über ein Forschungsprojekt,” in Das dargestellte Ich. Studien zu Selbstzeugnissen des
späteren Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Arnold, Sabine Schmolinsky and
Urs-Martin Zahnd (Selbstzeugnisse des Mittelalters und der beginnenden Neuzeit, vol. 1),
(Bochum: 1999), 147–163; and Sebastian Leutert and Gudrun Piller, “Deutschschweizerische
Selbstzeugnisse (1500–1800) als Quellen der Mentalitätsgeschichte. Ein Forschungsbericht,”
Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte/ Revue Suisse d’Histoire/ Rivista Storica Svizzera
49 (1999), 197–221. The Swiss database indexes around 850 self-narratives from the six-
teenth to nineteenth centuries from Swiss archives and libraries. It is currently being
extended by a research team directed by Danièle Tosato-Rigo (University of Lausanne) to
cover also material from the French and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland. In future,
it will be hosted by the University of Lausanne and will go online in 2015: www.ego
documents.ch. For Austria, see: Harald Tersch, Österreichische Selbstzeugnisse des
Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (1400–1650). Eine Darstellung in Einzelbeiträgen
(Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 1998), here single studies with bibliographic information
on 62 male authors and 2 female ones; on this, see also idem, “Das autobiographische
Schrifttum Österreichs in der Frühen Neuzeit – ein Projektbericht,” Mitteilungen des
Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtswissenschaft 102 (1994), 409–413.
65 Jancke, Quellenkunde.
66 Patronage relationships are decisive for these group cultures (Jancke, Autobiographie als
soziale Praxis, especially 75ff.).
belong to the nobility. According to her findings, the milieu in which autobio-
graphical writing was practiced is far more differentiated than it appears in
family book scholarship, although it must be stressed that not all family books
are self-narratives.67
If one looks at group cultures, then a whole range of possibilities for cultural
comparison opens up, which has barely been undertaken because of
Eurocentric presuppositions about individuality. A group of American schol-
ars led by Dwight F. Reynolds have worked on the significance of genealogical
relationships for Arabic autobiographies: “The relationships most clearly fore-
grounded in these texts are ‘vertical’ or ‘genealogical’ connections. In the con-
text of the family these reach back in time to parents, grandparents, and more
distant ancestors, on the one hand, and foreward in time through children and
grandchildren, on the other. This is paralleled in the sphere of education by the
meticulously noted relationships with teachers and the mention of the stu-
dents. In contrast, there are strikingly few portrayals of ‘lateral’ relationships
with siblings, fellow students, friends, and colleagues.”68 Taking into consider-
ation genealogical thinking in Arabic autobiographies suggests questions
about cognatic and agnatic kinship structures which have tended to go unno-
ticed in the research to date on German-language family books. In addition,
the parallels with scholarly culture indicate a path which could prove useful in
Europe-related research. These indications should be sufficient to show that a
transcultural comparison can open up new perspectives for the investigation
of early autobiographical writing.69
67 Studt, Haus- und Familienbücher, 753, also stresses that the classification of self-narratives
alone is not enough: “The documentation group of house and family books does actually
belong to the genre of self-narratives, since one or more authors integrate autobiographi-
cal records into their family history. In their commemorative functions, however, the
house and family books stretch beyond the single person and are more equivalent to
genealogies, aristocratic family chronicles, dynastic and city history writing, as well as to
necrologies, birth registers, gravestones and ancestral portrait galleries. With regard to
their normative functions, they stand in close relation in terms of content, history of
transmission and codicological context to the didactic and economic literature. And in
their representative functions, they correspond to the genre of texts, pictures and monu-
ments which served the function of ensuring and representation status: funerary monu-
ments again, but also portraits of donors, portraits from tournament and weapons books,
travel reports and even testaments, letters, deeds and archive indexes are passed down
through the channels of house and family books.”
68 Dwight F. Reynolds et al., eds., Interpreting the Self. Autobiography in the Arabic Literary
Tradition (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: 2001), 243f.
69 On the importance of genealogy for a literature-studies perspective, see Beate Kellner,
Ursprung und Kontinuität. Studien zum genealogischen Wissen im Mittelalter (Munich: 2004).
224 Ulbrich
Closely tied with the concept of remembering is the idea of identity. This
idea, at least in the studies of urban history, almost completely displaced the
notion of ‘self’ or ‘person’ in the 1990s, even though it was also used as a syn-
onym for self or self-awareness.70 In a review of the volume Distinctiveness:
Personal Identity and Identification in Premodern Society edited by Peter von
Moos,71 Gabriele Jancke underlines a problem that is bound up with the con-
cept of identity. Since identity is a key concept for modern societies, the word
brings with it unspoken presuppositions about demarcations, in- and exclu-
sions as well as classifications which, in connection with ideas about their rel-
evance to modernity, are retrospectively imposed on medieval society.72 In the
process, significance is attached to categories which were not the least relevant
for the writers of medieval and early modern texts. At the same time, other
important categories may well be overlooked, although they come into view
when one works with writing practices. For authors of autobiographical texts
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as Gabriele Jancke insists, writing was
a communicative act set within a network of social relations: “It is thus neces-
sary to clarify the anchorage and function of autobiographical texts within
authors’ respective networks before more particular questions can be asked.
Moreover, the kinds of questions that are restricted, for instance, to the con-
cept of the self as articulated in writing or to mentality require answers that
recognize the connection between these circumstances on the one hand and,
on the other, the networks and patterns of social relations in which they
became embedded in the process of being written down.”73 Mentalities as well
as identities thus have to be studied with reference to groups, as the medieval
conception of identity makes clear. In medieval theology and logic, the charac-
teristics common to various elements served as markers for the identity of
individual persons or groups. This presumes that the markers were known and
were broadly disseminated, such as through repetition.74 Personal identity,
too, must be deciphered as part of the cultures of group formation. It must
70 Cf., for example, Karl-Reinhart Trauner, Identität in der Frühen Neuzeit. Die Autobiographie
des Bartholomäus Sastrow (Munich, 2004).
71 Unverwechselbarkeit: Persönliche Identität und Identifikation in der vormodernen
Gesellschaft, ed. Peter von Moos (Norm und Struktur, vol. 23), (Cologne et al.: 2004).
72 Gabriele Jancke, review of Unverwechselbarkeit: Persönliche Identität und Identifikation
in der vormodernen Gesellschaft, ed. Peter von Moos (Cologne et al.: 2004), Sixteenth
Century Journal XXXVII, 2 (2006), 456–457.
73 See the contribution of Jancke in this volume, 118–165, here 119.
74 Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: 2001); Jean-Claude
Schmitt, “La ‘découverte de l’individu’: une fiction autobiographique?,” in La fabrique, la
figure et la feinte, ed. Pierre Mengal and Francois Parrot (Paris: 1984), 213–235.
thus be asked of the texts how identity is produced. In this, it is surely not suf-
ficient to evaluate their context with reference to the longevity of the family or
its status as described. A question also arises about “lignage.” Gabrielle M.
Spiegel argued in 1983 that genealogy in history writing developed as a genre in
parallel with agnatic “lignages.”75 Genealogical writing would thus, concludes
Gianna Pomata, be a sign that the “lignage,” the patrilineal line, has become
aware of itself.76 Given such interpretations, it becomes clear that one can read
the genealogical passages in house and family books not only as attempts to
constitute family and kinship as well as to assert one’s standing in the city, but
also in terms of gender relationships and power relations. It is clear that the
interrelation between the position of the patriarch and the writing of the fam-
ily book is part of a new definition of social roles and a new evaluation of the
house. Against this background, it also makes sense to investigate the writing
of family histories in the city within the context of pragmatic and didactic tra-
ditions in households and commerce. The connection between late medieval
teachings about the house, early modern economists and family books has cer-
tainly so far been insufficiently explained.77
House, family and kinship are reciprocally related in the family book.
Integration into a household or family group created identity, but could also be
a path to the education of a self. In her remarks about the boundaries of self-
hood in sixteenth-century France, Natalie Zemon Davis pointed out in 1986
that speaking about the self in practice always “involved a relationship: with
God or God and one’s confessor, with a patron, with a friend or a lover, or espe-
cially with one’s family and lineage.”78 For the texts she analyses, she shows
that the family is often the occasion for talking or writing about the self.79
Becoming an individual thus did not require a break from the family, as earlier
75 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Genealogy: Form and Function in Medieval Historical Narrative,”

History Today XXII (1983), 43–53.
76 Gianna Pomata, “Partikulargeschichte und Universalgeschichte. Bemerkungen zu
einigen Handbüchern der Frauengeschichte,” L’Homme. Zeitschrift für Feministische
Geschichtswissenschaft 2 (1991,1), 5–44, hier 26: “Das Erscheinen der Genealogie wäre
demnach Anzeichen und zugleich Folge davon, dass sich die “lignage”, das patrilineare
Geschlecht, der Stellung als eigene Gruppe bewusst wird.” (Quaderni Storici 74 (1990),
341–387).
77 Studt, Einführung, XI, and eadem, Haus- und Familienbücher, 753.
Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed.
Thomas C. Heller (Stanford: 1986), 52–63., here 53.
79 Ibid., 53.
226 Ulbrich
research states, for integration into a family or a kinship group could be an

important precondition for selfhood. Accordingly, it is not individualization
but rather the family orientation of life and work in the late Middle Ages that
functions as an important starting point for writing about the self. As Jean-
Claude Schmitt has shown, this orientation is not about making a choice
between truth and fiction. Medieval fiction is not to be understood as an
antithesis to truth – this would be a malicious deceit or a myth – but rather
as a way of ‘speaking providentially’. As he argues, truth and fiction in the
late Middle Ages are “in some sense always accomplices of each other.”80 This
provides a basis for asking questions about the narrative construction of family
books which have so far attracted little attention in German-language
scholarship.
***
House and family books are fascinating sources of information with regard to
central questions about medieval and early modern culture. Since they origi-
nated within the pragmatic context of writing in relation to the house, they
offer a perspective which allows us to challenge the binary concepts borrowed
from modernity and replace them with an comprehensive notion of the indi-
vidual, family and society, house and city, memory and status. From such a
perspective, the concepts which have often been used unreflectively in histori-
cal research – such as inside/outside, private/public, sacred/wordly – begin to
crumble and a path opens up for telling history in a new and different way or,
to borrow a phrase from Shalini Randeria, for taking seriously “individuals […]
as contextual users of their repertoires.”81
80 Jean-Claude Schmitt, La Conversion d’Hermann le Juif. Autobiographie, historie et fiction

(Paris: 2003), 59.
81 Shalini Randeria, “Geteilte Geschichte und verwobene Moderne,” in Zukunftsentwürfe.
Ideen für eine Kultur der Veränderung, ed. Björn Rüsen, Hanna Leitgeb and Norbert
Jegelka, (Frankfurt a.M. and New York: 2000), 87–96, here 90f., cit.91.
Autobiography in Economic History
Thomas Max Safley
At some point in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century – probably

between 1598 and 1620 – Caspar Koch began to write an autobiography of sorts.
In it, the merchant of Memmingen recorded for his posterity what he consid-
ered to be the most important events of his life. He began with an invocation,
typical of his day:
In the name of God, our beloved Lord and Savior Jesus

Christ, I, Caspar Koch of Memmingen began to write this
Book, to record what is memorable or needful to know. May
Almighty God give His blessing to it. Amen1
He organized what followed in the form of a family chronicle, one of many dif-
ferent forms of Familienbuch. This particular example contains three, distinct
parts. The first deals directly with the history of his life from his own birth and
the births of his siblings through his first marriage and the births of his chil-
dren to the deaths of his father and parents-in-law. It concludes with an exact
description of the suffering and death of his first wife. The second opens with
his personal reflections on the necessity of remarrying and proceeds to descrip-
tions of his second marriage, the wedding celebration, the death of his mother
and the births of his children by his second wife. It closes with an account of
his own death, probably recorded by his second wife. The third contains a
series of annual balances that record the business success and economic
growth of the Koch Company. From an initial capital of 3,000 Gulden that pur-
chased a partnership in his father’s company in 1597 to a gross worth of 150,000
Gulden at the time of his death in 1620, Caspar Koch rose into the ranks of
Memmingen’s wealthiest merchants.
His “autobiography” took shape over an extended period of time, in the
manner of a diary, with content added as events or memory dictated.
Whether, in fact, he wrote every day, recording immediate experience, or
1 “Jn dem namen Gottes unsers lieben Herrn u. Seligmachers Jesu Christi hab Jch Caspar Koch
von Memmingen dieses gegenwertig Büchlin angefangen zum schrieben waß denckwürdi-
ges, oder zum wissen von nöthen aufzuzeichnen, Gott der Allmechtige wolle sein gnad
Seegen und gedeien hierzu verleihen und geben. Amen.” (StadtA Memmingen. A 327/9). The
original manuscript is located in the Hartlieb Family Archive of the Bavarian State Archiv in
Munich.

228 Safley
periodically, working from memory or notes, cannot be determined. He con-

centrated on the unadorned description of his family and his life, avoiding
analysis or apology. The third part, an addendum by his second wife that
included biographical as well as economic information, signals the kinship of
family chronicles and other such early autobiographical writings to the ricor-
danzi of Italian merchants, who in a similar manner recorded familial and
business matters together,2 passing the responsibility of recording from one
author to another, one generation to the next. For Caspar Koch, it would seem,
one’s life could be understood only in terms of one’s family and one’s
business.
Koch was not singular in his writing. Recent scholarship has acknowledged
repeatedly that such quasi-autobiographical texts were commonplace in late
medieval and early modern Central Europe.3 Many Italian and German mer-
chants from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century memorialized their
lives, their families and their businesses in this way.4 As Adolf Rein noted in his
now classic essay:
When the burgher first reached for quill, it was certainly on account of
his business…. From these business and account books of the mercantile-
artisanal-urban milieu, in which we witness the first written, literary
markings of a new social estate, the emergence of a new self-biography is
to be drawn.5
2 Adolf Rein, who first emphasized the importance of early account books for the emergence
of early autobiography, explains the odd juxtaposition of professional and person informa-
tion in the following way: “Er erklärt sich im wesentlichen aus dem eigentümlichen persön-
lichen Charakter, den die alten privaten Rechnungs- und Handlungsbücher aufweisen. […]
Das Charakteristische für alle diese Bücher bleibt ihre Unsystematik, ihre Formlosigkeit; es
herrscht schließlich bei allen ein buntes Durcheinander verschiedenartiger Notizen.” [It
derives essentially from the idiosyncratic, personal character that private account and busi-
ness books display. […] Characteristic for all this books remains their lack of system, their
formlessness; a colorful jumble of the most varied notes marks all of them.] Adolf Rein, “Über
die Entwicklung der Selbstbiographie im ausgehenden deutschen Mittelalter,” Archiv für
Kulturgeschichte 14 (1919), 193–213, here 196.
3 See, as examples, the contributions of Gabriele Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich in this volume.
4 Gabriele Jancke: Selbstzeugnisse im deutschsprachigen Raum – Autobiographien, Tagebücher
und andere autobiographische Schriften, 1400–1620. Eine Quellenkunde. Unter Mitarbeit von
Marc Jarzebowski, Klaus Krönert und Yvonne Aßmann (2008, August 13, http://www.geschkult
.fu-berlin.de/e/jancke-quellenkunde).
5 “Als der Bürger zuerst zur Feder griff, war es sicher um seines Geschäftes willen. […] Aus
diesen Geschäfts- und Rechnungsbüchern der kaufmännisch-gewerblich-städtischen Kreise,
Autobiography in Economic History 229
The historical association between autobiography and business has not

escaped criticism from some scholars, who, like Bernd Neumann,6 are
uncomfortable with the association between capitalist economic forms and
unlimited individual consciousness. Still, a considerable portion of early auto
biographical sources that survive today seem to have emerged from the writing
conventions and forms of the late medieval and early modern urban elite.7
The authors were not all merchants, to be sure. In Gabriele Jancke’s collection
of 234 autobiographical texts, only 23 came from the quills of merchants.8
Most autobiographers came from the ranks of professionals or intellectuals.
Regardless of authorship, the known volume of such writings continues to
grow, the more it is explored. The early development of autobiography may be
more complex than Rein and other scholars imagined. It now seems insepara-
bly linked to the development of group identity and consciousness among
elites. That said, it remains tied in important ways to the growth of the pre-
industrial economy.
Despite a common ancestry in the requirements and abilities of pre-modern
producers and distributors, perhaps it is not surprising that two fields of his-
torical scholarship – the study of autobiographical writings in the past and the
study of economic activities in the past – make such limited reference to the
sources and findings of one another. The assumed focus and limits of each
lead them in different, one might even say opposite, directions. Yet, the dis-
tance between them may not be so great. This essay seeks to examine the
ways in which a variety of early autobiographical writings have served and may
continue to extend the economic history of early modern Europe.
***
in denen wir die ersten schriftlichen Aufzeichnungen des neuen Standes zu erblicken haben,
ist auch die Entstehung der neueren Selbstbiographie herzuleiten.” Rein, Über die Entwicklung
der Selbstbiographie, 195.
6 Bernd Neumann, Identität und Rollenzwang: Zur Theorie der Autobiographie (Frankfurt
a. M: 1970), 110.
7 Michaela Holdenried, Autobiographie (Stuttgart: 2000), 108–111.
8 Jancke, Selbstzeugnisse im deutschsprachigen Raum. Jancke’s survey certainly relativizes
Rein’s classic assertion that autobiography grows out of the practical, literary necessities
of urban, commercial life. It also raises fundamental questions about Holdenried’s notion
that early autobiography served a social or political purpose, that is, justifying and affirming
newly acquired status and stature. One needs to distinguish carefully between the different
kinds of content found in early autobiography, such as the Familienbuch, between the profes-
sional and the personal, between the public and the private.
230 Safley
Caspar Koch did not write his Familienbuch as an autobiography in the

strict sense. True to its name, it includes information about his parents, sib-
lings, spouses and children. Nor did he write it as a recollection of economic
life. It records only the increase in his capital, which is not much information.
It makes no mention of the nature of his business, the organization of his firm,
the relations with his employees, the market for his goods or the contribution
to the economy. Almost an obiter dicta, mentioned in the midst of very differ-
ent concerns, the record of his fortune speaks not to the economic engage-
ments of the (deceased) author but rather to his economic success, that is, the
social status and prestige of his family as achieved through the increase in his
wealth.9 The same may be said of the genre as a whole: such early autobio-
graphical writings usually fulfilled personal or social purposes, but seldom tes-
tified explicitly or directly to economic activities or conditions in the strict
sense. Economic historians may be excused, therefore, if they have seldom
grasped such works as important sources for study.
An economy is a system of human activities related to the production,
distribution, exchange and consumption of goods and services. Economic
history takes as its study, therefore, how economic phenomena occurred and
changed in the past. Its traditional sources are the products of economic activ-
ity written by economic agents: financial accounts, business correspondence
and administrative records, to name but a few. It is inseparable from technol-
ogy, history, society and culture, and it overlaps to an extent with demographic,
labor, business and even social history. The argument – perhaps rhetorical –
has been made that economic history “has never been and should never be
anything like a closed field,” but rather “it stands at a busy intersection of his-
tory and the social sciences, where economists, political scientists, sociolo-
gists, anthropologists, demographers, and historians come and go.”10 That may
be so, but its practitioners have seldom ventured so far afield as autobiographi-
cal, much less literary, studies.
The term, “autobiography,” refers to “the writing of one’s own life” or “the
self-written history of one’s own life.”11 It derives from classic Greek but is found
nowhere in Greek literature. The Greeks and the Romans alike, as Arnoldo
Momigliano12 has demonstrated, recognized the genre but distinguished
9 Barbara Schmid, Schreiben für Status und Herrschaft. Deutsche Autobiographik in

Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Zurich: 2006).
10 Joel Mokyr, “Preface,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History (Oxford: 2006), 1.
11 Oxford English Dictionary: “Autobiography,” 3rd edn, June 2011; online version September
2011.
12 Arnaldo Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography (Cambridge: 1971).
strictly between it and history. Biography, whether written of another or of

one’s self, had nothing to say to the study of the past.
Scholars of the nineteenth century contested this assumption directly and
indirectly, when they argued that individual interpretation and personal mem-
ory were essential and fundamental bases of the humanities, including history.
Karl Marx argued famously that material conditions, that is, the organization
of production and with it the structure of the economy, determined individual
perspectives and values, to say nothing of their expression. Hence, autobio-
graphical writings could testify to the structure and function of economic soci-
ety and give living voice to the historical dialectic in all its inevitability.13
Wilhelm Dilthey can stand for an opposing group of scholars, who elevated the
understanding of the self to a precondition for any knowledge of the human
condition, an inversion of the Marxian base-superstructure.14 They made that
understanding an essential precondition for any study of humankind, present
or past. Indeed, individual perspectives and values color any attempt to under-
stand the past, including its economy. Quite apart from this interest in the rela-
tionship between the person and his or her society, autobiographical writings
tended initially to be read by scholars, interested in the history of individuals
or of individuality as an indicator of modernity, following the often criticized
lead of Jacob Burckhardt,15 or in the literary genre of autobiography itself.
Only recently have scholars begun to examine autobiographical writings,
not only as expressions of individual temperament and taste, but also as prod-
ucts of social position and interaction.16 They have begun to pose questions
13 History is, Marx wrote, “a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of destruc-
tion in the social forces, of formation of ideas; there is nothing immutable but the abstrac-
tion of the movement – mors immortalis.” Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, The Poverty of
Philosophy (New York: 1963), 166.
14 Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Leipzig: 1883).
15 Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ein Versuch, 11th edn. (Stuttgart:
1988); Georg Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, 4 vols. (Bern 1949; Frankfurt a. M:
1969); Günter Niggl, ed., Die Autobiographie. Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen
Gattung (Darmstadt: 1989); recent historical collections: Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self:
Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: 1997); Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans
Medick, Patrice Veit, eds., Von der dargestelten Person zum erinnerten Ich. Europäische
Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500–1850), (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit 9),
(Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2001); Richard van Dülmen, ed., Entdeckung des Ich. Die
Geschichte der Individualisierung vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Cologne, Weimar,
Vienna: 2001).
des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit,
vol. 10), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2002). See also Marcel Mauss, “Une Catégorie
232 Safley
that extend beyond the purely personal or subjective: What conception or con-
ceptions of a “self” emerge from an autobiography? What are the connections
or relationships that bind a “self” to its historical context? That context might
have much to do with economic history, if the autobiographer is an economic
agent. Still, the historical analysis of autobiography tends to draw its inspira-
tion from literary rather than material studies.
Thus, the study of autobiography has progressed from what one scholar
recently called the sozialgeschichtliches Modell17 of Adolf Rein, according
to which early autobiographical writings derived from the social milieu
and condition of the late medieval and early modern, urban elite, to a social
transaction model18 that sees autobiographical writings not only as the
product of a particular social group but also as an expression of positions and
relations within it. Accordingly, notwithstanding the disclaimer of its invoca-
tion, Koch’s Familienbuch attempted much more than the storage and trans-
mission of knowledge of his family’s past.19 It attempted to legitimize the claim
to prestige and status that was the social fruit of that past. It lauded economic
success. Given the acknowledged, historical connection between early auto-
biographical writings and “pragmatic”20 writings, such as mercantile and
professional record-keeping, as well as the increased attention to writing as a
social activity, an increased attention to the economic bases of that activity –
to say nothing of economic thought and action as such – would be no surprise.
It has not happened.
Early autobiographical sources have been appropriated by social, cultural
and anthropological historians. These works have been fruitfully examined
for reflections on social relations and social structures.21 They have been
del’Esprit Humain: La Notion de Personne, Celle de ‘Moi’,” Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute 68 (1938), 263–281; Richard A. Shweder and Edmund J. Bourne,
“Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-Culturally,” in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind,
Self and Emotion, ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, (Cambridge, Eng.: 1984),
158–199.
17 Schmid, Schreiben für Status und Herrschaft, 48.
18 Ibid., 53.
19 Gregor Rohmann, “‘Mit seer grosser muhe vnd schreiben an ferre Ort’: Wissensproduktion
und Wissensvernetzung in der deutschsprachigen Familienbuchschreibung des 16.
Jahrhunderts,” in Haus- und Familienbücher in der städtischen Gesellschaft des
Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Birgit Studt (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna:
2007), 87–120, here 109.
21 Well before Schmid focused attention on questions of status, Otto Gerhard Oexle empha-
sized the role of autobiographical writings in the formation and identification of social
examined for evidence of symbol, ritual and meaning in a multitude of forms,

the very acts and interpretations that are shared by communities as a whole.22
They have been examined for evidence of the emotional content of personal
and familial life, the affective ties that characterized households.23 As a result
of such efforts, early autobiographical writings have moved to the center of
many different kinds of historical research.
They have not, however, moved to the center of economic history. Taken as
a whole, the relatively small field of biographical economic history has yielded
three basic forms. One might be described as “life and times studies,” most
notably the works on Francesco Datini, the merchant of Prato,24 the Ruiz of
Toulouse25 and Florentine bankers of the Renaissance,26 all of which consider
business practices and ethics in the past. Another can be understood as “con-
tingency approaches,” that is, studies of the choices made by historical actors
and their consequences. Usually, this style has a collective aspect, for example,
the Lunar Society of Birmingham27 or Harold Parker on the intendants at the
top of the French Bureau of Commerce.28 Finally, “individual case studies,”
have used autobiographical materials to expose the economic strategies, deci-
sions and outcomes of important economic agents, usually involved in the
integration of a new organization or technology, such as Samuel Bentham at
the English dockyards29 or Josiah Wedgwood in his porcelain factory.30 Despite
groups. See Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Soziale Gruppen in der Ständegesellschaft: Lebensformen
des Mittelalters und ihre historischen Wirkungen,” in Die Repräsentation der Gruppen. Texte-
Bilder-Objekte, ed. idem and Andrea von Hülsen-Esch (Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-
Instituts für Geschichte, vol. 141), (Göttingen: 1998), S. 9–44.
22 Otto Gerhard Oexle, ed., Memoria als Kultur (Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-
Instituts für Geschichte, vol. 121), (Göttingen: 1995).
23 Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin: Essay in Historical Anthropology
(New York: 1977).
24 Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato, Francesco Datini, 1335–1410 (New York: 1957).
25 Henri Lepeyre, Une famille des marchands: les Ruiz. Contribution à l’étude du commerce
entre la France et l’Espagne au temps du Philippe II (Paris: 1955).
26 Richard A. Goldthwaite, Banks, Palaces and Entrepreneurs in Renaissance Florence
(Aldershot: 1995).
27 Robert E. Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham: A Social History on Provincial
Science and Industry in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: 1963).
28 Harold Talbot Parker, An Administrative Bureau during the Old Regime: The Bureau of
Commerce and Its Relations to French Industry from May 1781 to November 1783 (Newark: 1993).
29 William J. Ashworth, “‘System of Terror’: Samuel Bentham, Accountability and Dockyard
Reform during the Napoleonic Wars,” Social History 23 (1998), 63–79.
30 Neil McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline,” Historical Journal 4 (1961),
30–55.
234 Safley
their differences, these three autobiographical approaches to economic his-

tory all take up homo oeconomicus31 to shed light on the workings of the
economy as an intrinsic whole. They seek to demonstrate through the choices
and decisions of individuals or groups the inexorable function of economic
principles. Their authors focus attention on larger, shared structures, such as
industries, markets, sectors or regions. Economic historians have not hitherto
extended their purview to the articulation of the individual or the family as a
being different or apart from the larger collectives of community, society or
market. Yet, early autobiographical writings cast the individual person or
household as the central figure of study. Certainly, the individual remains the
fundamental unit of economic life, as economic thinkers since Aristotle have
recognized.
Insofar as economic phenomena occur and change ultimately as a result of
the choices and actions of individuals, however, the relatively limited use of
autobiographical materials in economic history demands explanation. It may
reside, at least in part, in the conviction that individual persons and families
exist in a private sphere that is not the proper focus of historical or economic
analysis. It may also reside, however, in the development of economic history
as a field onto itself.
Like autobiography, economic history is a neologism of the nineteenth cen-
tury. The earliest reflections on economic matters, from Hammurabi and
Aristotle to Aquinas and Oresme, center on the morality rather than the history
of economic behaviors.32 Only with the Commercial Revolution of the High
Middle Ages did the study of economic life begin to abandon ethical reflection.
With the expansion of the economy that began around 1300, economic think-
ing turned to what would become its accepted, standard purview: the modali-
ties of pursuing profit and utility, the calculation of costs and benefits, the
determination of efficiency and inefficiency, the study of organizations and
31 The term, homo oeconomicus, belongs to the classic concepts of economic thought.
Economic man describes a human being who is perfectly rational, informed and self-
interested, who is thus perfectly able to make rational judgments in the efficient pursuit
of wealth. The term was first used in the late-nineteenth century by critics of John Stuart
Mill’s political economy. They responded to Mill’s now classic definition of “man, as a
being who inevitably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries,
conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial
with which they can be obtained.” With the rise of rational choice theory in the twentieth
century, the term took on sharper definition of a person who acts rationally, on complete
information, to pursue wealth out of self-interest.
32 The following brief discussion of the history of economic history relies on several excel-
lent narratives: Mokyr, Preface.
institutions. Students of economics gradually began to view it as a system, gov-

erned by its own laws and characterized by its own interrelationships. This
view of the economy as a self-contained sphere, subject to timeless principles
and mechanisms, influenced Adam Smith in his Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations.33 Following his lead, classical economists of
the nineteenth century interpreted the economy as a self-contained system,
regulated by supply and demand, free of moral or personal influences. The
market’s “invisible hand” alone would provide the optimal use of resources and
assure the greatest good for the greatest number. Given these assumptions, the
history of past economic behaviors or conditions could have no use beyond
demonstrating how the economy worked or did not work, according to whether
human economic behaviors corresponded to what was now understood to be
the natural economic order. Thus, early economists accorded little meaning to
the records or reflections of individual economic agents.
Classical economics, as articulated by Smith and his continental acolytes,
such as Jean-Baptiste Say and Johann Heinrich von Thünen, was critically
received in Germany during the mid-nineteenth century. The so-called Old
School of Economic History opposed the classical economic model in which
isolated individuals acted solely in accordance with unchanging economic
principles, excluding all moral, political or personal motives. This was felt to be
too simplistic. Friedrich List, Wilhelm Roscher, Bruno Hildebrand and Karl
Knies insisted that the proper study of the economy had to concentrate on
the lived, human experience in terms of the specific economic activities and
institutions of a specific place – for them, the nation, to be exact, though their
argument applies equally well to regions, communities or, even households –
throughout its history. As a result, most Old School economic history was
descriptive; it took the form of national histories largely devoid of individual
agency. The rapid course of industrialization and the impact of Marxist-
inspired economic interpretations of human life led to the eventual emer-
gence in Germany of a so-called New School of Economic History. Its work
resembled that of its predecessor, the Old School of Economic History, in that
both emphasized the study of historical economic developments rather than
timeless market processes. Economic agents were not abstract, theoretical
individuals but rather real persons, whose choices and decisions were shaped
by specific social or political contexts. As advocated by its leading exponents,
including Gustav Schmoller and the more radical Wilhelm Sombart and
Max Weber, the New School eschewed classical models and turned to national
33 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York:
1994; reprint of original edition, 1776).
236 Safley
history for guidance. Its approach remained historically descriptive, focused

on the collective rather than the individual. Autobiographical writings of any
sort assumed at best a secondary, illustrative function.
In the 1880s the New School was split by a methodological controversy
(Methodenstreit) over the proper approach to economic studies. It brought for-
ward a separation that had, in fact, always existed. The historical approach of
the old schools collided with the theoretical convictions of neoclassicists.
Economic historians studied the historically concrete and specific; economic
analysts pursued the theoretically abstract and general. The former attended
to actual economic behaviors; the latter articulated typical economic behavior.
Economic history sought to distance itself from the model-driven analysis of
classical economics. It proclaimed instead the centrality of the past and the
necessity of experience. Though it originally took the nation as its focus, its
assumptions left scope for the testimony of individuals, whose behaviors
would provide a more accurate basis for theory than all a prior ideal types and
scientific assumptions.
Economic history, thus, grew out of a need to understand economic change
and relate economic behaviors to other areas of human activity. It has long
been split between two imperatives: a need to describe human behavior; and a
need to analyze that behavior in terms of abstract principles or laws that are
universally valid. Its old methodological controversies have been replaced by
orientations dependent on the sources available for analysis. Its focus remains
largely, if not exclusively, macroeconomic.34 The tensions that remain between
description and analysis, and between the collective and the individual, may to
some extent explain why autobiographical writings by economic agents have
not been more consistently exploited as a source of economic history.
Yet, as Rein and his followers insisted, early attempts at proto-autobiograph-
ical or early autobiographical writing seem to have arisen in urban centers, a
product of the literate requirements of urban life. This includes, of course, eco-
nomic engagements. They are often difficult to distinguish according to theme;
what the author of the moment considered important, not reference to a fixed
genre, determined the content of the book. Hence, the ricordanzi and libri di
familia of Italian merchant families correspond in many respects to the Haus-
and Familienbücher of German merchant families. They combine business
and family records in an arbitrary manner that varies in quantity and detail
34 Macroeconomics is the branch of economic thought and analysis that treats the structure
and performance of national or regional economies as wholes. It distinguishes itself from
microeconomics, the proper study of which is the economic behavior of individuals,
households or firms.
from book to book. House-books often include information, not only about a
single household, but also about a family over generations; family-books often
include not only the genealogy of a family but also reference to memorable
incidents in the manner of Merkbücher; and urban elites of a certain status
recorded the advantageous marriages of their forefathers and –mothers,
including familial crests, in ways consistent with the Geschlechterbücher of the
landed aristocracy. Rein recognized clearly a “lack of system or formlessness”35
that renders such writings fascinating and difficult for all historians.
These writings follow no characteristic pattern, which is itself revealing.
How a given, autobiographical text is written may itself indicate something of
the author’s mind. Not just the content but also the form become necessarily
the focus of study. Koch offers very little about his economic activities, to
return to the opening example, leaving it to his wife to offer such data as are
presented. This may be the result of chance. It may also imply certain attitudes.
For him, economic reflections do not seem to be the focal point of his writing.
He offers no information about his business as such: nothing about his prod-
ucts, nothing about his partners, nothing about his associations, nothing about
his activities. They do not seem needful to know, to his way of thinking. When
his widow takes up the quill, however, the economic facts tell a tale of growing
wealth. Was that wealth intended to reflect her deceased husband’s success or
his family’s prominence? That she writes of it recalls the particular role of
women as managers of the domestic economy.
Rein’s flat assertion that “self-biography” arises from the business- and
account-books of the mercantile-artisanal-urban milieu fails, however, both
to acknowledge other urban groups that produced early autobiographical
materials and to account for non-urban groups that did so, too. In Scandinavia,
researchers have taken up peasant Anschreibebücher not only for their contri-
bution to the development of autobiography but also and self-consciously
for their information on social and economic history.36 These books took the
form of business memorials that tended to record economic data – the earliest,
from the sixteenth century in Denmark, list outstanding debts – along with
more personal, household matters. In form and content they resemble the
35 Rein, Über die Entwicklung der Selbstbiographie, 196.

36 Klaus-Joachim Lorenzen-Schmidt and Björn Poulsen, “Bäuerliche (An-)Schreibebücher
als Quellen für die Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte,” in Bäuerliche Anschreibebücher als
Quelle zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte, ed. id. (Studien zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte
Schleswig-Holsteins, Band 21), (Neumünster: 1992), 9–27; Jan Peters, ed., Mit Pflug und
Gänsekiel. Selbstzeugnisse schreibender Bauern. Eine Anthologie (Selbstzeugnisse der
Neuzeit, vol. 12), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2003).
238 Safley
Hausbücher and ricordanzi of southern European cities.37 Yet, rather than

reveal the growing self-reflection of the authors, these sources show the
peasant holding to have been an enterprise in which the peasant reacted
to fluctuations in expenses and income, experimented with methods of
production and attended to shifts in productivity and conjuncture. In some
respects, Anschreibebücher suggest the potential of other, early, autobiographi-
cal writings, such as memoirs or Haus- and Familienbücher as sources for
economic history.
The focus on individual households or farms as economic units recalls
historical considerations of the household. In preindustrial Europe, the house-
hold was by all accounts one of the dominant social forms. It was, in principle,
if not in practice, an economic unit, in which a common economic engage-
ment determined the size and structure of the household as well as the author-
ity and emotion that shaped relations within it. Using Hausväterliteratur of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Otto Brunner reconstructed the teach-
ing of domestic life and economy that became known as “das ganze Haus.”38
The household included not only the basic family, but also all those resident in
or dependent upon it, including domestic servants, wage laborers and elderly
or unmarried relatives. It was understood to be an economic, social, political
and legal unit, in which production and reproduction, that is the market and
domestic economies, were essentially unified. Under the patriarchal authority
of the husband-father-master, it organized all aspects of economic life, pro-
vided basic education and socialization, cared for the sick and infirm and par-
ticipated in communal institutions. The theory has been subjected to a variety
of criticisms. Scholars have argued that Brunner relied too heavily on the rural
household as a model and, therefore, ignored the degree to which urban house-
holds were not longer autarkic, that is, were more closely integrated into and
dependent upon urban society and market economy. Others have criticized his
ideal-typical presentation of patriarchy by noting that the wife-mother-mis-
tress figure played a substantial, even equal, role in the many aspects of house-
hold. Early autobiographical writings have contributed substantially to this
revision. Perhaps the best-known, English-language example is Alan
Macfarlane’s The Family Life of Ralph Josselin: Essay in Historical Anthropology,
for which the original source has since been published as The Diary of Ralph
37 Lorenzen-Schmidt/Poulsen, Bäuerliche Anschreibebücher, 14.

38 Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft. Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte
Südostdeutschlands im Mittelalter (Brünn: 1943); idem., Neue Wege der Sozialgeschichte.
Vorträge und Aufsätze (Göttingen: 1956).
Josselin, 1616–1683.39 Josselin, who was the vicar of Earls Colne in Essex, England
from 1641, left a remarkable diary, in which he recorded details of quotidian
rural life. He wrote of his economic situation, his dependence upon the
profits from his farming as well as the income from his preaching, his activities
as a lender and creditor and his expenditures as a householder. He remarked
upon a social world that relied more upon friends and neighbors than upon
an extended kinship network. He reported upon the division of labor – and
authority – within the household. The Diary serves as a much needed counter-
balance to broadly theoretical and suspiciously romantic notions of the house-
hold. It also indicates the ways in which early autobiographical writings can
inform economic history.
Whether rural or urban, the authors of these writings were frequently – one
could say usually – economic agents, whose attention and concern also
extended to economic matters. Among the more common forms of personal
writing in late medieval and early modern Europe were the so-called
Schreibkalendar, printed calendars that included information on history, econ-
omy and weather, not unlike almanacs in a more modern age, as well as blank
pages for personal recordings. Young merchants often kept these calendars as
a means of preserving observations and experiences gathered during their
commercial travels.40 Though these records might be translated into travel
memoirs, a genre that has excited great interest of late among cultural histori-
ans, they have not yet been consistently exploited as a source for the history of
early mercantile activity. Hausbücher likewise commonly contained informa-
tion of interest to economic historians. Written to record the quotidian occur-
rences of a family and household, they may contain everything from lifecycle
events to labor relations and commodity prices. In the hands of prominent
merchant-bankers, they could range far beyond the bounds of family or house.
The Hausbücher of Ulman Stromer and Willibald Imhof, both prominent
merchants of Nuremberg, contain their authors’ recordings of personal com-
mercial journeys and foreign commercial practices, including weights and
measures and customs and tariffs.41 The Augsburger merchant, Lucas Rem, left
39 Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman: An

Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge uk: 1970); Ralph Josselin, the Diary of Ralph
Josselin, 1616–1683, ed. Alan Macfarlane (Oxford: 1976).
41 Willibald Imhof, Memorialbuch, in Enkel und Erbe Willibald Pirckheimer, ed. Horst Pohl
(Nuremberg: 1992), 28–70; Ulman Stromer, Püchel von mein geslechet und vom abentewr,
ed. Karl Hegel in Die Chroniken der fränkischen Städte. Nürnberg, vol 1 (Die Chroniken des
Jahrhundert vol. 1). Leipzig 1862 (Reprint Göttingen 1961), 25–10. See also the discussion
in: Schmid, Schreiben für Status und Herrschaft, 68–71; 81–83.
240 Safley
a well-known Hausbuch that describes his training in Italy as a merchant, his

activity as a commercial factor of the Welser, the founding of his own firm,
his financial circumstances, his annual income and economic activities and
his relations with employees and associates.42 He intended this information,
despite its potential interest to economic historians, to serve the needs of his
heirs in settling questions of inheritance.
Nor were men alone in their attention to economic events and information.
The role of Caspar Koch’s wife as author of part of their Familienbuch points to
the broader presence of women as keepers of family memory and history, as
well as managers of the household.43 Widows often assumed the role; their
notes on the household as an economic and social unit were consistent with
their role as Hausmütter. The Gedenkbuch or “Memorial” of Maria Elisabeth
Stampfer contains, among its records of family matters in the broadest sense,
numerous references to a variety of economic enterprises, ranging from details
about the domestic economy to the purchase and operation of mines and
forges.44 Her little book demonstrates how fluid were the boundaries between
household and enterprise, between the so-called private or domestic economy
and the market economy, in which it was embedded. As Stampfer makes clear,
women engaged actively in both.
Probably the most famous autobiographical work by a woman – not a Haus-
or Familienbuch in the strict sense but rather an autobiography that contains
many of the same features, including reflections on a variety of economic
activities – is The Memoir of Glückel von Hameln.45 Written in retrospect, it
begins with a living will, distributing her property among her children and
42 Lukas Rem, Tagebuch des Lukas Rem aus den Jahren 1494–1541: ein Beitrag zur
Handelsgeschichte der Stadt Augsburg ; mitgetheilt, mit erläuternden Bemerkungen und
einem Anhange von noch ungedruckten Briefen und Berichten über die Entdeckung des
neuen Seeweges nach Amerika und Ostindien versehen, ed. Benedikt Greiff (Augsburg:
1861). See also the discussion in Schmid, Schreiben für Status und Herrschaft, 76–81.
43 Martin Scheutz and Harald Tersch, “Memoria und ‘Gesellschaft’: Die Stadt als Bühne in
drei oberösterreichischen Selbstzeugnissen von Frauen aus dem 17. Jahrhundert,” in
Haus- und Familienbücher in der städtischen Gesellschaft des Spätmittelalters und der
frühen Neuzeit, ed. Birgit Sudt (Cologne: 2007), 135–161. See also Schmid, Schreiben für
Status und Herrschaft, 14.
44 Maria Elisabeth Stampfer, Der Frau Maria Elisabeth Stampfer aus Vordernberg Hausbuch
auf Veranlassung des Grafen Franz v. Meran, ed. Joseph von Zahn (Vienna: 1887). See also
the discussion in Schmid, Schreiben für Status und Herrschaft, 88–93.
45 Die Memoiren der Glückel von Hameln, transl. and ed. Bertha Pappenheim (Weinheim und
Basel: 2005; reprint of original edition, Übertragung nach der Ausgabe der Prof. Dr. David
Kaufmann von Bertha Pappenheim, Vienna 1910).
urging them to live ethical lives. It then proceeds to record some of the most
memorable events of her life. Her first marriage was to the Hamburg jeweller,
Chaim Segal, whose business she took over after his death, travelling to trade
fairs, operating his retail shop and providing for their children. After several
years as a widow, she remarried a Jewish banker of Metz, Cerf Levy, whose
bankruptcy two years later destroyed not only his fortune but hers. Thus, in
addition to much information on Jewish history and world history, Glückel’s
memoir provides a wealth of data, if not on economics, then certainly on eco-
nomic life. Whether women authors understood economic life differently from
their male counterparts remains a question that, like a broader attention to
economic history, might be, but has not been, explored on the basis of autobio-
graphical writings.
This mutual lack of attention seems to reside in the priorities of the given
fields. Many scholars traditionally associate autobiography with the personal
and subjective in ways that are inimical to economic historians. Given their
attention to the macro and social levels of analysis, economic historians accord
the individual agent only a limited place in their studies. Many scholars like-
wise conceive of economics as a field, governed by principles that are impera-
tive and universal. Given their concern for issues of personal perspective and
perception and their attention to questions of cultural value and meaning, his-
torians of autobiography have not looked to economic engagements or turned
their attention to the material bases of life in the past.
***
Caspar Koch did not write his Familienbuch in its entirety. The third sec-
tion, containing the enticing reference to a business lost in time, belongs
to his second wife, who wrote it after his death. The possibility of multiple
authors raises profound questions about content. Whose perceptions,
experiences and values are actually recorded? How reliably do the recorded
perceptions, experiences and values reflect those of the putative author
and his or her family? The very arbitrariness and idiosyncrasy of such writ-
ings can present real problems of analysis. They present as well its source
of fascination and promise for scholars of early autobiographical writing
and economic history alike.
The Koch Familienbuch is, at best, only partially autobiographical. Other
examples appear to be not autobiographical at all. Numerous Hausväter dele-
gated the writing of their Haus- and Familienbücher to ghost-authors. In
Augsburg, such noteworthy members of the urban elite as Markus Pfister, Hans
Jakob Fugger, Heinrich Rehlinger and Ulrich Linck turned to a professional
242 Safley
author, the chronicler Clemens Jäger, to write their family histories.46 The list
is probably much longer. Often, professionally written chronicles are difficult
to distinguish from those that were personally composed. The difference is the
resort to professional, historical research and common tropes rather than per-
sonal memory and individual experience. This makes relative, but not irrele-
vant, their utility for economic history. A Familienbuch, composed over
generations, can offer more information about changes in economic circum-
stances over time. The Koch example would not have included even so much
information on economic fortunes, had Caspar been the sole author. Likewise
the list of marriage partners over generations, found in so many Familien- and
Ehrenbücher from elite circles, offers key information about patterns of rela-
tionship among families that were often business colleagues and competitors
and, thus, new insights into issues of capital formation and risk assessment, to
name but a couple of possibilities. At some point, nonetheless, such represen-
tative works of history and art, such as the Fugger Ehrenbuch, to give but a
single example, evolve away from their literary context and cease to be auto-
biographical – and in some cases biographical – at all.
The opposite possibility exists as well: a book that opens like a Hausbuch,
with the promise of information about the household as well as the persons
within it, but reveals itself to be more consistently personal and autobiograph-
ical. Matheus Miller’s memoir is a case in point. It begins in a manner reminis-
cent of Koch’s writing:
In this little book [are] recorded all manner of things

Pertaining to me, Matheus Miller of Augsburg. From my
Birth onward, so long as God grants me the life and grace
To continue this [writing], is briefly described so that my
Own may find it after God summons me from them.47
The two men were, in fact, much alike. Koch was born in Memmingen in
1576; Miller was born just to the east in Augsburg in 1625. Both were sons of
established merchant families. In the course of their careers, both became
46 Rohmann, “Mit seer grosser muhe vnd schreiben an ferre Ort,” 107.
47 Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Evangelisches Wesensarchiv 59, p. 1.: “Inn disem Büchlein allerley
sachen verzeichnet so mich Matheo Miller Inn Augsburg betreffen. Von meiner Geburt
ann So lang mir Got das Leben unnd die Genade verlihen dises zue continuieren Ist mit
wenigem darum verzeichnet umb die meinigen da Got die Gnade verlihe etwan zue ver-
lassen solhes nach mir finden.” See also Thomas Max Safley, Matheus Miller’s Memoir: A
Merchant’s Life in the Seventeenth Century (London: 1999).
successful businessmen in the regional and international trade among Italy,

Upper Germany and the Netherlands. Both occupied secure positions among
the prosperous bourgeoisie of south German Imperial cities.
Despite the similarities in the circumstances of their lives, the autobio-
graphical writings of Caspar Koch and Matheus Miller display remarkable dis-
similarities. Koch wrote his book in the form of a three-part family chronicle.
Miller also adopted a three-part structure, albeit with very different parts. An
extensive retrospective of his childhood precedes three distinct collections of
episodes and anecdotes from his adult life, each of which was chronologically
organized, devoted to a particular theme and composed in a single effort. The
first part takes up family matters. Like Koch, Miller concentrated on lifecycle
events, such as births, marriages and deaths. Unlike Koch, Miller provided
fewer situational details, such as the number of guests at a wedding feast or the
values of gifts to the newlyweds. Miller occupies the center of his own story.
The second part describes the series of minor public offices that Miller occu-
pied. Koch’s book makes no reference whatsoever to public office in
Memmingen, though his success and stature would likely have qualified him
for the service of his city, and, as we have seen, it gives sparse post mortem
testimony to his economic engagements. Matheus Miller wrote no discussion
of his business. Though he rose to become one of the richest men in Augsburg
at the time, one of the greatest commercial, industrial and financial cities of
the Empire and of Europe, his autobiographical writing contains not a single
word about the nature of his business or the extent of his fortune. The third
part portrays Miller’s social connections through lists of god-children and gift-
exchanges. Koch, too, describes his social world, but his lists remain limited
to such information as the numbers of guests or gifts, without revealing the
nature or intensity of the relationships behind them. Miller’s world reads more
personally and affectively; it seems bound by intimate considerations of rela-
tionship and confession.
Form and content differ because the intentions of the writers differed.
Koch’s Familienbuch seems factual and dispassionate, lacking in self-analysis.
He wished to record the history of his family, a history that is largely limited to
external events. Miller pursued other goals.48 His book bears striking resem-
blance to discussions of the good life, as found in the writings of Stoic philoso-
phers from Antiquity to the Renaissance.49 He analyzes selected events, often
48 See Safley, Matheus Miller’s Memoir, 1–19.

49 See Francis Copleston, SJ, A History of Philosophy, vol. I (Garden City, ny: 1962), 428–431.
Cf. Charles Trinkhaus, In Our Likeness and Image: Humanity and Divinity in Italian
Humanist Thought (Chicago: 1970), passim; Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in
244 Safley
without strict attention to historical fact or detail. His style is more private and
personal. The turning point of his youth, above all Miller’s apparently indepen-
dent and spontaneous decisions about career and marriage, led to tension
between himself and the elders of his family and its firm. Such violations of
generally accepted, contemporary standards of personal behavior and patriar-
chal authority demanded not only an explanation but also a justification. The
similarity between this autobiographical writing and Stoic thought suggests
that Miller referred to classical themes in order to give philosophical weight to
his apology. It is not only historical but also and equally didactic and apolo-
getic: he describes his life; he portrays an upright and honorable life; he justi-
fies his life according to these standards.50 Not surprisingly, therefore, his book
ends before his death. He was its sole author and its sole focus.
What possible use could economic historian make of such an autobiograph-
ical source? Though the author is an economic agent of the first rank, his mem-
oir contains no obviously economical observation or information. It permits
neither the description nor the analysis of economic circumstances in the
past. Miller appears neither as a shaper of the early modern economy nor as
homo oeconomicus.
Yet, relevant material is there, both implicitly and explicitly. The constant
reference to social values, such as honor and duty, which inform Miller’s reflec-
tions on family life, public office and social relation, suggests the contours of
economic rationality in the past as well as the present. The imperatives to act
honorably or dutifully could influence in a variety of ways the effort to obtain
the maximum profit or utility for the minimum of labor or resources. The
attention to a wide array of social relationships, such as kinship and friendship,
to which Miller returns repeatedly in his autobiographical writing, reveals the
fundamental structures of early economic life. He did not turn to the market
alone for the provision of goods and services but rather relied on extra-market
connections and information also. Clearly, production, distribution, exchange
and consumption of goods and services is limited neither to markets nor to
marketplaces. The demography of birth, marriage and death provides not only
a regular theme in Miller’s memoir but also its basic rhythm. When a couple
married, families and fortunes unite. Miller carefully noted the successful,
mercantile backgrounds of his spouses’ families, an indication that
Renaissance Florence: I Libri della Famiglia, transl. Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia, sc:
1969), 1–20.
50 See also Safley, Matheus Millers Memoir, 1–19; Die Aufzeichnungen des Matheus Miller.
Das Leben eines Augsburger Kaufmanns im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Thomas Max Safley
(Reiseberichte und Selbstzeugnisse aus Bayerisch-Schwaben 4) (Augsburg: 2003).
economics is inseparable from affection in such matters. When a child was

born, new needs had to be met. Miller marked repeatedly, sometimes anx-
iously, the economic demands of multiple mouths. When a spouse died, remar-
riage became key to continued economic activity. As Miller noted repeatedly,
he could not run his business and keep house at the same time. Death often
involved inheritance, and estate-related disputes stood at the center of several
incidents recorded in Miller’s memoir. Miller reflected on the social and eco-
nomic value of property, its impact on his family’s status and solidarity as well
as his family’s power and prosperity. For all its lack of direct reference to busi-
ness or wealth, his autobiographical writing testifies to the social and ethical
underpinnings of economic life in early modern Europe.
The question, how various social, ethical or political structures and institu-
tions influenced economic life, leads away from economics strictu sensu to the
realm of political economy. The term, which originated in the moral philosophy
of the eighteenth century, first applied to the study of production and exchange
and their relationship to law, custom, and government. In its broadest sense, it
explores the ways in which non-economic factors – initially politics, law and cus-
tom, but more recently culture, society and environment – influence economic
behavior. Political economy acknowledges the fact that economics is not just a
system of causes and effects that operates according to established laws but also
a system of relationships that depend upon social principles, such as honor, trust
and status. More recently, behavioral economics has evolved to address these
issues. It applies research on human and social, cognitive and emotional factors
to better understand economic behavior. It is concerned with the boundaries of
rationality among economic agents, how irrational concerns may influence a
rational response to market factors. Early autobiographical writings obviously
may have much to contribute here. Miller’s memoir examines a variety of values
that directly affected his economic activities. Koch likewise relates principles of
behavior that contribute to the success of a merchant. These and other early
forms of autobiography testify to the thought-worlds of early economic agents,
suggesting the various mental factors that shaped their economic behaviors.
Certainly, persons other than merchant-bankers recorded the histories of
themselves and their families in a variety of early autobiographical forms.
Koch composed a more traditional family chronicle; Miller’s memoir is more
nearly autobiographical in the strict sense. Philipp Höchstetter’s Tagebuch
combines aspects of both.51
51 Stadtarchiv Augsburg. Höchstettersammlung. See also Josef Herz, “Das Tagebuch des
Augsburger Arztes und Stadtphysikus Dr. Philipp Höchstetter,” Zeitschrift des historischen
Vereins für Schwaben 70 (1976), 180–224.
246 Safley
Höchstetter began writing relatively late in a life that was full of historical
incident. He was a scion of the elite, Augsburg merchant family, whose busi-
ness practices and bankruptcy contributed substantially to the so-called
Monopoly Debate (Monopolstreit) of the 1530s.52 Born in 1579, he began his
schooling at the evangelical gymnasium, the Collegium St. Anna, in Augsburg
and pursued medical studies from 1600 to 1604 at the universities of Basel and
Padua. He returned to his home town in 1605 with the degree Doctoris Medicinae
and matriculated in the college of physicians, the Collegium Medicum
Augustanum. The author of several volumes of medical observations, dedi-
cated to the City Council, he rose to become Physikus primarius in 1632. During
his career, he served as physician to the Cloister of St. Catharine, the city’s infir-
mary and the city’s orphanage, as well as private physician to the Fugger family.
He also wrote an autobiographical text that was continued and expanded by
other members of his family after his death in 1635.
As a combination Familien- and Tagebuch, it is an odd work. It alternates
between German and Latin in ways that are hard to comprehend, not con-
forming to content that was personal as opposed to professional or private as
opposed to public. A ready-made volume of 200 pages, Höchstetter divided it
by themes into multiple sections. The first section extends from pages 1–34.
Here he treated his family history, including his personal autobiography from
his birth in 1557 to 1627. He then wrote about his housing, including locations
and costs, between 1608 and 1626. He concluded with what might be a post-
script, written on a separate page, about the death of his mother in 1637, into
whose house he and his family moved. Pages 35 to 42 are blank, marking the
end of the first section. Thereafter, Höchstetter turned to less personal matters.
He offers an extended discussion of his household that included its personnel
and expenses between 1606, when he married, and 1626. He records, for exam-
ple, the costs of various foodstuffs and fuel, demonstrating the effects of infla-
tion and discussing such contributory factors as transportation and
debasement. Thereafter, he records prominent moments in what he calls his
“medicinal condition” (Condicion medicinalien), by which he means his profes-
sion: his various employments as a civic physician, some of his memorable
treatments and the payments he received. Pages 67 to 90 are blank, again
marking the end of a section. What follows is the largest single section of the
Tagebuch, pages 91 to 113, where Höchstetter takes up “various things that
occurred in Augsburg and Germany” (Memoriale etlicher Sa[c]hen inn Augspurg
und Teutschlandt geschehen), that is, events that were neither personal nor
52 Adelheid Hoechstetter-Müller, “Hoechstetter,” in Stadtlexikon Augsburg, ed. Günther

Grünsteudel, Günter Hägele and Rudolf Frankenberger (Augsburg: 1998), 505.
professional but rather historical. It includes a brief history of the civic Alms
Office, founded in 1522, that employed Höchstetter in a number of capacities,
first as physician to its infirmary in 1616, then as physician to its orphanage in
1626. This chronicle continues until 1630, when all evangelical persons were
expelled from civic service. It turns then to more global affairs, albeit from a
local perspective, beginning with the election of Ferdinand II as Holy Roman
Emperor in 1619, his entrance into Augsburg and the confessional tensions that
followed. It reports the local impact of the Edict of Restitution in 1629 as well
as the suffering inflicted by the Thirty Years’ War to 1635. Höchstetter summa-
rized in what reads like a cry of desperation: “1634–1635: no trade, no work, no
grain, no food or drink; taxes, losses, poverty, hunger, need and folly in plenty.”53
He concludes on a personal note: “But we need generous patience; may
God give it.”54 With this third section, which concludes with the author’s death
in 1635, other contributors take up the task of finishing the work. It has been
speculated that the next person to record events was Höchstetter’s widow,
Anna Maria Schmidin.55 As she died in 1638 and the historical section resumes
with a description of events in the period, 1639 to 1640, however, the more
likely author is their eldest son, Hans Matheus Höchstetter, to whom belongs
the very last section of the Tagebuch. Pages 117 to 128 are blank, marking the
end of the third section, as originally planned by Philipp Höchstetter. The
fourth section, again in Philipp Höchstetter’s hand contains a record of lifecy-
cle events in the family of his wife, Anna Maria Schmidin. Pages 134 to 148,
being blank, signal the now familiar boundary between sections. There follows
a record of Höchstetter’s children and their educations. Sons and daughters
alike received a basic education, whereafter the ways parted. Daughters
apprenticed to seamstresses or housekeepers, while sons became assistants to
merchants or students at universities. Höchstetter kept detailed record of the
progress of all his children, including associated expenses, indicating its impor-
tance to him. This section, the last by Philipp Höchstetter, ends abruptly in
1635. Immediately thereafter, on page 164, his eldest son, probably Hans
Matheus Höchstetter, records the father’s death. Over the following seventeen
pages, he continues the record of family events: employments, marriages,
births and deaths, concluding in 1661. The final eighteen pages are blank.
53 Tagebuch des Dr. Philipp Höchstetter, 108: “1634–1635 Kein Handel, kein arbeit, kein getreiden,
kein speiß noh Drankh: Steür, Verlust, Armuet, Hunger, Nott und Sott in copiam.”
54 Tagebuch des Dr. Philipp Höchstetter, 109 :”Unß aber ist generosa patientia [author’s
emphasis] vonn Nötten, die geb Gott.”
55 See interlinear comment in Walter Höchstetter’s typed, unpublished copy of the original
Tagebuch (Schwarzenbach: 1974), 27.
248 Safley
The period around 1626–1627 marked a turning point in Philipp Höchstetter’s

Tagebuch. At that point, he ceased his personal autobiography, the record of
his various dwelling places and his discussion of housekeeping as an economic
enterprise. Why is not clear. The 1620s were a dramatic period in the city’s his-
tory, poised as it was between the hyperinflation of 1622–23, the plagues that
followed it and the Edict of Restitution that would close the decade in 1629. For
a physician and an Evangelical, these events might have been sufficient to shift
his attention from the personal to the historical. The organization suggests
that he wrote the first two sections in 1626–1627. That the third, historical sec-
tion concludes abruptly in 1635 and is resumed between 1638 and 1640 by some
other party, presumably the eldest son, indicates a date of composition at the
time of the author’s death. The fourth and fifth sections, written by the hus-
band about his wife’s family and the father about his children, both extend in
time to 1635, though it is hard to know whether they were recorded in a single
effort or over an extended period of time. Later contributors pursued the
themes laid down by the original author, thus signalling the transformation of
what began as an individual memoir into a family chronicle.
For all the complexities of organization and authorship that Höchstetter’s
Tagebuch displays, which set it apart in many ways from the autobiographical
writings of Koch and Miller, it offers like them rich stuff for the economic his-
torian. His discussion of housekeeping on pages 43 to 58 includes lists of prices
for various foodstuffs, making possible the construction of a basic marketbas-
ket, which is key to calculating basic costs of living. What is more, Höchstetter
extends the discussion into the period, 1622–1624, the Kipper- und Wipperzeit
and its catastrophic inflation. He returns to the question of consumer prices in
his discussion of political events in the late 1630s, when Augsburg suffered
siege and occupation, famine and plague, again providing lists of basic food-
stuffs and the changes in their costs over time. Thus, Höchstetter gives direct,
detailed testimony not only to the microeconomic effects of inflation on con-
sumers but also to its macroeconomic causes. It is a theme his son continues to
the end of the decade. Other economic matters emerge as well, albeit in less
detail. Höchstetter provides information about payments received for the
practice of medicine in the seventeenth century. He records the costs of hous-
ing and education in Augsburg between 1620 and 1635. Taken in conjunction
with other source materials, his Tagebuch could serve as an essential, first-
person account of economic life in the seventeenth century.
Given their broad differences of form and content, none of these early
autobiographical writing – of which three is a very small sample, indeed –
seem immediately suited to economic history. Its traditional purview is macro-
economic rather than microeconomic, attentive to entire nations, regions or
industries rather than individual families or firms. Its traditional approach, be

it descriptive of analytic, presupposes a degree of objectivity that is lacking in
personal reminiscences and recordings.
Yet, the connection between individual agents and economic change over
time cannot be denied. With a shift in focus, early autobiographical writings
become economic documents of the first importance.
***
Caspar Koch and the other members of his family did not see their domestic or
social existence as fundamentally separate from their business or economic
subsistence. For that reason, modern attempts to distinguish and emphasize
the function of economic activity or social mobility in the early origins of these
sources must be used with caution as over-simplifications. The same applies to
other writers of early autobiographical texts. Their economic activities formed
an integral part of their lives and, accordingly, found but passing reference in
books that were devoted to those lives as a whole. As a result, those books vary
extraordinarily among themselves, reflecting the perspectives and personali-
ties of their authors, whether the focus is a given person or an entire family,
whether the economic aspects bulk larger or smaller.
As noted earlier, economic history has been proclaimed a field that “has
never been and should never be anything like a closed field,” but rather “stands
at a busy intersection of history and the social sciences, where economists,
political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, demographers, and historians
come and go.”56 Given the spirit of this history, autobiographical sources have
an undeniable place. Modern, self-consciously autobiographical sources have
been taken up directly. Historians of economic thought have mined the corre-
spondence and autobiographies of economic thinkers and agents to capture
the sources of their thoughts and actions.57 It might be argued that such mod-
ern sources have been shaped by the modern consciousness of economics as
a field apart, a self-contained system, governed by its own principles and
structures.
Yet, premodern, autobiographical writings were governed by no such
assumptions. Economics formed a part of life and was subject no less to the
broader influences of personality, morality or politics than to the technical
56 Mokyr, Preface.
57 See, for example, the collected correspondence of such figures as Adam Smith, David
Ricardo, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes,
to name but a very few.
250 Safley
function of markets and marketplaces. Such writings present a microeconomic

perspective: production, exchange and consumption from the perspective of
the individual person, family or firm. They place that individual in all its
complexity and idiosyncrasy at the center of events. Interestingly, economic
analysis has begun to take up more complexly questions of individual
decision-making, as witnessed by the recent efflorescence of rational-choice
and game theory. The defining of personal profit, advantage or utility may be
more complex than the playing out of rationality as traditionally defined. It
may even involve personal experience or moral considerations. Should eco-
nomic history continue to turn seriously to the microhistory of economic
activity, it will return ad fontes, to the moral origins of economic thought. And
it will be forced to turn to autobiographical writings in all their various forms.
Family Politics, Family Networks
and the “Familial Self”
Sibling Letters in Seventeenth Century German High Aristocracy
Sophie Ruppel
“It was my obligation to have answered sooner,”: so wrote Elisabeth of Hesse-

Kassel to her brother Wilhelm on August 9, 1656.1 Though she apologizes for
not having written, archival sources reveal that she actually corresponded
quite faithfully with her brother, writing to him about once a week. This fre-
quent correspondence, moreover, represents no exception among siblings in
the high nobility, who were spread, in many cases, across the European courts.
Research on correspondence has paid little attention to the courtly letter.
Furthermore, especially in literary studies, not only is the letter viewed as a
genuinely bourgeois form of communication, but the epoch of the letter is
above all located in the eighteenth century.2 However, earlier letters are not
completely neglected. In studies on the Holy Roman Empire, for example, the
history of merchants’ correspondence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
has been taken into account – the letters of the Paumgartner or Behaim fami-
lies come to mind. Conversely the history of the courtly letter, which blos-
somed in the seventeenth century, has been widely ignored untill now. This is
largely the result of a late-nineteenth-century reception based on bourgeois
values, a reception that on the one hand, classified courtly letters as unstylish
and tasteless, while on the other, excluded from the canon of national litera-
ture letters written in French. This position can be observed in Georg
Steinhausen’s work Geschichte des deutschen Briefes, which still remains influ-
ential today.3 The sophisticated letter ceremony of the nobility was harshly
condemned by Steinhausen. Through the criteria of his bourgeois aesthetic the
courtly letters appeared as ridiculous monstrosities, trapped in ceremony.4
From today’s perspective, however, the facts that letters were modeled within
1 The text was translated by Hannah Elmer. Elisabeth of Hesse-Kassel to Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel,
August 9, 1656; StAM (Staatsarchiv Marburg) Collection 4a49,9, not paginated: “Es hette mein
devoir erfordert EL. viehleher mit meinem getrewlich [Schreiben] auffzuwartten[…].”
2 Cf., for example, the anthology from Klaus Beyrer and Hans-Christian Täubrich, eds., Der
Brief. Eine Kulturgeschichte der schriftlichen Kommunikation (Heidelberg: 1996).
3 Georg Steinhausen, Geschichte des deutschen Briefes: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen
Volkes, 2 vols., (Berlin: 1889–1891).
4 Ibid. vol. 2, 52 ff.

252 Ruppel
the forms of courtly ceremony and that the medium of the letter was specifi-
cally instrumentalized within courtly culture are precisely that which gives
these letters their specific character, which offers us a new look at the culture
or communication of the period.
In the archives, letters from aristocratic siblings are often widely scattered
throughout different collections and not easy to find. They are, for instance,
just as likely to be found in collections on “Family Affairs” as in those on
“Foreign Relations.” In the context of a larger spectrum of archives and collec-
tions, it is surprising to see the richness of the familial correspondence from
before 1700, the period predating Gellert’s correspondence reform and the
flowering of the bourgeois letters. Thus, we should not leave unquestioned the
assessment that the eighteenth century alone was the century of the most
elaborate culture of correspondence. The aristocracy’s correspondence net-
works were extensive, and their correspondence culture emerges as a differen-
tiated cultural practice – seen, for example, in the so-called Briefsteller, or
instructions for letter-writing, which as a genre was widespread in the seven-
teenth century and whose texts often appeared in multiple editions. For the
medium of the letter, the aristocratic correspondence culture developed
entirely individual forms and functions.
Recently, the “letter” as a medium has attracted general interest, especially
through questions raised by research into self-narratives. Initially, self-narra-
tive research approached the letter with reserve. And, indeed, this initial
reserve is not entirely incomprehensible; the letter is, after all, much more of a
witness to interactions and relationships, and even over a long period, it is not
directly a medium of self-reflection. As an instrument of interaction and activ-
ity, as a form of action, the letter, especially in courtly culture, largely func-
tioned as an instrument for dynastic maneuvering and inter-dynastic
communication, as a medium of information, as a means of negotiation or way
of establishing and maintaining aristocratic relationships and networks. In
this sense, however, we could speak of a particular form of “self-affirmation,”
the affirmation of the individual anchoring him- or herself within aristocratic
relationship networks and securing a place on the scale of prestige.
In the following article, these different possibilities for using letter-based
communication in courtly culture will be presented through the letters of
siblings from the high nobility, specifically through the correspondence from
aristocratic siblings from the Electorates of the Palatinate, Hannover and
Brandenburg, as well as from Hesse-Kassel.5
5 The letters that I investigated can be found at the Lower Saxon Hauptstaatsarchiv in
Hannover (NHStA), at the Bavarian Hauptstaatsarchiv in Munich (BayHStA), at the
Family Politics, Family Networks and the “Familial Self” 253
Historical Background of Communication
Throughout the seventeenth century, webs of correspondence spread increas-

ingly across the Holy Roman Empire; in many places it was already possible to
mail letters at more than one time during the week. The extensive stability
after the Peace of Westphalia enabled further development of the postal
system – both the imperial postal system and the regional postal systems of
the princes.6
In many cases, though, letter exchange was not yet a matter of exclusive
correspondence between two partners, rather it involved entire circles of sen
ders and addressees. Often, letters were not solely directed to a single recipient
but were forwarded, copied or read aloud to a larger group of people; in short,
they were passed on and reproduced. In this way, the correspondence network
of the aristocracy was incredibly far-reaching.7 A nobleman would correspond
with other royal houses, with relatives, artists, intellectuals, diplomats and
every sort of person of rank. Also siblings, often scattered across the European
courts, corresponded regularly. In most cases, the recipient would send a reply
“with the next mail (Post).” Both from the surviving collections and through
remarks in the letters themselves, we can determine, for example, that in
many cases the siblings under consideration here sent one to two letters per
week. Sophie of Hannover, for instance, wrote one to two letters weekly to
both her brother Karl Ludwig and to her sister Louise Hollandine.8 Similarly,
Emilie and Charlotte of Hesse-Kassel wrote on a weekly basis to their brother.9
Normative conceptions were developed concerning the frequency with
which letters should be exchanged, leading Sophie of Hannover to complain
Staatsarchiv Marburg (StAM) and at the Geheimen Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz in

Berlin (GStPK). Only in a few cases have these letters have been edited.
6 On the expansion of the postal system, see Wolfgang Behringer, Thurn und Taxis: Die
Geschichte ihrer Post und ihrer Unternehmen (Munich and Zurich: 1990). Additional biblio-
graphic references can be found here.
7 On the increase of correspondence and the extent of writings sent by the aristocracy, see also
Susan Whyman, “‘Paper visits’: The Post-Restoration Letter as Seen Through the Verney
Family Archive,” in Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter Writers 1600–1945, ed. Rebecca Earle
(Hants, Vt.: 1999), 15–36.
8 The former figures come from the collections in Hannover (NHStA Hannover 91 KfSo 39a),
whose remaining pieces comprise four thick files; the latter figures come from a letter written
to her morganatic niece: Briefe der Kurfürstin Sophie von Hannover an die Raugräfinnen und
Raugrafen zu Pfalz, ed. Eduard Bodemann (Publicationen aus den Preuss. Staatsarchiven,
vol. 37), (Osnabrück: 1966; Reprint of the 1888 edn), 168.
9 This is indicated by the collections in Marburg. Cf. for example, StAM 4a49, 11 or 49,11.
254 Ruppel
often in letters to her mother that she had heard so little from her brother
Ruprecht.10
Only a part of the correspondence among the siblings is extant. Often it is well
documented with up to three or even four letters per week, but sometimes entire
years are missing. Nevertheless, the transmission rate remains quite high, despite
the destruction of letters for political reasons or later losses due to fire, water
damage, etc. Precise numbers are, however, difficult to name, partially because
the correspondence itself was widely dispersed and also because the letters are
archived in a variety of places. Only a Europe-wide survey will be able to provide
an accurate overview of the situation.
Siblings, of course, did not only write to each other but also to their mothers,
sons and in-laws.11 All in all, the variety of the collections immediately suggests
that letter-writing was a preoccupation for the aristocracy, and Elisabeth
Charlotte of the Palatinate is no special case. Without a doubt, correspondence
formed the central medium of communication for the trans-regional aristocracy;
only through this exchange of letters could the communication network of the
nobility span all of Europe.
Postal delivery was erratic, however, until the end of the seventeenth
century. Again and again it appeared that letters simply did not arrive,12 and
every now and then, letters were opened along the way.13 Not infrequently was
a sibling mystified that the brother or sister never answered, even after multi-
ple letters had been sent.14 Therefore, up until the end of the century, respon-
dents would confirm the receipt of the letter at the start of their reply. If the
correspondence was politically important, the most important information
from the received letter would be reiterated at the beginning of the response.
10 For example, Sophie of Hannover to Elisabeth Stuart, October 31, 1661, in A Collection of
Original Royal Letters, written by King Charles the First and Second And the King and Queen
of Bohemia, together with original Letters written by Prince Rupert, Charles Louis Count
Palatine, The Duchess of Hanover And Several other distinguished Persons […], ed. Sir
George Bromley (London: 1777), 226 f.
11 There is still much to be done here, especially regarding historical-anthropological
research into kinship. There is likewise much correspondence between siblings from the
previous or succeeding generations, parent-child letters, etc.
12 Philipp of the Palatinate, for example, wrote to his brother Karl Ludwig that he feared his
letters had not arrived, since he was writing again for the fourth time. (Philipp to Karl
Ludwig, July 15/25, 1650; NHStA Hann. 91 Kf. So. No. 36 Pg. 214 ff.).
13 For example, Philipp of the Palatinate to Eduard of the Palatinate (undated); NHStA
Hann. 91 Kf.So. No. 36 Pg. 237 f.
14 For instance, Emilie of Hesse-Kassel to her brother Wilhelm on March 22, 1652; StAM
4a49,10 not paginated.
Thus, for example, Landgravine Hedwig Sophie of Hesse-Kassel began her

correspondence to her brother Prince Elector Friedrich Wilhelm of
Brandenburg with “Ab Ew. Ld. vom 8. dieses nunmehr zu end lauffenden Monats
und Jahres zu recht ingelangten gar angenehmen Antwortschreiben, hab ich mit
mehrerm ersehen, welchergestalt [a reiteration of the contents follows] ...”15
Without a doubt, this practice eased the negotiations carried out via letter,
especially in political correspondence.
The postal delivery times appear in the letters to vary greatly. A letter from
Kassel to Berlin generally required five days, but occasionally it could take
eight or nine days.16
Letter Forms, Letter Ceremony, and the Letter as an Instrument

of Action
In the seventeenth century, the letter developed into the means of communi-
cation and instrument of activity for the European aristocracy. It was through
letters that networks were established and maintained, through letters that
marriages were negotiated, and through letters that political and societal infor-
mation was exchanged.
This meant that the courtly letter became a medium which with its formal
arrangement reflected the differentiated ceremonies of the aristocracy. The
complexity of these forms are attested to in the Briefsteller from the time.17
The correspondents’ ranks are already suggested by the letter’s external
characteristics: in their folded format the emperor’s letters were twice as large
as the letters circulating among the nobility. The size of the sender’s seal also
indicates his rank, just as do the placement of his signature or the size of the
characters used in writing his name.18 The greater the difference in rank
15 Hedwig Sophie of Hesse-Kassel to Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg, December 23, 1663;

GStPK, I.HA Geh. Rat, Rep. 11 Auswärt. Bez. Nr. 117d), fasz. 2 page 46. This ‘recapitulation’
at the beginning of the letters can also be found in the instructions of the Briefsteller. It
was not merely to confirm the receipt of the letter but also to accelerate business negotia-
tions by reiterating the issues for the partner. Cf., for example, Caspar von Stieler, Der
Allzeitgertige Secretarius […] (Nuremberg: 1680), 922.
16 Cf., for instance, the collections GHStA PK I. HA Rep. 11 No. 117.
17 For example, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Der Teutsche Secretarius. Das ist: Allen Cantzeleven//
Studir- und Schreibstuben nutzliches […] Titular- un[d] Formularbuch (Nuremberg: 1656);
von Stieler, Der Allzeitfertige Secretarius, 1680 (of this Briefsteller many editions were issued).
18 This model can be found not only in the Briefsteller but also, for example, in the letters of
Ruprecht of the Palatinate to the Emperor; BayHStA GHA Corresp. No. 1030.
256 Ruppel
between the sender and the recipient, the larger the gap maintained on the
paper between the repeated address of the superior person at the end of the
letter and the sender’s subscription. Thus, order of rank is always crucial: those
of higher rank always name themselves first, both in the address and in the
subscription. The ‘titles’ in the letter become complicated in the outer address,
the inner salutation and the listing of the names at the end of the letter.
Linguistically, superlatives are used to distinguish. For example, a prince elec-
tor is addressed ‘most illustrious’, but a prince only as ‘illustrious’, and while
the emperor is called ‘all-illustrious, most powerful and most invincible’, a king
is named with slightly more modesty ‘most illustrious, most powerful and most
invincible’.19
This complex code was no mere frivolity. This is suggested by the conduct
of the princes and princesses. Mis-titled nobles declined letters and addressing
an elector by ‘illustrious’ alone (instead of ‘most illustrious’) could be taken
as an insult. Thus on the formal level of letter correspondence, such concrete
negotiations became possible: defamation and self-humiliation could be
expressed.
In this way, not only did disputes over seating arrangements and order
provide opportunity for highly political conflicts but so did deviations in the
expected letter ceremonies. The letter ceremonies thus became a seismo-
graphic instrument of current ranking order. Here, communication via letter
was much more than simply “communication;” in many cases it was direct,
written negotiation.
Yet these rigid, ceremonial forms do not underlie all aristocratic letters.
Among the sibling letters we find both notes quickly written and devoid of
all formal elements, as well as letters formulaically executed and compliant
with all ceremonial standards. The form of the letter, however, does not neces-
sarily correspond to its content. Formless notes do not generally seem to have
more “private” content. It is possible that this related more to the matter of
transport – a servant quickly sent from brother to brother was perhaps more
likely to have carried a note, while letters going from prince to prince and hav-
ing to pass through multiple territories would have needed the standard
formalities.
But there is also another element at work. Since mid-century, not only were
the letters written in French, but the French ‘galant’ style of writing was also
adopted. This more conversational, more entertaining and less formal style
19 Cf. Harsdörffer, Teutscher Secretarius, Part I.: Prince elector: “Der Durchleuchtigste,” prince:
“Der Durchleuchtige,” Kaiser: “Der Allerdurchleuchtigste Großmächtigste und Unüber
windlichste,” König: “Der Durchleuchtigste Großmächtigste und Unüberwindlichste”.
found its way into the West, making the letter forms in the western territories
of the Holy Roman Empire different from those common in the East.20
The Content and Function of Letters: Between Information and

Emotion
What kind of positions do the siblings assume in the correspondence

networks? What sort of content do they communicate in their letters?
Since aristocratic siblings lived mostly scattered among the European
courts – by marrying into these courts, by being members of the local entou-
rage, or by serving in the military – they functioned in many cases as central
figures in the dynastic network. Through their letter exchange, they were able
to realize their duties of negotiating, spreading information and stabilizing
networks.21 When describing this transmission of news from foreign courts
and the completions of assignments at various courts, aristocratic siblings
tended to use the expressions ‘Rendre ses devoirs’ and ‘Rendre service’ in their
letters. Of course other relatives or allied nobles also sent information. It
appears, however, that the remaining siblings were essentially required to keep
the successor informed if they did not want to lose their claims to the dynastic
resources or reduce the dynasty’s honor and position of power, with which
their own status was bound.
The correspondence records, with their multi-page reports, attest that the
younger siblings of the successor dutifully assumed this task. For instance,
Sophie Amalie, the sister of the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg who married
into the Danish court, followed these expectations and regularly informed her
brothers about what she had learned, writing, for example: “Yesterday, news
was brought to the king concerning what the Swedes…” (observations on the
Swedish intentions follow).22 Thus, even though the younger brothers might
have been sent regularly on trips for specific missions, they were not the only
ones responsible for transmitting information; sisters married into the heart of
allied dynasties kept this process in motion.
20 See Agnes Roseno, Die Entwicklung der Brieftheorie von 1655–1709. Dargestellt an Hand der
Brieftheorie der Briefsteller von Philipp Harsdörffer, Kaspar von Stieler, Christian Weise und
Benjamin Neukirch (Würzburg: 1933).
21 Cf. Sophie Ruppel, Verbündete Rivalen. Geschwisterbeziehungen im Hochadel des 17.
Jahrhunderts (Cologne: 2006).
22 Sophie Amalie to Ernst August, October(?) 17, 1677; NHStA Cal. Br. 22 No. 621 Pg. 32. “Es ist
gestern die zeitung anher an König eingebracht wie das die Schweden […].”
258 Ruppel
This demonstrates the high value that princes placed on such information.
In a time when reliable information was rare and newspapers were only slowly
emerging, these transmissions were a valuable asset and guided the princes’
political conduct.
There was even a separate category in contemporary literature on letter
writing for such informative writings, especially those transmitting recent
news, which was labeled “communication writings” [Kommunikationsschreiben].
These letters often end with “c’est tout qu’il y a de nouveau” or that this was all
the “zeittung” [news] the writer had come across. As mentioned above, dis-
seminating news from other European courts was viewed as the self-evident
responsibility of all siblings, and this flow of information was only rarely dis-
rupted, even during conflicts between younger siblings and the successor.
Frequently, information was not simply passed along, but the letters received
at court would also be copied and forwarded. In many cases, this forwarding of
writings created outright circles of communication. Thus, certain blocs of
power, such as the Protestant bloc in the north, can be correctly described as a
communication community.
There was no small danger that letters with sensitive political news could be
captured by oppositional factions. As a countermeasure, various encoding
techniques were often employed. For example, the writer might eliminate the
salutation and subscription or use aliases. This can be seen in reports from
Sophie of Hannover in which she used names from baroque dramas when
writing about the marriage conflicts between her brother Karl Ludwig and his
wife Charlotte of Hesse-Kassel. The main coding technique, however, was to
encipher the information; certain number combinations would be used for
personal names, and sometimes each word would even be replaced. This espe-
cially applies to letters which had to travel through hostile areas or war zones.
Significantly, sometimes such numerical codings would be used to obscure
familial events.23 In particularly sensitive situations, messengers, provided
with a so-called “creditive,” would be sent to deliver the news orally and return
with a verbal answer and a “recreditive.” Sophie Amalie of Denmark, for exam-
ple, used this form very frequently when imparting news to her brothers.24
In the example of Sophie Amalie of Brunswick-Lüneburg and her brothers,
the form of their letters is important for gender history. Sophie had married
Friedrich of Bremen, who became king of Denmark after several deaths struck
the family; as a result, Sophie became queen. This manifests itself in the letter
ceremony as she began to name herself at the start of the letters she wrote to
23 Cf, for instance, the letters in NHStA Hann. 91 Kf.So. No. 37a.
24 See NHStA Cal. Br. 24 No. 1315.
her brothers, compliant with the rules for acknowledging rank. Symbolically,
she thus appears above her brothers in the hierarchy. Her position at the very
heart of this dynasty’s power center became crucially important for the poli-
tics of the Brunswick-Lüneburg brothers in many instances. Similar cases of
rank advancement through marriage are Sophie, sister of Karl Ludwig of the
Palatinate, who rose to become Electress of Hannover, or Hedwig Sophie, sister
of the elector of Brandenburg, who faced her brother for years as regent of the
imperial territory of the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel. Because these last two
women did not exceed the princely rank, their advancement is not reflected in
changes of letter ceremony.
Looking at the correspondence of the sisters of successors, it is surprising
that only in rare cases did these women see themselves as passive victims of a
marriage policy governed by political calculation. Instead, they perceived
themselves as important brokers between dynasties and felt obligated to their
families of origin. Conversely – from the perspective of the successor and gov-
erning oldest brother – he could hardly come closer to an amicable dynasty
than through the marriage of one of his sisters into that group.
The greatest part of the information contained in the letters concerns events
at court. Yet today, we can hardly achieve an overview of the extensive descrip-
tions of these courtly happenings, let alone untangle the multitudes of people.
Who arrived, who departed, who was fighting with whom over rank, rumors of
marriage projects, who stood in which level of favor, who had fallen out of
grace with the ruler, etc. – all of these issues were reported in the letters. Here
we can find information regarding networks, straight descriptions of courtly
happenings, as well as the latest gossip, which itself can be quite telling of the
current situation at court. Siblings also reported on military operations
and outcomes of wars, an apt example of which being the letters from Louise
Charlotte of Brandenburg to her brother Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg.
Having moved to Courland because of her marriage, she found herself report-
ing directly from a battle zone as the war between Sweden and Poland
increasingly engulfed Courland between its fronts.25 These letters are largely
enciphered or consist of chopped fragments of information, making them
almost incomprehensible for the uninitiated, and appear to have been com-
posed in a great hurry.
Frequently, brothers who were not yet settled and who were constantly trav-
elling and residing at various courts across Europe had a prominent role in
transmitting information. Among the Brunswick-Lüneburg siblings, for
instance, Johann Friedrich, who was foremost without inheritance, acted for a
25 GStAPK: I.HA Geh. Rat Rep. 9 Polen.

260 Ruppel
long time as a travelling informant (and envoy) for his eldest brother Christian
Ludwig. He travelled on his brother’s assignment especially often during the
1660s, when he still received his appanage from Christian Ludwig’s court. He
conducted negotiations for him and reported to him about the political situa-
tion in the different countries. From Venice, for example, he informed his
brother about the war with the Turks and described in detail how the Venetians
achieved victory, how many Turkish galleys were overpowered and how many
Turks had been captured, etc.26 He visited Copenhagen frequently, where he
conducted various negotiations for his brother.27
Thus, siblings did not only send information back and forth but also acted
as a mouthpiece for the successor via letter. They conducted negotiations or
even secured military and political support. In this capacity, Ruprecht of the
Palatinate negotiated the payment of money from the Peace of Westphalia at
the imperial court in Vienna during the 1650s for his brother, the Palatinate
Elector Karl Ludwig, and he repeatedly discussed with his brother via letter the
latest state of his efforts. Another brother of Karl Ludwig, Eduard, conducted
missions for many years at the French court for the successor. Involvement was
not limited to brothers; sisters also acted for the successor Karl Ludwig, as can
be seen in the example of the Abbess Louise Hollandine, who took over the
“work” in France after Eduard had died.28 Especially a sister married into
another dynasty would act as such an intermediary between princes through
her negotiations with her own brother and her husband – Sophie Amalie of
Denmark (formerly of Brunswick-Lüneburg) or Sophie of Hannover are two
such examples.
A central task for the successor’s sisters was to mediate marriage arrange-
ments. In many cases, aunts tested out possible marriage candidates for their
nieces or nephews. They would correspond with the respective parents and,
accompanied by a portrait of the niece or nephew, would frequently also travel
to the courts in question in order to begin the first stages of the negotiations.
In the actual marriage contracts, however, they rarely appeared; their involve-
ment in these negotiations and networking strategies can usually only be
detected through the preliminary correspondence.
Not least of all, questions of representation and ceremony would be
discussed in letters between the siblings; ballets, the latest fashion, hunting
expeditions and plays would also be reported. In the rivalries between courts,
26 E.g., Johann Friedrich to Christian Ludwig, October 8, 1661; NHStA Cal. Br. 22 No. 619 Pg. 8.
27 Cf. NHStA Cal. Br. 22 No. 619.
28 Cf. Luise Hollandine to Karl Ludwig, May 23 (year unclear); NHStA Hann. 91 Kf.So. No. 42
Pg. 10.
both culture and knowledge were also transmitted through siblings. Similarly,
the latest novels were exchanged or new medical discoveries discussed – such
as the effectiveness of coffee against headaches. In the later letters of ageing
siblings, however, religious or philosophical questions of the time came more
and more to the fore.
Exchange was not limited just to letters; a concrete material exchange often
accompanied the correspondence. In this way, items ranging from monastic
rules, poems, portraits and landscape paintings to animals (such as dogs and
horses), precious gems and fabrics to seeds and culinary specialties were sent
between courts. Even the exchange of personnel was common, should a
brother or sister require, for example, a royal tutor or scribe.
When all of their functions are taken into account, it becomes apparent that
siblings undertook a variety of duties in negotiating, transmitting information,
and in establishing and expanding networks. In many cases they formed the
central points of intersection in the dynasty’s political cooperation.
Yet the correspondence between aristocratic siblings was, interestingly
enough, not simply a medium for information; frequently the letters were also
places of emotional expression – a function that, here, does not conflict with
their familial-political purposes.
An excellent, albeit exceptional, example for this can be seen in the corre-
spondence between Wilhelm VI of Hesse-Kassel with his two sisters, Emilie
and Charlotte. Wilhelm (1629–1663) was successor of the Hesse-Kassel siblings
and assumed control there in 1650. Charlotte, two years his senior, married the
Prince Elector Karl Ludwig of the Palatinate in 1650 and lived from then on in
Heidelberg, while Emilie (1626–1693) married Henri Charles de la Trémouille
and moved to France. The correspondence between the brother and his sisters
is part of the extensive collection of letters which were exchanged between all
family members, now held in the Staatsarchiv Marburg. It began as a corre-
spondence between children. As Wilhelm would find himself on frequent trav-
els abroad, beginning already in the 1640s, he would first write to all the siblings
simultaneously and then to each one individually.
In a departure from the standard aristocratic custom, his siblings would
address him in their letters as ‘most dear to the heart and chosen brother’ or
simply as ‘highly honorable, chosen and most dear to my heart’, or would be
called in the text ‘dearest treasure’, ‘my most dearest treasure’, or ‘my chosen,
golden treasure, most dearest angel’.29
29 Cf. the collections StAM 4a49, 10 and 49,11: “hertzallerliebster und auserwehlter herr
bruder,” “hochgeehrtes außerwehltes mein im hertzen allerliebstes,” “liebster Schatz,” “mein
allerliebster Schatz,” “mein auserwählter, güldener Schatz, allerliebster engel”.
262 Ruppel
In addition to the sprawling news of the court and reports of visits or note-
worthy events, which also appear in the Hesse-Kassel letters, descriptions of
mental states, and thus also emotions, occupy a surprising amount of space in
the sisters’ correspondence with their brother – and especially that of Charlotte.
Love for their brother, complaints of his absence, joy and grief are often relayed.
Again and again, the sisters demand that their brother not forget them, and
they repeatedly assert how difficult the parting was after his visit. For example,
Emilie of Hesse-Kassel wrote to the brother: “If you could only half imagine
how I have felt since I last left you, you would surely sympathize with me, since
truthfully I wander like a poor sheep without a shepherd, and I realize how lost
I am.”30 In a similar way, they would express joy at receiving a letter. The words
chosen to complain of the brother’s absence remind of the romantic semantic
of desire: “Thus I cannot help but to most humbly kiss your hand in order to
see if anyone is still there who would spare a moment to think of me.”31 Similar
assertions of love and longing occur in several variations. It was in this verbose
manner that they lamented the death of their mother in 1651.
Charlotte also candidly reports to her brother about her marriage problems
and complains to him by the page about her sufferings. Over the course of her
almost weekly letters, a long story slowly emerges – it covers the jealousy and
foul temper of her spouse, it shows Charlotte’s anger concerning his relation-
ship with his younger sister Sophie, and it describes the letters of apology
bouncing back and forth inside the court after her husband became enraged
over rumors that Charlotte had more or less spread of him having an incestu-
ous relationship with his sister. The whole course of the quarrels at court
becomes comprehensible through the letters to the brother. Wilhelm appears
almost as the addressee of a diary. He is the central emotional contact person
for Charlotte; it is upon him that she attaches her hope of one day being able
to move back to Hesse-Kassel – which later did indeed occur.
As mentioned, however, within the larger set of sibling correspondence, the
letters from the sisters from Hesse-Kassel to their brother represent an excep-
tion; emotional outbursts were not the norm. Samples from other collections
30 Emilie of Hesse-Kassel to her brother Wilhelm, December 15, 1654; StAM 4a49,10: “Wan
E.L. sich halb einbilden köndten daß so ich entpfinde seider dem E.L. ich quittirt habe, so
würden sie gar gewiß ein mittleiden mitt mihr haben, dan ich gehe mitt warheit wie ein arm
schaff so keinen hirten hatt undt deucht mich wohl ich bin verlohren […].”
31 Emilie of Hesse-Kassel to Wilhelm, March 24, 1647; StAM 4a49,10; also in Erwin
Bettenhäuser, ed., Familienbriefe der Landgräfin Amalie von Hessen-Kassel und ihrer
Kinder (Marburg: 1994), 146f.: “So kan ich doch nicht lassen EL. demütigst die hendt zu küs-
sen, umb zu sehen, ob noch jemandt übrig welcher so ein augenblickgen an mich gedencken
woltte.”
of sibling letters from aristocratic families generally display a distanced and

often formulaic mode of speech. A typical salutation would be: ‘Illustrious
Prince, kind and dear brother’ or ‘Highly honored, kind and much adored sis-
ter’. Nevertheless, emotional expression can still be found in the other sibling
correspondence, even if it is not so bold. Expression of emotion is indeed not
entirely foreign to the courtly society, but aside from the Hesse-Kassel excep-
tion, it is still far removed from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cult of
emotions. In many cases, only small departures from prescribed letter formu-
las, for example, will suggest a special bond between two siblings. The sudden
appearance of short, affectionate addresses within the correspondence of a
sibling group often hint at a particularly friendly relationship. Particularly
close relationships between two siblings, however, can also often be inferred
through the relationship of actions and through context.
Nevertheless, even in the larger context of correspondence, siblings do regu-
larly speak explicitly about trust and friendship or express other emotional
experiences, such as grieving over a death. The fact that this occurs partially in
the widely fixed phrases of the baroque letter culture should not lead us to
conclude that these emotions were not genuine. After all, the effusive displays
of feelings in the bourgeois letters of the eighteenth century are likely to be just
as conventionally coded as the reserve of the courtly correspondence culture.
How far linguistic expression and experience determine or influence one
another and how far the experience of emotion is socially learned and shaped
by the cultural milieu cannot be determined here and is potentially a field for
psychological research focused on history. All that remains for the modern
observer to investigate are the expressions of emotion, along with the uncer-
tainty that the experience of emotion is possibly subject to historical change.32
Therefore, here we can only proceed from an approximation which uses the
content of today’s language in order to approach terms that were expressed in
another epoch, in another linguistic and cultural milieu.
Thus, even if emotions are expressed – be it directly, as in the letters from
Hesse-Kassel, or be it more reserved, as in most of the other correspondence
between siblings – another difference between the later, bourgeois cult of
correspondence can still be seen: self-reflection occurs extremely rarely in
the aristocratic siblings’ letters. It is certainly possible to find expressions of
emotions throughout, but searching for reflections about particular sensitivi-
ties is futile. Longer passages about a personal mental state or individual life
situation simply do not exist. Psychologizing the self appears to be a later
32 On this topic, see the discussion in: Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Emotion and
Social Change. Toward A New Psychohistory (New York and London: 1988).
264 Ruppel
development. In contrast, reflecting on the wellbeing of the family as a whole

occurs more frequently, such as when a sibling recounts news from another
sibling or reports on the worries over the children; yet, the political and famil-
ial always flow into each other. The self-reflecting as subject, however, as an
individual and singular being, as “I,” and the distanced consideration of the self
exist only rudimentarily in the context of a courtly dynasty.
Strangely, the lack of the “I” reflection correlates with the linguistic conven-
tion of speaking of “we.” For instance, the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg sel-
dom write “I have…” but instead write to their brothers using “We have…” which
emphasizes their rank. The Brandenburg siblings use this in a similar way,
while those in the Palatinate and Hesse-Kassel use it rarely, i.e., in their early
letters. Certainly, on one side, this has to do with the change in correspondence
trends, but it also raises the questions to what degree this change could also be
determined through a shifting conception of person and if the plural form
does not, in fact, suggest that the nobility were actually located and defined in
their collective. Research has, in any case, revealed justifiably the ideas of indi-
vidual and person as moments underlying this change. A person’s conception
of herself, her view of herself within culturally varying references, changes
over the centuries, and from a historical perspective, the modern “individual”
no longer represents a time-spanning constant.33 As we learn from Norbert
Elias the conception of an “I” as a singular being and as an autonomous indi-
vidual, is in itself nothing other than the phenomenon of a particular societal
figuration.34
In contrast to the bourgeois, sentimental letters of the eighteenth century,
courtly letters are, indeed, hardly a medium of an individualized “I,” even if
they are moving in that direction. Instead, the courtly letters reflect much
more the dynastic bonds of the correspondent and his identity as a part of the
dynasty. So, as little of the state of the “I” is considered, so much more do the
familial-dynastic connections shift to the center. The surrounding field of
events – deaths, births, marriages or relationships with family members in
33 To this, see, for instance, Richard van Dülmen, Die Entdeckung des Individuums 1500–1800
(Europäische Geschichte), (Frankfurt a.M.: 1997). A synoptic discussion can also be found
in Fabian Brändle et al., “Texte zwischen Erfahrung und Diskurs. Probleme der
Selbstzeugnisforschung,” in Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich. Europäische
and Patrice Veit (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol 9), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna:
2002), 3–31.
34 See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. 1: The History of Manners (Oxford and
Cambridge, ma: 1994), especially 206 ff.
general – is of significant interest for the position of the actual person, for
her rank, status and prestige. In short, the decisive element of the aristocratic
sibling letters is the relation to the dynasty.
If we follow Richard Shweder and Edmund Bournes’s differentiation in
demarcating “egocentric societies” from “sociocentric societies,”35 we must
classify the courtly conception of person among the latter, since a kind of
“familial self” exists and the definition of the particular person runs along lines
of birth family, blood affiliation and dynasty membership.
There is also an additional aspect: as modern conceptions of self-referential
subjectivity go hand in hand with ideas of privateness, here, collective think-
ing correlates with the quasi public nature of acting – as it does in the quasi
publicity of a correspondence system based on forwarding, reading aloud in
groups and transmitting information. To a certain degree, the aristocrats thus
always stand in the open, and the private sphere is only minimally developed
in a figuration that so closely connects family with politics. Nevertheless, it still
remains the case that modern elements also exist rudimentarily. Thus, the con-
cern here is not so much about establishing the existence or non-existence of
these elements, but rather about identifying the long-term shift in emphasis.
Conclusion
The letters of aristocratic siblings appear in the most varied forms – with and
without ceremony, formulaic and distanced, and highly emotional to the point
of theatrical – as seen, for instance, in the correspondence among the siblings
of Hesse-Kassel, which, however, must be remembered as being exceptional.
The letters also have extremely varied content – from the factual coverage of
wars to philosophical reflections and emotional outbursts. Moreover, these dif-
ferent types of content can also coexist in one letter – familial, emotional and
political are not mutually exclusive.
The aristocratic letter of the seventeenth century thus encompasses a
wider spectrum of functions than the bourgeois private letter of the eighteenth
century: it equally combines social, political, informational-technological
and emotional functions. It is a witness to the not-yet completed separation
of private sphere from public sphere; the high aristocracy were per se in
the public – they were “le monde” – in those areas of life that, while today
35 Richard A. Shweder and Edmund J. Bourne, “Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-
culturally?,” in Culture Theory. Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion, ed. Richard A. Shweder
and Robert A. LeVine (Cambridge: 1984), 158–199.
266 Ruppel
considered private, as Elias has shown, were at that time integrated into living
and acting at court.36
The letter’s emotional content was not an entirely new invention of
the eighteenth century, but the “private letter” would be later reduced to this
element. During the process of nationalization and impersonalization of the
structures of power and authority, everything concerning societal, public and
political life was transferred to institutional writings. As governing based on
personal relationships and kinship slowly came to an end, not only did person
and office become distinct, but the areas which relied on the medium of the
letter were also affected: the private letter became separate from the business
letter. In the eighteenth-century shift to “private letter,” we likely need to recog-
nize a loss, narrowing or shifting of the letter’s function, and thus a differentia-
tion in the medium itself, a differentiation that has to do, not lastly, with the
dismantling of the societal organization based on personal connections. In
this, the private letter achieved its level of self-reflection.
The sibling letters from the seventeenth century, however, avoid this sepa-
ration of “private” and “public.” They must do this, in fact, because political
culture was constructed on the phenomenon of family and kinship, an ele-
ment that, in modern times, has been exclusively relegated to the private
sphere, or rather has simply advanced into the private sphere. The early
modern aristocratic letter cannot be classified exclusively as political or
commercial correspondence nor as letters of friendship nor as familial writ-
ings. It is all these things at once. As a witness from a time of personal forms
of governing, it is a witness both to political negotiations as well as to ami-
cable or familial relationships.
However, the courtly letter is not, or is at least only rudimentarily, a medium
of self-reflection and self-observation.
If we read courtly letters as self-narratives, we can identify the letter’s lack of
reflection over an individualized, self-observing and commenting self. It is,
moreover, precisely this widespread aspect that may enable us to set out for
new territory in the history of conceptions of the person. With its particular
characteristics and specific, ceremonial and formulaic language, the courtly
letter exhibits functional emphases, which are decidely different from the
bourgeois private letter of the eighteenth century. The courtly letter is rooted
in collective practices and used to maintain connections, as well as to affirm
prestige and collective dynastic identity within the courtly networks. As such,
it offers insights onto a specific concept of the person. Perhaps self narrative
research could discover here forms of pre-modern living and thinking whose
otherness is worth discovering.
36 Norbert Elias, The Court Society, transl. Edmund Jephcott (New York: 1983).
Scrabbling Mice, a Visit from Hades
and Thoughts of Death
The Autobiography of Lucas Forcart-Respinger, a Merchant
from Basel (1789–1869)1
Imagine my feelings and my inclination on this 37th birthday – I had lost

my health, was suffering, frail and weak, my fortune was lost, my wife and
two children passed away before me, the weak one. Thus I was like Job,
sitting on ruins and eating my own tears, but I could also say: the lord
has given this, the lord has taken it, let the name of the lord be
praised!2
With these words, Lucas Forcart-Respinger described the state of his feelings
after the deaths of his wife and two sons, which had occurred within two years
of each other. This passage leads directly to the topic of this article: death and
dying.3
This article will not only investigate representations of death and dying
in the text, but, in following arguments advanced by Silvia Serena Tschopp,4
it will also examine the dominant religious modes of understanding death
1 This article was translated by Hannah Elmer. It is based on a paper I read at the workshop
“Frühneuzeitliche Selbstzeugnisse: Kategorien, Gattungsgrenzen, aktuelle Forschung” at the
University of Basel (August 29–30, 2005). It is a workshop account of my dissertation, which
has been published in the meantime: Patricia Zihlmann-Märki, “Gott gebe das wir das Liebe
Engelein mit Freüden wieder sehen Mögen.” Eine kulturgeschichtliche Untersuchung des Todes
in Basel 1750–1850 (Zurich: 2010). I would like to thank Rebekka Schifferle for her valuable
comments and for editing the original German text.
2 Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt (henceforth: StABS) Privatarchiv (pa) 678 C 1, o. T. (Autobiography
of Lucas Forcart-Respinger), 177–178: “Denke man sich meine Gefühle und Beugung an die-
sem 37[.] Geburtstage, − die eigene Gesundheit hatte ich verloren, war leidend gebrechlich
schwächlich, mein Vermögen war dahin und verloren, Frau und zwei Kinder waren mir dem
Schwachen vorangegangen so dass ich wie Hiob auf den Trümmern sass und ass die Tränen
in mich hinein, konnte aber auch dabei sagen: Der her [!] hats gegeben, der herr hats
genommen der Name des herrn sei gelobet!”
3 There is a wide range of works on the topic. Among others, in the 1970s French historians
investigated collective notions related to death. See Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death
(New York: 1981; original: 1978). Critiques of this study cannot be dealt with here.
4 In following Roger Chartier, Tschopp has made the case for perception (Wahrnehmung) to
be included in cultural-historical research. Cf. Silvia Serena Tschopp, “Das Unsichtbare

268 Zihlmann-Märki
and dying, since these may have influenced basic perceptions and thus the
formation of the text. In what follows, I shall first introduce the author and
autobiography, then I shall outline how death and dying are thematized in
Lucas Forcart-Respinger’s autobiography. I will first investigate how the
author describes the deaths of others and the meanings these have for
him. I will also look at the author’s reflections upon his own death. In
third place, I shall search the text for representations of the author’s con-
ceptions of the hereafter. Fourth, I shall address the question whether
Forcart-Respinger’s actions, language and writing were still guided by the
artes moriendi, the art of dying, which was a practice originating in the
Middle Ages for preparing both the dying and living for the deathbed and
strengthening them against the devil’s temptations that would take place
there. More specifically, I will try to find out whether the influence of the
artes moriendi consequently helped create a mode of perception that
structured the representations of death and dying.5 I shall conclude by
questioning the author’s self-construction and motivations for writing
and by presenting different possibilities for interpreting the text – for
sources are always an “ambiguous construct of actual experience”; they
begreifen. Die Rekonstruktion historischer Wahrnehmungsmodi als methodische

Herausforderung der Kulturgeschichte,” Historische Zeitschrift 280 (2005), 39–81. Tschopp
circumscribes her object as “the modes of human perception due to cognitive, affective and
ethical dispositions,” an “active and conscious act of knowledge constitution and interpreta-
tion of reality.” Tschopp, Das Unsichtbare, 45. I have taken “modes of perception [Wahrneh
mungsmodi]” to mean different kinds of perceptions that are created situationally through
conceptions, feelings and norms. I understand conceptions [Vorstellungen] to be (non-static)
ways of thinking, which can be, for example, influenced by lifestyle and personal factors
but also by perceptions. Consequently, perceptions and conceptions interact with one
another. The question of acquisition and reception (for example, with regard to Lucas
Forcart-Respinger’s autobiography), terms that are equally important for Tschopp, cannot be
addressed in this article.
5 Sebastian Leutert, Geschichten vom Tod. Tod und Sterben in Deutschschweizer und ober-
deutschen Selbstzeugnissen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Basler Beiträge zur Geschichts
wissenschaft, vol. 178), (Basel: 2007), 87 and 159–220. Leutert has established that the
ars moriendi − tradition still played an important role in sixteenth and seventeenth-century
self-narratives in the description of deaths and their qualification as good or bad deaths.
Cf. Lucinda Becker, “The Absent Body. Representations of Dying Early Modern Women in a
Selection of Seventeenth-Century Diaries,” Women’s Writing 8 (2001), 251–262, especially 258.
The assessment of death could also be based on other criteria, for example, friendship, kin-
ship, lifestyle or burial. Cf. Leutert, Geschichten, 87–117 and 159–185; and Lucinda McCray
Beier, “The Good Death in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Death, Ritual, and Bereavement,
ed. Ralph Houlbrooke (London and New York: 1989), 43–61, here 60.
Scrabbling Mice 269
not only represent modes of perception and conception, but they can also
generate these.6
The Writer and his Work
Born in 1789, Lucas Forcart descended from two very prominent and affluent
families in Basel.7 His parents had died by the time he was ten, and this loss
would initiate the social decline of the family, particularly as the guardian
entrusted to the children embezzled part of their father’s fortune. Lucas
Forcart completed a business apprenticeship in Ouchy near Lausanne, and
between 1811 and 1813 he was the postmaster of a shipping company in Brig.
Once more in Basel, he landed in business and financial difficulties. He was
only able to avoid a threatening bankruptcy through the help of his relatives.
In 1822, he began to work as a representative [Prokurist] for the flourishing silk
ribbon company of one of his relatives, but his financial situation only relaxed
in 1860 when he received a bequest.
In 1818 he married Anna Maria Respinger, a woman from a prosperous fam-
ily. The couple had three children. Anna Maria Forcart-Respinger died in 1823,
shortly followed by the two sons Dietrich and Rudolf. From this point, Lucas
Forcart-Respinger lived alone with his daughter Marie,8 who later married the
merchant and future counciller Johann Jacob Imhof (1815–1900). In 1828,
Forcart-Respinger moved into a house, which he later bought, with his sister
Susanne Streckeisen, who was likewise widowed. In his autobiography, Forcart-
Respinger looked back happily on this time during which he met with friends
and relatives for church services and Bible study. The writer interacted
with many associates of the late-Pietist circles of Basel,9 and he visited the
“hours of edification” [Erbauungsstunden] of the minister Nikolaus von Brunn
(1766–1849), the uncle of his deceased wife. Von Brunn was a member of the
Basler Brüdersozietät [Basel Society of Brothers], the Christentumsgesellschaft
[Society for Christianity] and the Missionsgesellschaft [Mission Society], but
6 Tschopp, Das Unsichtbare, 51 and 78.

7 The comments on the biography are based on Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography.
8 According to the baptismal register, her name was Maria; cf. StABS pa 888a P 2. 1 (1), Souvenir-
Album J.J. Imhof, p. 9; Forcart-Respinger, however, calls her Marie in the text and in most of
his letters.
9 Several letters to Christian Friedrich Spittler (1782–1867), secretary of the Chris
tentumsgesellschaft in Basel, are extant; cf. StABS pa 653 V. 9, Lucas Forcart-Respinger,
1826–1851. Wilhelm Köllner (1760–1835) – an “awakened” pastor from Baden – was also among
his friends; cf. Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, e.g.,208–210.
270 Zihlmann-Märki
nonetheless remained the pastor of St. Martin’s in Basel until 1845; this was not
atypical for the time, since both the enlightened and Pietist circles were inte-
grated in Basel’s church.10 Forcart-Respinger was also a member of the
Gesellschaft zur Verbreitung des Christentums unter den Juden, a society founded
between 1820 and 1830 as a splinter group of the Christentumsgesellschaft.11
During this time, he also visited a “euphoric” [schwärmerisch] congregation,
which performed magnetic practices and made prophesies of the last days.12
In October 1869, Lucas Forcart-Respinger died in Basel at the age of eighty.
In addition to his autobiography, several shorter texts and letters written in his
hand as well as other documents have survived, allowing a close contextualiza-
tion. The autobiography of Forcart-Respinger is preserved at the Basel
Staatsarchiv in a typed copy comprising 250 pages. Some short excerpts have
been published.13 In this detailed autobiography, Forcart-Respinger describes
all of the important stages of his life; in some cases, these appear under
subheadings. In addition to familial events – births, deaths and illnesses – he
discusses political incidents and wars. With only a few exceptions, the autobi-
ography is organized chronologically. Through several clues given by the
author, readers can determine that he began the work in 1842. Precise dates,
however, are frequently lacking from the event descriptions; instead we
find such expressions as after a few weeks or a little while later. This likely
reflects how the piece was composed. The author wrote the larger part of his
autobiography as one continuous narration and probably made entries from
earlier notes.14 While the writer maintains a retrospective narration across
10 See Thomas K. Kuhn, Religion und neuzeitliche Gesellschaft. Studien zum sozialen und
diakonischen Handeln in Pietismus, Aufklärung und Erweckungsbewegung (Tübingen: 2003),
297–300; Sara Janner, “Judenmission in Basel in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Ein
Forschungsbericht,” Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde 104 (2004), 31–81,
especially 45–46. Kuhn sees von Brunn as the “most influential […] theologian of ‘Pious Basel’
in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.” Kuhn, Neuzeitliche Gesellschaft, 297.
11 Cf. also Janner, Judenmission, especially 57–63.
12 Ernst Staehelin, “Der Basler Seidenbandweber Johann Jakob Wirz als Hellseher und
Gründer der Nazarenergemeine,” Basler Stadtbuch (1966), 50–77; Forcart-Respinger,
Autobiography, 188–207, especially 197. Excerpts have appeared in Emil Schaub, “Eine
Separatistengemeinde in Basel. Bilder aus dem religiösen Leben Basels ums Jahr 1830,”
Basler Jahrbuch (1909), 217–261.
13 Schaub, Separatistengemeinde, and idem, “Aus den Erinnerungen eines Postmeisters am
Simplon,” Basler Jahrbuch (1908), 216–245; as well as Christlicher Volksbote aus Basel 79
(1911), 275–277; 284–286; 292–294 and 300–302.
14 Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 169: “Aus den sehr unvollkommenen Notizen jener Zeit
(1824),” and StABS pa 678 C 1, regarding the recording by L. Forcart-Respinger (1864), f. lv.
Scrabbling Mice 271
240 pages, he shifts to more of a diary narrative for the last 10 to 12 pages – these
contain one to two entries per year, some of which note a lag-time of a few days
or months. These pages describe the years from 1852 to 1868. Following Forcart-
Respinger’s final entry, his descendants describe his death. The autobiography
was intended for his daughter and her family, as indicated by his occasional
addresses to Marie or the children. In a few parts of the text, he addresses his
brother-in-law who had killed himself. Frequently Forcart-Respinger turns to
God and Jesus.15
The text poses several questions that cannot truly be answered without
the original copy, which is missing. For example, the original could help
determine if the change in narrative form actually occurred in the text or if
it was a product of the copyist combining different writings of Forcart-
Respinger. Furthermore, at the beginning of the autobiography there is the
phrase “1. Buch. Imanuel.”16 How should we understand this? Is it a refer-
ence to the Gospel of Matthew – the first book in the New Testament – in
which Imanuel is given as a name of Christ? Or does the phrase 1st Book
indicate the division of the text into chapters, which either the author or
the copyist did not continue throughout the rest of the work? In my opin-
ion, in invoking Imanuel, the writer places a religious caption before the
succeeding text and thereby suggests a possibility for interpreting the
work. This conjecture can be supported by the author’s remarks about rev-
olutionary incidents in his birth year (1789) when people had outrageously
put the existence of God into question. By writing Imanuel – which means
God is with us17 – the author possibly sought to distance himself from those
‘godless’ revolutionary times and to indicate that he received God’s grace.
As we shall see later, this corresponds to the image that the writer suggests
of himself.
Death and Dying to Lucas Forcart-Respinger
For my dissertation project, I have investigated approximately 60 self-narratives.

In comparison to the other sources, Lucas Forcart-Respinger’s autobiography
assumes a special position when it comes to thematizing death and dying.
15 Cf. Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 6 and 100 (children and Marie), 107–108 (brother-in-
law), 25–26, 86, 109 and 247–248 (God and Jesus).
16 Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 1.
17 Cf. Hans Schmoldt, “Immanuel,” in Reclams Bibellexikon, ed. Hans Schmoldt et al., 6th edn
(Stuttgart: 2000), 227.
272 Zihlmann-Märki
The length and the genre of autobiography18 may have played a role in this, but
they are hardly the only factors. I propose instead that death and dying assumed
prominent positions in the author’s world, both actual and perceived. Not only
is the presence of death in the text beyond the ordinary, but so is the fact that
its most diverse aspects are brought before the reader’s eyes, aspects that in the
other self-narratives are only briefly handled, if addressed at all. Among these
aspects are the appearance of ghosts, the debate about apparent death, and
the anatomical dissection of dead bodies.19 The author’s strong yearning for
death, or more cautiously formulated, his orientation to the afterlife, is also
exceptional.
others die…
Lucas Forcart-Respinger’s autobiography thematizes about 40 incidents of

death of the author’s relatives and acquaintances. The descriptions of the
deaths differ from one another both in length and in the surrounding circum-
stances reported.20
In general, the deaths of the nearest relatives and closest acquaintances are
described in greater length21 and in more detail than those of more distant
relatives. Forcart-Respinger also dedicates significant space to the death of his
friend Heusler, who died from a fièvre maligne, the same illness that Forcart
was supposed to have suffered from. His friend was also then dissected. Writing
about Heusler’s death, moreover, enabled the author to create suspense when
reviewing his own illness. A stylistic reason for the longer description could
thus be imagined here, particularly since the parallels between the two cases
are not limited to the sickness: while the writer lay “in a death-like state,” he
heard the doctor speak of the (posthumous) dissection of his body.22
The writer uses the most detail and the most space to describe the death of
his wife.23 Anna Maria Forcart-Respinger became weaker and weaker and
18 This cannot be discussed in detail here. See, for example, Günter Niggl, Die Autobiographie.
Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung, 2nd edn (Darmstadt: 1998).
19 For the topicality of anatomy and apparent death in the seventeenth to nineteenth cen-
turies, cf., for example, Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 361–369 and 396–497.
20 I am counting not only the descriptions of actual death but also remarks on causes, buri-
als, consequences, emotions, etc.
21 The length of the death descriptions varies between only a few lines and several pages.
22 Cf. Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 23–27; quotation: 24.
23 For the following, cf. Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 146–160.
Scrabbling Mice 273
suffered hemorrhages more and more frequently over the course of several
months. As her condition worsened, the doctors turned to a torturous treat-
ment of moxa. On the day of her death, Anna Maria appeared the opposite of
her previous condition as her mental and physical states immediately
improved: she had no more pain, felt strong, wanted to go to the window and
changed into fresh clothes. She bid farewell to her relatives and thanked her
husband for everything. While previously the thought of separating from her
family was hardly bearable, she now only asserted her joy at the approaching
nearness to God. Her uncle, Pastor Nikolaus von Brunn, said a prayer, and
finally she “exhaled.”24 Forcart-Respinger had sensed for a long time that she
would die. This was finally confirmed to him by “the extremely conspicuous
noise and scrabbling of mice.”25 Even though he was prepared for the event, it
still pained him, especially because he had lost his only friend and his children
were deprived of their mother. The description of his wife’s death contains
numerous elements that also appear in other deaths described by Forcart-
Respinger. In more than half of the cases, the writer names the cause of death26
and provides information about the dead person.27 We find remarks about the
context of death almost everywhere, above all the year of death and the date.
Place of death and witnesses to the dying, however, are seldom mentioned.
Even though he did not personally experience each of them, Forcart-Respinger
still more or less precisely sketches the death scenes of eight cases.28 A little
fewer than half of the descriptions comment on the consequences of the
death,29 the writer’s emotions and the death rituals.
Sometimes the writer explicitly names the feelings triggered by the deaths,
while at other points we can sense his reactions. When he writes about the
24 Ibid., 158: “atmete aus.”

25 Ibid., 155: “ein über die Massen auffallendes Geräusch und Geprassel von Mäusen.”
26 Frequently, the information concerning the cause of death or symptoms of illness were
very imprecise; in about half of the causes of death he generally names an illness as fatal.
27 For example, age, occupation, offices, familial and marital status or character attributes.
28 It is not surprising that his description of the circumstances surrounding Köllner’s death do not
correspond to those by his descendants. Cf. Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 208; and
Mittheilungen aus dem Leben des theuren Vaters Carl Köllner: Für die Familie und Freunde des-
selben als Manuscript gedruckt, 2nd edn (Kornthal: 1856), 101–102. Gudrun Piller has established
that in many self-narratives the story of illness ending in death may contain contradictions.
Piller argues that the reason for this is the desire of the writers to describe a good death.
Cf. Gudrun Piller, Private Körper. Spuren des Leibes in Selbstzeugnissen des 18. Jahrhunderts
(Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 17), (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2007), 230–234.
29 For example, the remarriage of remaining partners, inheritance, business management
and poverty.
274 Zihlmann-Märki
death of a near relative, Forcart-Respinger makes his deep grief clear. After the
deaths of his wife and sons, he compares himself to Job, as can be seen in the
passage cited at the beginning of this article.30 Following the death of his sister,
with whom he lived for many years, he felt “desolate and empty.”31 He found
consolation in the fact that his wife and his siblings were spared painful
experiences by their deaths: his wife did not have to witness the threatening
bankruptcy and his brother – governor [Statthalter] in Sissach (Basel
Landschaft) – was spared from expulsion during the chaotic division of the old
Canton of Basel (1830–1833). Forcart-Respinger reacted with dismay and
surprise to unexpected deaths, for example, that of his friend Heusler or the
suicide of his brother-in-law.32 In certain cases, the writer was relieved by a
death; for instance, when a relative for whom he had done many administra-
tive tasks over the years left him a large bequest, his livelihood was finally
secured.33 “A large burden was buried” for him alongside his mother-in-law.34
The writer had never really liked her because of her dissolute lifestyle, but his
aversion increased after she had wanted to poison herself and afterwards
appeared to be possessed by evil spirits.
The description of the circumstances of his wife’s death illustrates several
rituals concerning dying. The relatives surrounding the dying woman suggest
the traditional deathbed scene.35 After the death, “the difficult time of prepar-
ing the funeral and the visits of condolence” descended.36 The death portrait
that the author had made of the dead wife could still bring him back to “those
30 Several times he notes the saying “Aus sechs Trübsalen will ich Dich erretten und in
der siebenten soll dir kein Leid geschehen [I shall rescue you from six afflictions and in
the seventh, no harm shall come to you]” as if it could be the motto for his life in those
times. Cf., for example, Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 161. This saying is taken from
Job 5:19.
32 Cf. ibid., 23 and 103.
33 Cf. ibid., 243.
34 Ibid., 230.
35 When his father died, the writer’s mother and a few of his aunts gathered around the
deathbed. An aunt showed him his father’s corpse. Was this a wake? Cf. Forcart-Respinger,
Autobiography, 11. The showing or viewing of the corpse is also explicitly mentioned in
other Basel self-narratives, for example, in Johannes DeBary-Respinger (1771–1836), StABS
pa 751 A 12 e, Notanda, f. 6v, in Johannes Otteney (1767–1839), ub bs hsa vb Mscr. P 34,
Mein Leben und Schicksahle; Für Freünde des Guten, 18; or “Ein Lehrerleben vor 100 Jahren.
Aufzeichnungen des Basler Armenschullehrers Matthias Buser (1788–1848),” ed. Wilhelm
Kradolfer, Basler Jahrbuch (1930), 48–112, especially 64.
Scrabbling Mice 275
days of hot distress” decades later.37 This painting was thus a medium of con-
templation, similar to the epitaph that Forcart-Respinger and other relatives
had endowed for his brother.38 The writer could express together both the
depth and the lasting nature of his pain regarding his spouse’s passing.
For a quarter of the deaths, the writer explicitly mentions the time and place
of the funeral and sometimes even mentions the exact location of the grave,
such as the family tomb in which his wife and children were placed.39 His
meaning when he claims that this grave was something homey should be
examined more closely:
On May 9th [1825], I guided this dear child [Rudolf] as well to the tomb.
The two coffins of my wife and Dietrich were taken out so that this one
could be placed among the others – astounded, I saw how first the two
children and then the mother’s coffin were lowered, and thoughts of the
mother’s resurrection with the children filled me with the desire also to
be delivered to them soon. A family tomb has, after all, something quite
homey about it, if one knows that those lowered in the ground sleep in
the Lord, which was the case here. Pastor v. Brunn, as godfather to Rudolf,
said a prayer at the grave on the words: the kingdom of heaven is theirs.40
The text presents to the reader two meanings for the term homey; on the one
hand, the writer expresses his wish for a familial reunion in the heavenly after-
life. In my opinion, the family tomb was the place for Forcart-Respinger where
members of the entire family would be reunited, at least physically, after death.
This physical reunion would precede the spiritual one in the beyond. The fam-
ily tomb was thus homey in the sense that the family members, separated by
death, would find each other again in their new home – the grave. On the other
hand, the writer was convinced that the three would be resurrected. Because
they would wait in the grave for the day of resurrection, the grave became the
place of departure for the crossing over into the heavenly beyond. Homey – in
the second meaning of this passage – could indicate the return to the true
37 Ibid., 158.
38 Cf. ibid., 193. In a letter to his daughter, he mentions that her hair and that of his wife is in
the enclosure. Cf. StABS pa 678 C 1, Letter to Marie (November 4, 1836), f. 1v. Is this also
about an object of contemplation? Or was it simply a lock from her childhood, without
any further meaning? In any case, people often used to make so-called Haarbilder from
the hair of the deceased, which they would then hang in the living room. Numerous
Haarbilder can be found, for example, in the collection of the Hörnli cemetery in Basel.
39 Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 158 and 222.
40 Ibid., 178. (Emphasis in original is achieved through letterspacing).
276 Zihlmann-Märki
home of the believers, that is, to the realm of heaven. The idea existed in
Protestant theology that the dead would rise (in body) on the day of the Last
Judgment. In this sense, the passage also transmits the belief that Forcart-
Respinger would rise along with his wife and children from the family tomb on
the day of the Resurrection and they would make their way to the Last Judgment
together. It must have been devastating for the writer when, in the early 1860s,
the tombs in the minster cloister were dismantled; the mentioned family tomb
was among these.41 In any event, a physical reunification in the grave with
those gone ahead was now no longer possible.
Lucas Forcart-Respinger described the ceremonies on the occasion of his
wife’s funeral. After a mass in the church square, the pastor held a funeral
address. When they opened the family grave, the remains of the writer’s ances-
tors buried there came to light; old women broke off teeth from them for rem-
edies.42 As his son Rudolf was buried, his godfather said a prayer at the grave.43
The same was also done for a dead friend, Köllner; at his grave a clergyman and
a son of the deceased said prayers. Because all of the villagers wanted to see
Köllner’s body once more, his coffin remained open until the procession to the
churchyard. Finally, the burial was accompanied by singing.44 In contrast, his
friend Heusler was brought by “a very poor, covered hearse” to the cemetery,
and the entourage went to the grave, where neither a clergyman awaited nor a
prayer was said. In Forcart-Respinger’s eyes, this was not a proper burial.
Instead, Heusler was “dumped in a hole” – “the coffin was placed on a board,
one end of which was lifted into the air and the coffin smashed into the grave
below.”45 Here, the rough handling of Heusler’s body, begun with dissection,
continued.46
41 Cf., for example, StABS pa 678 A 4 with the declaration for grave no. 17 in the church clois-
ter […]. (February 6, 1862). It was against this backdrop that in December 1861 the follow-
ing text emerged in which the writer describes the appearance and location of the grave
as well as the names of those buried within: StABS pa 678 C 1, Address at a tomb in the
church cloister.
43 Cf. ibid., 178.
44 Cf. ibid., 209.
45 Cf. ibid., 23: “sehr armselig bespannten Leichenwagen”; “verlocht”; “der Sarg wurde auf ein
Brett gelegt, dasselbe an einem Ende in die Höhe gehoben und der Sarg schmetterte in die
Grube hinunter.”
46 Cf. ibid., 23: “The same [the corpse] was lying there, naked, headless, chest opened, across
a board that was placed on two stools. His head was in a bowl, likewise opened, entrails in
another bowl, and I was seized by a shudder.” It is interesting that Forcart-Respinger’s
house was directly next to the building of the Anatomical Institute; cf. StABS Historisches
Scrabbling Mice 277
The writer also described precisely how his brother-in-law, who had shot
himself outside of the confederate area in 1819, was buried.
Above all, the brother-in-law’s body now had to be buried, and after we
made the necessary arrangements in St. Louis [a town in Alsace], at mid-
night on May 26th, the corpse was brought on a cart before the stone gate.
Here it was placed on a bier and carried by the appointed men, under the
glow of two lanterns and accompanied by the Obersthelfer B., the rela-
tives and several friends, behind the circular wall and through to the cem-
etery of St. Elisabeth. The corpse was buried in the corner for suicides
after the pastor, who had been a friend of the house, said a moving
prayer.47
The night burial of the deceased in the corner for suicides and the preceding
transport outside of the walls were certainly characteristics of an abnormal
funeral.48 In fact, it was first in 1827 that the discrimination in the burial of
suicides was eased in Basel; from then on if the deceased had suffered from a
mental illness, a pastor – without vestments however – was allowed to accom-
pany the funeral procession to the grave. Nevertheless, he was not allowed to
say a prayer, and the burial was to take place either early in the morning or late
in the evening.49 Yet, Forcart-Respinger mentions that the pastor, who had
Grundbuch der Stadt Basel, Zettelkasten, Rheinsprung, Nr. 1515 (5) and Nr. 1508 (7). Did
this inspire his imagination? Or did he observe an autopsy?
47 Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 103: “Vor allem musste nun die Leiche des Schwagers
beerdigt werden, und nachdem wir in St. Louis die nötigen Anstalten getroffen, wurde am
26. Mai um Mitternacht die Leiche auf einem Wagen vor das Steinentor gebracht, dort auf
eine Bahre gelegt und von bestellten Männern, unter dem Schein zweier Laternen und in
Begleitung des damaligen Obersthelfers B., der Verwandten und etlichen Freunden,
hinter der Ringmauer durch nach dem St. Elisabeth Gottesacker getragen, wo die Leiche
in der Ecke der Selbstmörder bestattet wurde, nachdem der Pfarrer, der ein Freund des
Hauses war, ein rührendes Gebet gehalten.”
48 See, for example, Ursula Baumann, Das Recht auf den eigenen Tod: Die Geschichte des
Suizids vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert in Deutschland (Weimar: 2001), 15–25. In Basel, dur-
ing the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the corpses of suicides would be placed in
casks and thrown into the Rhine or would be buried under the gallows. However, the
melancholy or similarly afflicted who committed suicide but had upheld a Christian life-
style were often buried in churchyards. Cf. Peter Ochs, Geschichte der Stadt und Landschaft
Basel (Basel: 1821), vol. 6: 487; 762–763; 765; 767, vol. 7: 346–347.
49 StABS Kirchenarchiv K 2, Beschluss der Stadtgeistlichkeit (August, 23, 1827). The discrimi-
natory burial for suicides was first opposed by the Council of Basel in 1850; cf. StABS
Kirchenarchiv K 1, Beerdigung der Selbstmörder (with Protocol excerpts from 1850 und
278 Zihlmann-Märki
been a friend, said a prayer before the coffin was lowered. This discrepancy
between the self-narrative and the norm can have several explanations. It is
conceivable that the funeral took place as Forcart-Respinger describes. If this
is the case, then norm and practice do, in fact, differ from each other in this
concrete example. It could also be the case, however, that the pastor said the
prayer at the grave in his role as friend – and not as officiant. Another possibil-
ity is that the writer intentionally described the burial of his brother-in-law
differently from how it actually took place. The funeral procession and the
presence of a pastor who says a prayer assume the function of transmitting
normalcy. Or perhaps the writer simply forgot how it all occurred, maybe
because his earlier notes were too brief?
…and your own death has been a long time coming
Lucas Forcart-Respinger thematizes not only the deaths of others in his auto-
biography but also his own. The passing of relatives or acquaintances, his own
illnesses and the life-threatening dangers that he survived, and his birthdays
all provided opportunities for such reflections. The author’s take on survival is
illustrated by the example of his illness of fièvre maligne. His friend Heusler
had already died from the same ailment, which the writer describes as plague-
like, contagious, unknown to the doctors and consequently extremely danger-
ous. The illness sometimes caused hot flashes and convulsions, during which
he would become delirious; sometimes, however, he would fall unconscious
and appear dead, leading the doctors to begin discussing dissecting his body.
Nevertheless, he did finally recover fully.50 At first the writer was furious with
the doctors who wanted to dissect him. Later, however, he viewed them as the
“means and instruments” of God,51 and he recognized their interest in his ill-
ness as the very reason for his survival. He thanked God for his rescue, while at
the same time also expressing his regret that he had not died. Finally he
acknowledged – begging God for forgiveness – that he had lacked what was
1851). Cf. also Paul Kölner, Basler Friedhöfe (Basel: 1927), 24–25. On the conflicts surround-
ing the type of burial for suicides in the canton of Basel-Landschaft around 1850, see
Bettina Hunger, Diesseits und Jenseits. Die Säkularisierung des Todes im Baselbiet des 19.
und 20. Jahrhunderts (Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte und Landeskunde des
Kantons Basel-Landschaft, vol. 53), (Liestal: 1995), 87 and 91. Concerning the research on
types of burial, see Patricia Zihlmann-Märki, “Gott gebe….” Eine kulturgeschichtliche
Untersuchung des Todes, 39ff and 143 ff.
50 Cf. for this section, Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 24–27.
51 Ibid., 25.
Scrabbling Mice 279
“great, unifying, necessary.” “I would not have died blessed; only in you Lord
Jesus Christ does one die blessed.”52
Several elements in the description of his own looming death by fièvre
maligne recur in the sketches of other life-threatening situations. First is the
certainty the writer received of his own, imminent death. Second is the precise
description Forcart-Respinger provides of the course of the illness and concur-
ring events. Especially for the above example, we must allow the question if he
actually remembered the occurrence, since he was not always conscious. Third
are the preparations he undertook once he was made aware of his impending
death; specifically, he created a will to order his affairs and he bid farewell to
relatives and acquaintances either personally or through writing.53 Fourth is
Forcart-Respinger’s rather ambivalent construal of his survival. On the one
hand, he recognizes his recovery in a religious sense as the grace of God, and is
thus thankful;54 on the other hand, however, he occasionally regrets his sur-
vival because of his knowledge of later sins. In this way, the author arrives at a
dilemma by wanting to uphold God’s will but still yearning for death. It is thus
not surprising that he asks God for patience in his autobiography, as in the last
entry: “Lord grant me the patience to wait devotedly, with my longing sup-
pressed, until he calls, Amen.”55
Decades earlier the writer had been less patient. As he used to cross Simplon
Pass to reach Domodossola during his days as postmaster, he would frequently
bring himself into mortal danger when his sleigh would become buried; he
was, however, always able to be rescued. Forcart-Respinger judged this earlier
recklessness as suicide-like when writing his autobiography. This lack of fear
he recognized as being caused by his having had “enough of life [Lebens-
Sattsein],”56 a state he attributed to his personal and financial situation:
As a fatherless and motherless orphan, from the middle of a large, pres-

tigious, rich family, myself however with little wealth, without a chance
again after my birth to lift myself to the level of my family, I had to
spend my life instead as a subordinate, as a servant. Taught by experi-
ence from childhood on that everything only served to oppress me, I
52 Ibid., 26.
53 Cf. ibid., for example 111 and 205.
54 Here we encounter a continuation of the religious meaning of survival (embedded in
divine providence) that Leutert established for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Cf. Leutert, Geschichten vom Tod, 261–311.
56 Ibid., 55.
280 Zihlmann-Märki
saw the day of death as rather the day of birth, for the better one. And I
would have almost been happy, had I lost my life on my professional
path.57
If we choose to believe the autobiography, the writer was preoccupied with

thoughts of death for almost his entire life.58 These thoughts were sometimes
so abstruse that even he himself found them strange. Once, for example, he
kept a man from standing near him during a storm because he was convinced
he would be struck by lightning.59 Every decline in his health he interpreted as
the beginning of the end, as the beginning of a fatal illness. He often hoped on
his birthday that it would be his last.60 Even though Forcart-Respinger had
thoughts of death his entire life, they changed over the course of time. If as a
young man the author tried to hasten his death – as at Simplon Pass – with age,
he waited for his passing, resigned to God’s will.61
The pervasiveness of his thoughts on his own death – or at least as they are
so described – leads us to ask if that could be a possible component of a typical
Pietist or “awakened” stance towards the beyond. Silvia Leonhard has pre-
sented similar findings in her Master’s thesis [Lizentiatsarbeit] on the Pietist
movement lead by Sophie von Wurstemberger (1809–1878) in Bern. Since, in
the eyes of “awakened” persons, approaching the greatest possible state of
grace occurred with death, this resulted in a continuous yearning for death and
the joy of dying.62 When Forcart-Respinger wrote about his own thoughts on
death, he would use the opportunity to beg for God’s grace.63 He sees proof of
this grace acting in his life in his survival and in the fact that despite being the
57 Ibid., 64.
58 He wrote, for instance, that “for more than 30 years (1857), every day [he] has dealt with
thoughts of death and [he] often feels a great yearning to leave this life [seit mehr denn 30
Jahren (1857) täglich mit Sterbensgedanken umgehe und oft eine grosse Sehnsucht empfinde
aus diesem Leben abzuscheiden].” Cf. Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 222.
59 Cf. ibid., 181.
60 For example, ibid., 204; 211 or 236. The pietist Sophie von Wurstemberger also experienced
her birthdays as crises, since they were opportunities to contemplate the sins committed
in the past year. Cf. Silvia Leonhard, Wege zum Selbst. Rituale der Selbstvergewisserung
dargestellt anhand von Selbstzeugnissen Sophie von Wurstembergers (1809–1878), (unpub-
lished Lizentiatsarbeit, University of Basel: 1998), 17.
61 Cf. Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 74: “So my life passed […] peaceful, gently calm,
always thinking of my imminent summons to leave the stage of this world, on which I am
as if dead.”
62 Leonhard, Wege, 67–68.
63 Cf. Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 248.
Scrabbling Mice 281
weakest of his siblings, he outlived them all.64 Forcart-Respinger’s glimpse into

God’s doings65 was first possible after a turning point in his life, which is com-
parable to Pietist incidents of awakening and conversion. After his return from
Brig to Basel, the writer fell into such a deep state of desperation that he almost
threw himself into the Rhine. On the bridge spanning the river, however, an
inner voice – which he later interpreted as divine – restrained him from the
satanic temptation of suicide, which assured him that66
It was […] a kind of commitment to God’s just judgment, even if I be

damned. […] Oh, Lord Jesus, I look at myself as an old man (53) who
enjoys the grace of walking with you and standing in your company,
like a friend with his friend. I have experienced so much, and I have
been so very blessed by you that I have been given much light and the
epiphany as to how imperfect, impure and changeable my condition
is, that surely as far as I am concerned, I build upon your grace and
deliverance, yet often still feel so weak when you allow a grave event
to occur.67
As this passage has already suggested, Forcart-Respinger did not remain pro-
tected from challenges after his suicidal thoughts. At the outbreak of the July
Revolution in 1830, he remarked that every year between Shrove Tuesday and
Easter he sensed a “weakness” and had “many more temptations” than in the
rest of the year; moreover, he was in general already “sickly, had weak nerves
and was susceptible to every spiritual influence.”68
These remarks show that the writer could be seen as melancholic, too.
His thoughts on death do not necessarily have to lead back to his Pietist
“awakened” devoutness. Yearning for death was also present in the sentimen-
tal, romantic poetry.69 And Andreas Bähr has shown in his dissertation Der
Richter im Ich. Die Semantik der Selbsttötung in der Aufklärung that many
64 Here he refers to the trope of the schwachen Hütte, which frequently recurs in pietism. See
also Erika Hebeisen, leidenschaftlich fromm. Die pietistische Bewegung in Basel 1750–1830
(Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: 2005), 209–210.
65 Cf. Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 222.
66 Cf. ibid., 85.
67 Ibid., 86.
68 Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 194. See also Andreas Bähr, Der Richter im Ich. Die
Semantik der Selbsttötung in der Aufklärung (Göttingen: 2002), 56–57.
69 Cf. Werner Schneiders, “Aufklärung als memento mori?,” Das 18. Jahrhundert 25 (2001),
83–96, here 94–96.
282 Zihlmann-Märki
roponents of the Enlightenment, too, considered suicide or even committed

p
it out of obligation to perfecting their souls.70
The Hereafter, Spirits and Other Ghost-Like Beings
Another aspect of the topic of death is the question of what happens to the
deceased, their souls and their bodies. According to medieval and early mod-
ern conceptions of the hereafter, spiritual salvation and the soul’s resting place
in the afterlife depended on life and dying.
Forcart-Respinger was already sure before the death of his wife that she
would go to the “heavenly home.”71 In addition to the heavenly hereafter,
there were, in his eyes, other places in the beyond where the deceased
could live again. The brother-in-law who committed suicide appeared to
him as a ghost. He was dressed as he was the day he died, and he disap-
peared immediately after the writer greeted him with the exclamation
“Lord Jesus! St…[Streckeisen] are you there?”72 Later, the brother-in-law
asserted his presence through knocking until he was judged a righteous
man in the legal proceedings and his debts were settled with his wife’s
assets. The writer was sure that his brother-in-law had glimpsed hell
because, according to his worldview, the latter had “taken leave of God and
Christ”; the devil had murdered him and had given him no rest, not even in
the grave. In “Hades,”73 where he had endured “torments of hell” and had
stayed in “darkness and the shadows of death,”74 the brother-in-law was
finally convinced that God, Christ and the Devil were no mere fictions.
70 Cf. Bähr’s example of Carl Wilhelm Jerusalem, in idem, Der Richter im Ich, e.g., 92–144,
especially 141–144.
72 Ibid., 104.
73 It cannot be determined whether the writer actually wanted to draw on classical concep-
tions with the notion of Hades. However, he first uses the term to reference the place
where the wandering dead, saved from hell, found themselves. This would correspond
with the term Hades used by Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling; on this, see Zihlmann-Märki,
“Gott gebe….” Eine kulturgeschichtliche Untersuchung, 277 f. He also uses the term as a syn-
onym for the hell where those damned by God resided.
74 All citations Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 107. This relativizes Ariès’s assertion that
hell for “the pious believer of the nineteenth century” was only “dogma.” Cf. Ariès, The
Hour of Our Death, 473. However, Ariès’s study is focused in a large measure on the devel-
opment within Catholic areas.
Scrabbling Mice 283
Because his friends thought of him “with a fervent spirit,” and because he
defied the devil, he was provided with spirits who made him visible so that
he could appear to the writer:
So now (1842) you are a soul saved from death, one permitted eternal
salvation, yet still suffering, having trifled away your time on earth and its
means of grace. For you, the time of damnation will become an eternity –
an eternity upon eternity – which you long to break through in order to
arrive at perfect peace and salvation in Christ Jesus.75
After the writer had accused his brother-in-law, he prayed that God have mercy
on him and on others who had turned away from Christian beliefs.76 Did
the writer want to help his relative with this prayer? This would suggest an
intercessory praxis and imply that the writing of self-narratives could also be a
religious act.77
In the writer’s eyes, it was not only suicides who ran the danger of being
excluded from the heavenly beyond. Those who did not live in a true spiritual
community with Jesus and God or who maintained an extravagant and luxuri-
ous lifestyle also put their spiritual salvation at risk.78
The appearance of the deceased brother-in-law occurred in 1819. Forcart-
Respinger at that time did not believe in such phenomena, as he affirms in his
autobiography, and he initially attributed it to a trick of the senses. Yet when he
discussed the episode later with an acquaintance, the latter convinced him that
the dead who were still bound to the things of the world could certainly appear
to the living as ghosts. The brother-in-law was, moreover, not the only apparition
that the writer thematized in his text.79 How are we to interpret these ghost epi-
sodes? Did the writer actually witness such apparitions? Or did he use the stories
simply as a stylistic means to make the autobiography more exciting for his read-
ers? These questions must remain open; nevertheless, we do know that belief in
ghosts or spirits still existed in Pietist circles in Baden and Alsace during the first

76 Cf. ibid., 109. Also before the death of his wife and sons, the writer prayed for God’s mercy
for their salvation and resurrection. Cf. ibid., 154–155 and 177.
77 Cf. Zihlmann-Märki, “Gott gebe….” Eine kulturgeschichtliche Untersuchung, 379 f.
78 Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 26, 136 and 183–184: that the mother-in-law, who had
previously lived a luxurious life, survived a suicide attempt and had from then on a swol-
len tongue, a fixed gaze, and saw demonic spirits, was interpreted by the writer as part of
God’s judgment.
79 Cf. ibid., 171 and 210.
284 Zihlmann-Märki
half of the nineteenth century.80 The same holds true for Basel, as revealed in an
1808 sermon by the pastor Johann Jakob Faesch (1752–1832), a proponent of the
Enlightenment. Faesch judged extremely harshly these “superstitions of our
times,” the beliefs in the “apparitions of the dead.”81 Countless people were to
have believed that ghosts existed, “especially since the emergence of the theory
of the doctrine of spirits.”82 With this, Faesch was most likely addressing Johann
Heinrich Jung-Stilling’s (1740–1817) Theorie der Geister-Kunde, in einer Natur-,
Vernunft- und Bibelmässigen Beantwortung der Frage: was von Ahnungen,
Gesichten und Geistererscheinungen geglaubt und nicht geglaubt werden müsse
(1808). Jung-Stilling established and systematically proved the existence of
ghosts and spirits. The book was banned in Basel.83 Lucas Forcart-Respinger
wrote in his autobiography that he had read the writings of Jung-Stilling shortly
after his brother-in-law’s suicide, and the two books Theorie der Geister-Kunde
and Scenen aus dem Geisterreiche are listed in the book inventory that he created
in 1867.84 Even if he had freely invented the ghost stories solely for stylistic pur-
poses, it can still be inferred that he was aware of the topicality of the issue.85
The writer also points to the supernatural in other parts of his autobiogra-
phy; he himself received a premonition of his father’s death through a dream,
and in the “euphoric” congregation, he and another member made prophe-
sies.86 The already mentioned noises and scrabbling of mice announced to
him the death of his wife.87
80 See Jules Keller, Die jenseitige Welt ist nicht verschlossen. Das Elsass in der Tradition der volk-
stümlichen Geistergeschichten aus dem 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Contacts: Sér. 3, Etudes et docu-
ments, vol. 58), (Bern, etc.: 2001), 3–59; Diethard Sawicki, Leben mit den Toten. Geisterglauben
und die Entstehung des Spiritismus in Deutschland 1770–1900 (Paderborn, etc.: 2002), 165.
81 J.J. Faesch, Predigt über den Gespenster-Glauben, nach I. Timotheum IV. V. VII, gehalten in
der Kirche St. Theodor, den 9.ten Weinmonat 1808 (Basel: [1808]), 5.
82 Faesch, Predigt über den Gespenster-Glauben, 20.
83 The first edition of Jungs-Stilling’s Scenen aus dem Geisterreiche appeared in 1803. See, for
example, Martin Landmann, Ahnungen, Visionen und Geistererscheinungen nach Jung-
Stilling. Eine ausdeutende Untersuchung (Siegen: 1995); Sawicki, Leben mit den Toten, 56–58.
84 Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 110–111; StABS pa 678 A 4, Verzeichniß der Bücher
1867.
85 Daniel Burckhardt-Wildt describes in his diary a ghost story that occurred in Basel in
1795, which was later dismissed as a fake. Cf. Daniel Burckhardt-Wildt, Tag=buch der
Merckwürdigsten Vorfällen, welche seit dem Jahr 1789 in diesen für unsere Stadt basel unver-
gesslichen Zeiten zugetragen haben, ed. André Salvisberg (Quellenedition der Peter Ochs
Gesellschaft, vol. 2), (Basel: 1997), 76.
86 Cf. Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 10 and 197.
87 Ibid., 155 and 160. On the popular belief that mice could herald death, see the art. “Maus”
in Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, ed. Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli and Eduard
Hoffmann-Krayer, vol. 6, 3rd edn (Berlin and New York: 2000), 44–45.
Scrabbling Mice 285
Different kinds of ghosts appear in the text: his mother-in-law and

Mrs. Blackwell, a member of the “euphoric” congregation, were possessed by
evil spirits. A priest even performed an exorcism on the latter.88 When Forcart-
Respinger and his grandson were seriously ill, the writer wrote that an “angel of
death” had withdrawn.89 During Passiontide 1846, the writer sensed that the
“enemy” – certainly a synonym for Devil – was searching for his victims. Only a
little while later, several accidents and suicides took place in Basel, thereby
affirming his premonition.90 The world created in Forcart-Respinger’s text was
animated with demons, angels, ghosts and the Devil, and it was shaped by
these beings just as it was by Jesus and God.
Forcart-Respinger’s reflections on his brother-in-law’s suicide have shown
that the writer believed in a stepped afterworld, that in addition to heaven and
hell there was at least one other place in the beyond where souls saved from
hell resided and which could facilitate interaction between the living and the
dead. How a person had lived and died had substantial influence on the (ini-
tial) resting place for the soul. Yet as the example of the brother-in-law shows,
a soul can even be saved from eternal death in hell and enter bliss. Ultimately,
salvation was not only influenced by the life and dying of the deceased but
also by the prayers of those left behind. In his study Leben mit den Toten.
Geisterglauben und die Entstehung des Spiritualismus in Deutschland 1770–1900,
Diethard Sawicki describes the conception of a stepped afterworld proceeding
from the perfection of the soul as the “new hereafter.” From the last third of the
eighteenth century, this afterworld belief spread through circles of pietists as
well as through groups of those following the Enlightenment.91 The concep-
tion of a stepped afterworld can likewise be found in the writings of Johann
Friedrich Oberlin (1740–1826), who belonged to the “mystical-Pietist circles of
Strasbourg and the surrounding areas,”92 and Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling
(1740–1817). The possibility of contact between the immaterial and material
worlds, between the living and dead was at the center of debates taking place
around 1800.93 When the dead brother-in-law appeared, Forcart-Respinger
88 For the mother-in-law, see Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 183–184 and 230; for Mrs.
Blackwell, ibid., 190–192 and 194–207; Schaub, Separatistengemeinde, 217–261.
89 Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 232 (“Todesengel”); in other places the author reports
of a “murderous spirit [Mordgeist],” 235–236.
91 These conceptions of the hereafter reach back to the thoughts of Emanuel Swedenborg
(1688–1772). Cf. Sawicki, Leben mit den Toten, 41–55. For the debate on the immortality
and perfecting of the soul, see Bähr, Der Richter im Ich, 92–144; Schneiders, Aufklärung,
89–94.
92 Keller, Die jenseitige Welt, XII (quotation) and 10.
93 Cf. Sawicki, Leben mit den Toten, 44–46.
286 Zihlmann-Märki
remarked that his soul had been made visible as light, and he was thus not
corporeally resurrected. The corporeal resurrection of the (blessed) deceased
would, in the writer’s eyes, first occur with the Last Judgment, as indicated by
his comments on the family tomb.
artes moriendi?
As previously mentioned, the conception of a stepped afterworld may have

influenced Forcart-Respinger’s perception of his brother-in-law’s suicide as
well as his writing about the incident. His remarks have also shown, however,
that in Forcart-Respinger’s eyes, how one lived and died influenced salvation.
This observation leads us to ask if there are passages in his text that suggest the
artes moriendi94 still guided his writing.
The description of his wife’s dying reminds of a good death according to
the ars moriendi − tradition: the dying woman knew of her imminent death,
she looked forward to it and to her future nearness to God, she bid farewell
to the relatives who had assembled around her and she thanked them for
everything. Spiritual texts and prayers were also present. The brother-in-
law’s suicide was clearly a bad death in Forcart-Respinger’s opinion, and it
was connected to the former’s bad way of life. The writer’s harsh judgment of
this suicide despite his own near encounter with the same step only a few
years before is not necessarily a contradiction. The difference lies in the fact
– according to Forcart-Respinger’s logic – that he had been hindered in his
suicide by a divine voice. This grace of God was not given to his brother-in-
law. The writer’s pleas to God that he be merciful to the brother-in-law and
his later biddings for his sons’ and wife’s salvation and resurrection95 allow
us to conjecture that he perhaps also intended his writings to be a religious
94 Important elements of the art of dying were certainty of death, taking leave of those
remaining, presence of mind, confidence in God’s grace (confession of faith) and the
presence of spiritual texts or intercessions. Cf. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 110–112,
132–136, and 303–307; Leutert, Geschichten vom Tod, 91–117.
95 Such prayers can be found in many self-narratives of the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries: Leutert, Geschichten vom Tod, 106–117; Benigna von Krusenstjern, “Die Tränen des
Jungen über ein vertrunkenes Pferd. Ausdrucksformen von Emotionalität in Selbstzeugnissen
des späten 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich.
Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500–1850),(Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit,
vol. 9), ed. Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans Medick and Patrice Veit (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna:
2001), 157–168, especially 165.
Scrabbling Mice 287
act.96 Another brother-in-law of the writer died “in complete desperation”97

facing his impending death. After he had jumped from his bed, “he made
such a desperate face at the end, with his tongue stuck out, that the image is
still before me. I cannot imagine a parting worse than that.” Desperation
was an unmistakable sign of a bad death according to the ars moriendi −
tradition. If a person did not approach death with confidence, then he or she
lacked a genuine trust in God.98 It is true that the writer liked this brother-
in-law very much, but he did not agree with his “material drive,” or “his quest
for honor.”
The ideal of the good death appears in Forcart-Respinger’s autobiography
only in a few more cases. Especially in instances of sudden death, which would
be categorized as bad according to the ars moriendi, we can see a clear devia-
tion.99 The writer judges these deaths mostly neutrally, if he does not outright
envy the suddenly departed, which likely relates to his attachment to the
beyond. Nonetheless, in the funeral sermon for Achilles Forcart-Iselin –
Forcart-Respinger’s employer, who died unexpectedly in 1844 – it was impor-
tant for both the pastor and the bereaved to show that because of the illness of
96 According to Thomas Luckmann, religious action is a part of social action, if religion can
be viewed as a cultural phenomenon which is socially formed, and can express meaning.
Cf. Kuhn, Neuzeitliche Gesellschaft, 1–8, 339–346; Kaspar von Greyerz, Religion und Kultur.
Europa 1500–1800 (Göttingen: 2000) 11. Religious action consequently means action con-
cerning religious values, norms and practices. By directing a prayer to God or by asking for
the forgiveness of his brother-in-law or the resurrection of his kin, the writer not only
engages in a religious practice (praying) but also acts for the salvation of his brother-in-
law while being conscious of the fact that the salvation of the latter is entirely in the
hands of God.
97 All quotations from this section are from Forcart-Respinger, Autobiography, 139.
98 See, for example, Arthur Imhof, Ars Moriendi. Die Kunst des Sterbens einst und heute
(Kulturstudien Bibliothek der Kulturgeschichte, vol. 22), (Vienna and Cologne: 1991),
34–35.
99 Those who died suddenly could not prepare themselves in a Christian way for death. See,
for example, Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 11–14. If a person lived in a way pleasing to God,
a sudden death could also be positively assessed: cf. e.g., Heike Düselder, Tod in Oldenburg.
Sozial- und kulturgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zu Lebenswelten im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert
(Veröffentlichungen der historischen Kommission für Niedersachsen und Bremen,
vol. 34), (Hannover: 1999), 294–303; Rudolf Mohr, Der unverhoffte Tod. Theologie- und kul-
turgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zu aussergewöhnlichen Todesfällen in Leichenpredigten
(Marburger Personalschriften-Forschungen, vol. 5), (Marburg: 1982), 61–64. According to
Mohr, ibid., 79–80, it is precisely the excessive emphasis on the blessed end of a person
who suddenly died that may reveal the challenge this end still posed to the
congregation.
288 Zihlmann-Märki
his wife, the deceased had been just as well prepared for death as if on a sick-
bed himself.100 The writer never explicitly labels a death good or bad.
Nevertheless, through his descriptions, he implicitly attributes these qualities
to a few circumstances surrounding the death. This is clear, for instance, in the
juxtaposition of his wife’s and his brother-in-law’s death bed scenes; while she
departed gently and “well” in the traditional sense, the brother-in-law died in
desperation – jumping around wildly and with his tongue stuck out. Is this
simply coincidental or is it perhaps intended by the writer?
Conclusion
Death and dying assume a central position in the autobiography of Lucas

Forcart-Respinger. He thematizes various aspects, informs about rituals and
takes up the contemporary debates about apparent death and the appearance
of ghosts. Additionally, his conception of the hereafter is represented in the
text. Regarding the deaths he describes, the writer suggests to the recipients
different interpretative strategies, which simultaneously refer back to his
modes of perception. These could be medically, legally, emotionally or even
religiously dominated. The same modes of perception are not necessarily
apprehensible in every death description, and only in some cases are religious
modes active. These were – as this article has shown – still partially determined
by the ars moriendi − tradition but also partially by the conception prevalent
around 1800 of a stepped afterlife in which the soul would be perfected over
the course of a long process.
The writer desired his own death and longed for spiritual community with
God the Father and God the Son in the heavenly beyond. He explained his
strong yearning for the afterlife and death by his position as a poor man within
a rich family. Additionally, his desire to be reunited with his wife and sons after
their deaths further propelled this longing. In the writer’s several references to
his mental state, the reader can perhaps understand him as melancholic.
That his beliefs and attachment to the hereafter101 shaped his everyday life is
100 StABS la 1844 April 5, Predigt über Johann. XI, 11. gehalten bei der Leichenbestattung des
Herrn Achilles Forcart-Jselin, den 8ten April 1844 in der St. Elisabethen = Kirche von Jakob
Burckhardt. Antistes, ([Basel]: s.a.), 23.
101 Forcart-Respinger did not hide in any way his deep yearning for the hereafter: see, for
example, StABS pa 678 B 10, 1, letter from L. Forcart to J.J. Imhof (August 2, 1850): “if I must
reach an advanced age, which I do not hope for [wenn ich was ich nicht hoffe ein höheres
Alter erreichen muß].”
Scrabbling Mice 289
illustrated by a poem his nineteen-year-old daughter gave him in 1838 as a

birthday gift.102 Here she expressed her understanding that everything on
earth is “corruptible.” Only Jesus had “incorruptible gifts,” “alone in Him is eter-
nal salvation! Once with Him, a never corruptible piece.” Whoever lives in the
true belief of Jesus, “will then live eternally! – Hallelujah! ! !”103 The writer’s
attachment to the hereafter, as described in the autobiography, is a part of his
self-construction. He presents himself as a pious Christian, who patiently
defers to the acts of God, while he had previously been a great sinner. By
patiently awaiting death – in contrast to earlier times – despite his yearning for
it, he proves himself sufficiently steadfast to endure the will of God. The words
of Andreas Bähr can help capture this:
If he mournfully longed to leave the dungeon, so did he prove his

righteousness; if he left the dungeon, so would he prove otherwise. In
nothing else than “becoming blessed in [Pietist] desire” [Verlangen seelig
zu werden] could the delicate grandeur of death not be a grandeur of sui-
cide […]. This grandeur described the grandeur of those who remain,
despite everything. Only those who “deserved” [verdient] this suffering
would be unable to bear it.104
The many religious digressions and long reflections on a Christian way of life
also confirm the picture of a deeply religious man.105 He repeatedly begged
God for his grace, yet recognized in his survival and outliving his siblings an
evidence that he would receive divine grace.
The writer presents himself as a poor man, but his continuous complaints
about his strained financial situation are qualified by his ability to buy a house
and by both his wife and son-in-law descending from wealthy families. The
writer was surely not indigent, even if he did not belong to the richest circles in
102 This is also an example of the transmission of Pietist “awakened” piety within the con-
texts of family and school. Marie went to a school in Sitzenkirch for a long time, where the
son of Forcart-Respinger’s friend Köllner also ran a school. Cf. Mittheilungen, 79; Hebeisen,
leidenschaftlich fromm, 172–288.
103 StABS pa 678 C 2, Gedicht (March 25, 1838).
104 Bähr, Der Richter im Ich, 168–169.
105 Cf. also the letters to his daughter Marie during her stay in Sitzenkirch, in which he sum-
moned her to test herself constantly and urged her to abandon vanity and “bad habits.”
See, for example, StABS pa 678 C 1, letter to Marie (December 2, 1835), f. 1r-1v; letter to
Marie (July 9, 1836), f. 2v; letter to Marie (April 30, 1835), f. 1v; or StABS pa 679 C 2, letter to
Marie (May 2, 1837).
290 Zihlmann-Märki
Basel, as did his relatives to whom he compared himself.106 As a young wid-

ower in visible financial need, he was able to profit from his familial support
network, which however served to fuel his feelings of subjective poverty: “to
this very moment, a great strain, a gnawing worm, remains for me, and will do
so to the grave.”107
The author’s motivations for writing are not explicitly named in his autobi-
ography. We can, however, attempt to work out various “structures of mean-
ing”108 and possibilities for interpretation, and we can try to reveal a “subtext.”109
In my opinion, multiple motivations for writing come into question for the
presented text. In light of both his proximity to the Pietist “awakened” circles
and his countless religious digressions, the need for self-examination and self-
assurance may have fostered the creation of the text. Countless Pietists com-
posed a life [Lebenslauf], a diary or an autobiography in order to assess their
“state of grace.”110 Forcart-Respinger presents himself as a pious man and
repeatedly asserts his sinfulness. However, through his confidence that he
would enter heaven after his death, he bears witness to his trust in God. With
Sebastian Leutert’s work in mind, we can ask if the authors wanted to prove
their readiness for their own dying by frequently addressing their own death
within self-narratives. According to this logic, salvation would not be endan-
gered by a ‘bad’ death.111 A religious meaning of the text would also be con-
firmed through the expression Imanuel at the beginning of the text. Not only
can the author use his writings about his life to stage himself, but he can also
use them as a means for further social action.112 As head of the family, he gave
106 The tax registers show that once Forcart-Respinger had received a bequest, he was
wealthy. Nevertheless, in comparison with his relatives, his fortune was still modest. See
StABS Steuern D 8, Vermögenssteuer 1867–1870, Stadt.
108 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description. Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in idem:
The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays (New York: 1973), 3–30.
109 See Kaspar von Greyerz and Fabian Brändle, “Basler Selbstzeugnisse des 16./17.
Jahrhunderts und die neuere historische Forschung,” in Platteriana. Beiträge zum 500.
Geburtstag des Thomas Platter (1499? − 1582), ed. Werner Meyer and Kaspar von Greyerz
(Basler Beiträge zur Geschichtswissenschaft, vol. 175), (Basel: 2002), 59–75, here 73.
110 Cf. Günter Niggl, “Zur Säkularisation der pietistischen Autobiographie im 18. Jahrhundert”
(1974) in: Autobiographie, ed. idem, 367–391; and Jacques Voisine, “Vom religiösen
Bekenntnis zur Autobiographie und zum intimen Tagebuch zwischen 1760 und 1820”
(1974) in: Niggl, ed., Autobiographie, 392–414, especially 394.
111 Cf. Leutert, Geschichten vom Tod, 319.
112 Gabriele Jancke has shown this in her dissertation: Gabriele Jancke, Autobiographie als
soziale Praxis: Beziehungskonzepte in Selbstzeugnissen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im
Scrabbling Mice 291
important advice to his descendants through his autobiography, which they

could choose to follow or not, but which they certainly took notice of and
which would influence their perceptions.113
The fashioning of the past – from bereavements to injustices felt by the
writer – could likewise have played a role in the recording of the autobiogra-
phy. It enabled the writer, moreover, to narrate his truth – that is, his percep-
tion of reality and certain events,114 and it allowed him to explain or justify115
inconsistencies in his life.
Since Forcart-Respinger knew that his autobiography would find readers,
his self-representation was already directed towards them. His text was thus
conceived as a readable and entertaining story, one which he enriched with
dialogues, with prayers and – sometimes even narrated with a wink – with
amusing anecdotes.
deutschsprachigen Raum (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, vol. 10), (Cologne, Weimar and
Vienna: 2002).
113 On several occasions, he expresses his concern for the salvation of his daughter and her
family because she tended towards an extravagant lifestyle. Cf. Forcart-Respinger,
Autobiography, 117.
114 Ingrid Aichinger, for example, writes that truth is the “sensible […] design of the personal-
ity [sinnvolle … Gestaltung der Persönlichkeit].” Cf. Ingrid Aichinger, “Probleme der
Autobiograpie als Sprachkunstwerk” (1970) in Autobiographie, ed. Niggl, 170–199, here 186.
115 There are, in fact, interruptions and uncertainties in the narration. For example, it is not
clear why Nikolaus von Brunn allegedly reprimanded the writer for his absence at the
step-mother’s funeral, referring foremost to the “euphoric” congregation, considering that
he had always maintained a certain distance vis-à-vis this community. Cf. Forcart-
Respinger, Autobiography, 197.
Index of Persons
Aberli, Johannes (1774–1851) 88 Burton, Robert 169

Aemisegger, Elisabeth 190, 194–195 Butler, Judith 82
Aemisegger, Gregorius (1815–1913) 10, Bynum, Caroline W. 80, 82, 164, 220
190–191, 194–205
Altermatt, Johann Baptist Caesar, Julius 147
(1764–1849) 67–68 Calvin, John 148
Amelang, James 1 Canning, Kathleen 76
Andlau, the Lords of 131 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 15–16
Andreae, Jacob (1528–1590) 9, 118–119, Charles IV, Emperor 215
124, 146–159, 161–163 Charles V, Emperor 130, 132, 150
Aquinas, St. Thomas 234 Charlotte of Hesse-Kassel, Electress
Aristotle 234 Palatine 253, 258, 261–262
Arnold, Gottfried (1666–1714) 47 Christian Ludwig, Duke of
Brunswick-Lüneburg 260
Bähr, Andreas 10, 166, 220, 281, 289 Christoph of Württemberg,
Baggerman, Arianne 7 Duke 147–150, 152, 156
Bansi, Barbara (1777–1863) 8, 60–64
Bansi, Heinrich 61 Danahay, Martin 15
Barbier, Patrick 76 Darnton, Robert 1
Bayle, Pierre 54 Darwin, Charles 200
Behaim, merchant family 251 Datini, Francesco 233
Bentham, Samuel 233 David, Jacques-Louis 62
Berlichingen, Götz von (c.1480–1562) 120 Davis, Natalie Zemon 1, 28, 98, 164, 225
Bernoulli, Jacob 54 Dekker, Rudolf 1, 6–7, 58
Bernoulli-Respinger, Hieronymus Delumeau, Jean 168,
(1745–1829) 84 Descartes, René 1, 200
Beza, Theodor 148 Diesbach, Ludwig von (1452–1527) 212, 214
Bibliander, Theodor 109 Dietschi, Anna 99, 106–108
Billing, Heinz 108 Dilthey, Wilhelm 211, 231
Blackwell, Mrs. 285 Douglas, Mary 97
Bonaparte, Lätitia 61 Durkheim, Emile 169, 171
Bosshard, Heinrich (1749–1815) 35
Bournes, Edmund 265 Eduard, Count Palatine 260
Bräker, Ulrich (1735–1798) 59 Elias, Norbert 264, 266
Brändle, Fabian 10–11, 28, 190 Elisabeth of Hesse-Kassel 251
Brandmüller, Johann 70 Elisabeth Charlotte, Princess
Brehm, Edmund 200 Palatine 254
Brenz, Johann 147, 153–154 Elmer, Herr, Toggenburg wise man 201
Brunn, Nikolaus von 269–270, 273, Emilie of Hesse-Kassel, Princesse de
275–276 Trémouille 253, 261–262
Brunner, Klara (1674–1736) 66 Entringer, Johanna 146
Brunner, Otto 238 Erb, Johannes (1635–1701) 8, 68–73
Burckhardt, Jacob 23–24, 28, 56,
211–213, 231 Faesch, Johann Jakob 284
Burke, Peter 1, 191 Falk, Pasi 103
294 Index of Persons
Ferdinand II, Emperor 247 Hedwig Sophie of Brandenburg, Landgravine

Forcart, Dietrich 267, 269, 274–276, 288 of Hesse-Kassel 255, 259
Forcart, Marie 269, 271, 289 Heiligensetzer, Lorenz 1, 3, 8, 58–59
Forcart, Rudolf 267, 269, 274–276, 288 Heimen, Angela 9, 97
Forcart-Iselin, Achilles 287 Helfenstein, Count Ulrich of 151
Forcart-Respinger, Lucas (1789–1869) Herbort, Anton 71
11–12, 267–291 Herder, Johann Gottfried 35
François, Etienne 56 Hess, Anna Magdalena 61
Franklin, Benjamin (1706–1790) 88 Heusler, friend of Lucas Forcart-
Friedrich of Bremen, King of Respinger 272, 274, 276, 278
Denmark 258 Hildebrand, Bruno 235
Friedrich Wilhelm, Prince-elector of Höchstetter, Johann Matheus
Brandenburg 255, 259 (1607–1662) 247–248
Fugger, Hans Jakob 241–242 Höchstetter, Philipp II.
Fugger, merchant family 246 (1579–1635) 11, 245–248
Furttenbach (also Furtenbach), Joseph Holbach, Paul Thiry d’ 183
(1591–1667) 8, 34, 37, 39–41, 54–55 Huber, Johann Rudolf (1766–1806) 83–89,
Furttenbach, Joseph, Jr. 40–41 91–94
Hugo, Victor (1802–1895) 88
Galen of Pergamon 115 Hume, David 183
Gast, Johannes (?-1552) 74
Gellert, Christian Fürchtegott 83–86, Illing, Christian Friedrich 166–168,
91, 252 175–183, 185
Georg, Bernhard 182 Imhof, Johann Jacob 269, 289
Geyler von Kaysersberg, Johann 100 Imhof, Willibald (1519–1580) 239
Glikl bas Judah Leib, see Glückel von Hameln
Glückel von Hameln (1645–1724) 8, 34, Jäger, Clemens 241
37, 49–50, 52–53, 240–241 Jancke, Gabriele 3–4, 7–9, 15, 98, 100,
Glutz, Xaveria (1738–1795) 67–68 118, 221–222, 224, 229
Göbelin, Johann Conradt 41 Jecklin, family 65
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Jenny, Beat Rudolf 111
(1749–1832) 35, 121 Johann Friedrich, Duke of
Goltstein, Alexander van (1784–1813) 88 Brunswick-Lüneburg 259–260
Greyerz, Kaspar von 1–2, 8, 34, 59 Josel von Rosheim (c.1478–1554) 9,
Gültlingen, von, nobleman and 124–134, 160–163
steward 157 Josselin, Ralph (1616–1683) 238–239
(Güntzer), Agnes, daughter of Augustin Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich 284–285
Güntzer 39
Güntzer, Augustin (1596-c.1657) 8, 24–28, Kant, Immanuel 168, 181–183, 187
34, 36–39, 41, 48, 54–56 Karl Ludwig, Elector Palatine 253,
Gugger, Urs Karl (1694–1778) 66–68 258–262
Gusdorf, Georges 214 Keiser, Andreas 43
Gustav Adolf, King of Sweden 52 Kessel, Martina 29
Kittsteiner, Heinz D. 168–169, 181, 188, 189
Hägelich, Hans Caspar 43 Knies, Karl 235
Halbwachs, Maurice 217 Koch, Caspar (1576–1620) 11, 227–228,
Hammurabi I, King of Babylon 234 230, 232, 237, 241–243, 245, 248–249
Hartmann, Alfred 99 (Koch), wife of Caspar Koch
Heberle, Hans (1618–1672) 44 (16th/17th c.) 240–241
Index Of Persons 295
Köllner, (Wilhelm) 276 Monnet, Pierre 217–218

Kohn, Johann 42 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat,
Koselleck, Reinhart 81 Baron de 183
Krusenstjern, Benigna von 4, 60, 77 Moos, Peter von 224
Kurz, Johannes 70 Müller, Armin 201
Müller, Johann Georg 35
Lachmund, Jens 76 Myconius, Oswald 99, 104, 106, 108–110
Lafayette, Marquis de 63
Lauberer, Mathias (1625–1691) 191 Nannoni, Lorenzo 61
Lavater, Johann Kaspar Napoleon Bonaparte 61
(1741–1801) 59, 61, 88 Neumann, Bernd 229
Lazarus of Dambach 38 Nietzsche, Friedrich 57
Lehmann, Hartmut 51
Lehnherr, Rachel 70 Oberlin, Johann Friedrich 285
Leonhard, Silvia 280 Oest, Johann Friedrich 89
Leutert, Sebastian 3, 59, 290 Öttingen, Ludwig XV the elder, Count
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 114–115 of 150
Levy, Cerf 241 Öttingen, Ludwig XVI, Count of 150
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph Oexle, Otto Gerhard 217, 219
(1742–1799) 88 Oresme, Nicolas 234
Linck, Ulrich 241–242
Lindemann, Mary 1 Pappenheim, Bertha 50
List, Friedrich 235 Parker, Harold Talbot 233
Louis XVI, King of France 63–64 Pascal, Roy 214
Louise Charlotte of Brandenburg, Pastenaci, Stefan 102, 108
Duchess of Courland 259 Paullini, Christian Franz 56
Louise Hollandine, Countess Palatine, later Paumgartner, merchant family 251
Abess of Maubuisson 253, 260 Pestalozzi, Heinrich 61
Lucä, Friedrich (1644–1708) 56 Petrarch 1
Luther, Martin 168, 177 Pfister, Markus 241–242
Piller, Gudrun 3, 8–9, 59, 76
Macfarlane, Alan 238 Platter, Felix (1536–1614) 56, 59, 99,
Mahler, Josua (1529–1599) 59 106–107, 109, 111, 113, 115
Mahrholz, Werner 212–213 Platter, Thomas (1499?-1582) 9, 59, 97–117
Manner, Johann Jacob 40 Pomata, Gianna 225
Marat, Jean-Paul 63 Porter, Roy 93
Margaritha, Antonius 130 Preis, Caspar (?-c.1667) 8, 34, 43–45, 53,
Marx, Karl 231 55
Mascuch, Michael 94 (Preis), Gerdraut (1596-?), wife of Caspar
Maurer, Michael 87 Preis 44
Mauss, Marcel 8, 30 Presser, Jacques 2
Medick, Hans 23, 103
Meissner, August Gottlieb 91 Rabelais, François 100
Ménétra, Jacques-Louis (1738–1803?) 55 Rabus, Ludwig 135–140, 143–145, 160
Meyer, Werner 110 Randeria, Shalini 226
Miller, Matthäus (1625–1685) 11, Rathgeber, Julius 191
242–245, 248 Rechberg, Lord of 154
Misch, Georg 35, 118, 164, 211–214 Rehlinger, Heinrich 241–242
Momigliano, Arnoldo 230 Rein, Adolf 212–213, 228, 232, 236–237
296 Index of Persons
Rem, Lucas (1481–1542) 217 Sophie, Princess Palatine, Electress of

Respinger, Anna Maria 267, 269, 272–276, Hannover 253, 258–260, 262
282, 284, 286, 288–289 Sophie Amalie of Brunswick-Lüneburg,
Reynolds, Dwight F. 223 Queen of Denmark 257–258, 260
Ridderus, Franziskus 71 Spiegel, Gabrielle M. 225
Roche, Daniel 1 Stadler, Hans 55
Rohmann, Gregor 220 Stampfer, Maria Elisabeth
Rohrbach, family 218 (1638–1700) 240
Roll, Clara von, née Wallier 66 Steinhausen, Georg 251
Roper, Lyndal 82, 94 Stollberg, Gunnar 76
Roscher, Wilhelm 235 Strauss, Anna Katharina 40
Rottenhausen, Johann 55 Streckeisen, Susanne, née Forcart 269,
(Rottenhausen), Margreta, wife of Johann 274, 282
Rottenhausen 55 Streckeisen-Forcart, (Johann
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 121 Friedrich) 271, 274, 277–278, 282–286
Ruggiu, François-Joseph 5 Stromer, Ulman (1329–1407) 209, 215, 218,
Ruiz, merchant family 233 239
Ruppel, Sophie 11, 251 Studt, Birgit 216
Ruprecht, Count Palatine 254, 260 (Sury), Johann Ludwig von, son of Urs Victor
von Sury 66
Sabean, David W. 32, 103, 213 Sury, Urs 66
Safley, Thomas M. 11, 227 Sury, Urs Victor von (1670–1710) 66–68
Salis, Barbara von, née Meiss Sury, Urs Victor von (1697–1736) 66
(1574–1638) 65 Suvée, Joseph-Benoît 61
Salis, Hortensia von 55
Samson, Henri 55 Taylor, Thomas 70
Sarasin, Philipp 76, 83 Tersch, Harald 4, 23
Sawicki, Diethard 285 Thünen, Johann Heinrich von 233
Say, Jean-Baptiste 235 Tissot, Samuel André 90–91
Schär, Markus 169, 179, 188–189 Torgler, Hieronymus 191
Scheutz, Martin 23 Trémouille, Henri Charles de la 261
Schmid, Barbara 215, 220–221 Tscharner, family 65
Schmidt, Barbara (1582–1638) 247 Tscharner, Katharina,
Schmitt, Jean-Claude 226 née Brunner (?-1626) 65
Schmoller, Gustav 235 Tschopp, Silvia Serena 267
Scholem, Gershom 53 Tugginer, Eduard (1791–1865) 67
Schulze, Winfried 2 Tugginer, family 67–68
Schweizer, Johann Caspar 61
Schwenckfeld, Caspar von Ossig 140 Ulbrich, Claudia 1–3, 7–8, 10, 15, 209
Scott, Joan W. 81 Ulbricht, Otto 76, 81
Segal, Chaim 241
Segal, Naomi 5 Velten, Hans Rudolf 109, 111
Seybold, David Christoph 35 Vetter, Anna (1630–1703) 8, 34, 46–49
Shweder, Richard 265 Vetter, Johann Michael 48
Sieber, Dominik 28 (Vetter), Veit, son of Anna and Johann
Smith, Adam 235 Michael Vetter 48
Sombart, Wilhelm 235 Vonder Mühll-Ryhiner, Anna Katharina
Sonnleitner, Georg 70 (1761–1800) 90–91
Index Of Persons 297
Warneken, Bernd Jürgen 203 Zaddok, Rabbi 125, 130–131

Watt, Jeffrey R. 170, 188–189 Zahnd, Urs Martin 214–215
Wear, Andrew 79 Zell, Katharina, née Schütz (1497/98–1562)
Weber, Max 168–169, 235 9, 124, 134–144, 160–163
Wedel, Gudrun 3 Zell, Matthäus 134–135, 141–142
Wedgwood, Josiah 233 Zewi, Sabbatai 50
Welser, merchant family 240 Zihlmann-Märki, Patricia 3, 11, 267
Wild, Bernhard (1776–1832) 84, 88 Zingerle, Arnold 103
Wilhelm VI, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel Zink, Burkhard (c.1396–1474/75) 212, 218
253, 261–262 Zwingli, Huldrych 9, 99–100, 102–106, 108,
Wolfgang of Zweibrücken, Count 113, 117
Palatine 157
Wurstemberger, Sophie von
(1809–1878) 280
Wurstisen, Christian (1544–1588) 74
Index of Places
Aachen 3, 6 Denmark 18, 40, 237, 257–258, 260

Alerheim 150 Dillingen 157
Alsace 25, 125, 128–130, 132, 160, Domodossola 279
191–192, 277, 283
Alzey 153–154 Earls Colne, Essex 239
Amöneburg 43–44 Endingen 128
Ansbach 37, 48 England 40, 42, 54, 89, 233, 239
Appenzell, Swiss canton 195, 200, 202 Ensisheim 131
Augsburg 11, 38, 41, 56, 130, 212, 217, Esslingen 131
239, 241–243, 246–248 Europe 5, 7, 9, 18, 21–22, 51, 53, 193,
Austria 4, 18 238–239, 243, 245, 251, 253–255, 257–259
Bad Homburg 2 Fläsch 61

Baden, Germany 283 Florence 61, 233
Baden, Switzerland 108 France 5, 29, 64, 148, 151–152, 164, 192, 200,
Baltic countries 37 233, 260–261
Bar 127 Frankfurt/Main 47, 56
Basel 2–3, 6–7, 11–12, 37, 56, 70–71, 74,
83–84, 90, 97, 99, 108–109, 111–112, 114–115, Genoa 215
246, 267, 269–270, 277, 281, 284–285, 290 Germany 3–4, 6, 10, 18, 38, 52, 87,
Basel, Swiss canton 274 99, 132, 146, 158, 193, 198, 235–236,
Berlin 2–3, 5–7, 130, 255 243, 246, 251
Bern 69–70, 214, 280 Göppingen 146, 149, 150, 152, 155
Bern, Swiss canton 8, 69 Göttingen 166, 175, 177, 180
Birmingham 233 Graubünden, see Grisons
Bordeaux 5 Grindelwald 69
Brandenburg 11, 130–131, 252, 255, Grisons 8, 55, 61, 65
259, 264 Grübingen (also Gruibingen) 151
Bremen 258
Brieg, duchy 56 Hagenau 131
Brig 269, 281 Hamburg 49–50, 241
Britain 16 Hameln 50
Brunswick-Lüneburg, Hanau 44
duchy 257–260, 264 Hannover, electorate of Brunswick-
Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, principality 146 Hannover 11, 252–253, 258–260
Bütswil 202 Heidelberg 69, 261
Hemberg 202
Cana 105 Heskem 43
Chur 65 Hesse-Kassel, landgraviate 11, 44–45,
Colmar 39, 65, 191 252–254, 258–259, 261–265
Copenhagen 260 Hesse, Hessia 43–44, 131
Courland, duchy 259 Hildesheim 50
Dangolsheim 131 India 15–16
Darmstadt 44 Israel 127
Index Of Places 299
Italy 37, 40–41, 61, 198, 210–211, 215, 228, Prague 130

236, 240, 243 Prato 233
Prussia 35, 166
Jebenhausen 153
Regensburg 131
Kassel 255 Rhine 281
Kattenhochstatt 47 Rhine valley, Swiss
Kaysersberg 131–132 condominium 202
Kirchhain 55 Riga 54
Rome 39, 125
Landau 131 Rosheim 131–132
Latvia 37 Rotterdam 6–7
Lauingen 157–158
Lausanne 90, 269 Saxony 131, 147
Leipzig 166, 177, 179–180 Scandinavia 237
Leutkirch 39 Schaffhausen 35
Lichtensteig 191 Scherzlingen near Thun 72
Lithuania 37 Siena 39
Loreto 39 Silesia 56, 103
Low Countries, see also Simplon Pass 279–280
Netherlands 40 Sion 111
Lucerne 10 Sissach 274
Lucerne, Swiss canton 202–203 Solothurn 64, 66–68
Lützelstein 127 St. Gall 10, 84, 196, 202
Lyon 39 St. Gall, Swiss canton 201–202
St. Louis in Alsace 277
Mainz 43 Stausebach 37, 43–45, 53
Marburg 261 Strasbourg 37–38, 124, 131, 134–139,
Memmingen 227, 242–243 145, 160, 285
Metz 241 Stuttgart 146
Milan 215 Swabia 44
Monte Verità (Ticino) 4, 6 Sweden 52, 257, 259
Munich 4, 38, 55 Switzerland 2–4, 6, 8, 18, 40, 58–60,
64–65, 68–69, 73, 77, 79, 99, 119, 190,
Netherlands, see also Low Countries 1, 3, 193, 197–198, 202, 204
6, 18, 58, 88, 243
Nördlingen 150 Thorn 166
Nuremberg 126, 209, 214–215, 239 Thun 69, 72–73
Ticino, Swiss canton 4
Oberburg 69, 72 Toggenburg 191, 201
Oberehnheim (Obernai) 37, 127, 131 Toulouse 233
Öttingen 150 Tübingen (also Tubingen) 146–147, 203
Ouchy near Lausanne 269 Turkey 260
Tuscany 215
Padua 246 Tyrol 38
Palatinate, electorate 11, 153–154, 157,
252, 254, 259–261, 264 Ukraine 53
Paris 8, 55, 61–64 Ulm 39, 40–42, 135, 139, 160
Poland 53, 259 Uri, Swiss canton 104
300 Index of Places
Valais, Swiss canton 9, 97, 102–104 Wiesensteig 151

Venice 215, 260 Winterthur 88
Vienna 260 Wittelsberg 44
Visp 106 Worms 153
Württemberg 146–149, 153–154
Waibling 146 Würzburg 126
Wedelsheim 48
Weissenburg 47–48 Zurich 9, 61, 104, 106
Weissenstein 154–156 Zurich, Swiss canton 169

Claudia Ulbrich Mapping The I

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Mapping the ‘I’

Egodocuments and History Series

Arianne Baggerman (Erasmus University Rotterdam

James Amelang (Universidad Autónoma Madrid)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/egdo

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

1 From the Individual to the Person

6 Autobiographical Texts: Acting within a Network

7 Condemning Oneself to Death

9 Family and House Books in Late Medieval German-Speaking Areas

The present volume is the fruit of almost twenty years of cooperation

Kaspar von Greyerz

Thomas Max Safley

The general interest in autobiographical texts as sources of history has grown

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004283978_002

6 Dekker, Introduction, 7f.

materialized in Austria and Germany. Given the geographical size of Germany,

The present volume documents many years of a fruitful cooperation between

the title “Early modern autobiographical testimony. Categories, limits, research

on to propose the replacement of the notion of the individual, which is strongly

(Erfahrungsgeschichte) and the history of discourse. She concludes that a his-

Andreas Bähr’s essay, which follows, is committed to different methodologi-

by bankruptcy), he belonged to the socially and politically conservative part

Gabriele Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004283978_003

5 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

11 Gabriele Jancke, Autobiographie als soziale Praxis. Beziehungskonzepte in Selbstzeugnissen

17 On imaginations cf. Judith Schlehe, “Einleitung. Lebenswege und Sichtweisen im Übergang:

The classical notion that autobiography is closely related to individualiza-

28 In The Autobiographical Subject, Nussbaum has extensively analyzed the gender-specific

Gracious Reader, should my simple contribution, this Biechlin, come into

35 [“Großginstiger Lesser, so dihr mein einfeltiges Schreiben, dißes Biechlin, fihrkompt zu

Augustin Güntzer’s will to integrate himself into a lineage is certainly an

In particular when my God afflicts me with a cross to bear, affliction, per-

parts of Güntzer’s Kleines Biechlin. In these passages, with God, he negotiates

that the exploration of self in sixteenth-century France was made in con-

obstacle to self-definition was not embeddedness but powerlessness and

Against the universalizing notion of Western individualism, this introduces a

Connections, with their far-reaching intersections with social structures, thus

Kaspar von Greyerz

Early modern self-narratives – that is, autobiographies, diaries, family chroni-

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004283978_004

together the early modern society of estates, in monarchies as well as

What is self-writing? Self-writing refers to texts in which the “author him or

The five self-narratives to be introduced here are the autobiography of the

architect (Stadtbaumeister) of Ulm Joseph Furttenbach, the Stausebach chron-

found in the records of the Alsatian pewterer. He continuously interprets them

13 Reproduced ibid., 148 f.

“Die Privatbeichte im Luthertum von ihren Anfängen bis zu ihrer Auflösung,” in

otherwise seen in such concentrated form only in writings of seventeenth-

36 Eckhardt/Klingelhöfer, eds., Bauernleben, 35, n. 35.

40 Eckhardt/Klingelhöfer, eds., Bauernleben, 36 f.

Wedelsheim near Weissenburg. As a result, the author spent a childhood

48 Kantzenbach, Die Ansbacher Visionärin, 27 and 29.

In what follows, I will work from the German translation by Bertha

56 See the perceptive analysis of Jancke, “Die…Sichronot, Memoiren,” 120 f.

contribute to historiographically sharpening the profile of the early modern

If we turn to the apocalyptical thinking of this critical time, we are indeed

62 Cf. Andreas Holzem, “Zeit – Zeitenwende – Endzeit? Anfangsbeobachtungen zum

67 Hartmut Lehmann, “Die Kometenflugschriften des 17. Jahrhunderts als historische

explanation, as Furttenbach was a man of much higher social station. Without