Lent lasted til Easter which is usually in early-mid April. At the end of April, in southern Germany the locals held Walpurgisnacht, a pre-summer festival asking for good harvests, happy births, mild weather and also to chase out witches and bad spirits. Wunderli explains the origins of the Walburga cult, her significance especially as protectress against plague and hunger. [p.47]
The bonfires and the praying and the braying were meant to scare off the bad spirits that brought plague, hunger, infertility, sin.
This was no minor concern. Less than 130 years before had been the great plague of 1348 and that had returned again and again in the interval since. In Germany it has been estimated nearly a fourth of all German towns had been abandoned opening up huge tracts of land with fewer people left to work them. This meant less harvested and less done overall and less revenue for government and churches. It took many decades to work these crucial concerns out in every place. But the new stasis that had developed in Germany, by the 1460's-70's, unsurprisingly left the poor peasants poorer and the landlords, the churches, monasteries and the cities generally better off.
Quickly, in a few short sketches, Wunderli has laid out a clear picture of the socio-economic life after the plague years, the resolutions, advances, continuing problems [pp 51-4].
This year, 1476, some time after Walpurgisnacht, pilgrims began arriving in Niklashausen, the sleepy little town near the Tauber River in southern Germany. Lots of pilgrims. All who wanted to hear, to see, to touch the young drummer who had been a shepherd and now spoke the commands of the Virgin Mary. By early June the local bishop was writing to the archbishop of Mainz about this character and the great crowds that had come to hear him speak. By the end of June, Archbishop Dieter was ordering the infecting disruption to be squashed before it could spread [pp 48-9]. Like the plague.
Where we might ask Why or How this might happen, Wunderli very carefully explains that this is not the question the locals asked.
To understand what they thought and felt, he says, we have to ask their questions rather than ours.
Rather than What or How, they asked Who. Who was the festival in honor of? Who brought the plague or pestilence or hunger and misery? Who could make it better?
This year, a drummer, a shepherd said that Mary Mother of God had spoken to him and said that the snows would melt and sure enough, they did. He said people should give up their belongings that held them to this world of excess and God would protect them if they made a pilgrimage in the name of Mary to Niklashausen. Again, the what or why or how was obvious to people in those days, but not who, for whom? When this 'who' became clear, for Mary, for this drummer her chosen spokesman, then it was obvious to them what they should do. Salvation demanded the why, pilgrimage answered the how. Once the answer to the question, 'who was this for' became clear,-- for Mary, the drummer, themselves -- the peasants knew what to do [pp. 55-59].
Wunderli gives a quote from Georg Widman many years later and adds:
Pilgrimages were common in those days. Today people don't go on pilgrimage, or pine and look forward to a time when we can. Instead, we go on vacation."Stableboys left their horses, taking the bridles with them, he said; reapers left their reaping, carrying their scythes; women ceased haying in the middle of their fields, and came to Niklashausen with their rakes; wives left their husbands, husbands left their wives; children left their parents. Common people from all over central and south Germany -- from Saxony, the Rhineland, Hesse, Thuringia, Swabia, Bavaria, and, of course, Franconia -- simply dropped what they were doing and went to Niklashausen.Widman insinuated that the pilgrims were attracted by cheap wine from roadside taverns and the promiscuous sex in the barns and the fields where the pilgrims slept. His analysis may betray elitist, clerical fantasies and disdain for common folk, but he was correct about the type of people who became pilgrims. With few exceptions they were peasants and peasant-artisans. What was so frightening to authorities -- those who Widman spoke for -- was that those people took to the road to Niklashausen and did not ask anybody's permission, not from their landlords to leave work, not from their priests to go on a pilgrimage. Social rank and obligations just seemed to dissolve." [pp 47-8]
In those days, a pilgrimage was usually a purposeful trek to a specific place. A holy place where salvation might be found if the pilgrim was penitent and open to God's true teaching. Wunderli gives us penetrating insight here as well, leading us into the mysteries of what a pilgrimage held for the common person in those days [pp. 59-66]. Just as a pilgrimage site was a holy place designed to overwhelm and satisfy the penitent, the act of going as a pilgrim was itself a holy act. Their concept of the world, -- and people's place in it, the priests and chroniclers are quick to assure us -- was clearly marked out. All was God's creation but not all for people to understand. Yes, there was sin and guilt to keep people's vulgar ambitions in check. God created it but the devil ruled, temporarily, even their bodies. Any action, any gust of wind, a bad harvest, a bad actor, a rock, could hide or reveal the work of the devil. The devil kept people from salvation. Pilgrimage and indulgences could temporarily release people from the devil's sway. It was that simple and far-reaching.
A pilgrimage site remains interesting to us for what remains and what it reveals but more so, Wunderli tells us, was the effect for the pilgrim, at the holy site in the act of penitence.
"Pilgrimage sites indeed were holy places, and they all had one thing in common: they were the site of a past miracle which could recur at any moment. At a pilgrimage shrine a breach had opened in the veil that separates heaven and earth, a tear in the fabric that would not be closed. It was as if a heavenly ray -- here we must imagine, with medieval artists, a ray breaking through the clouds -- were shining from heaven on a specific earthly location. Anybody who entered the holy spotlight partook directly of the miraculous, for the light was filled with the unseen presence of a saint, or Christ, or the Virgin. Within this heavenly ray, a pilgrim could find the healing powers that only God, His family, and His companions could provide.
The point... was, and is, movement: from the mundane to the mysterious, from normal time and space to enchanted time and space, from homes and familiar surroundings to the unfamiliar 'light' of a holy place. this is an act of free choice ... pilgrimage is an act of liberation, not just from sin, but also from the everyday social bonds that hold people in ranks of obedience. A pilgrimage may be made without the sanction of clergy; and grace may be received at a holy site directly from heaven without the intercession of clergy.... bishops and princes were suspicious of pilgrimages.... something inherently populist, anarchical, and even anticlerical about them." [pp 60-1].
Our author goes further into the nature of the whole process of pilgrimage, using a number of examples to describe the 'liminal' nature of movement from one realm to another. Like a shoreline or that between shadow and light, the movement between the two also could be called holy and not subject to regular, temporal, earthly laws. The whole pilgrimage was often understood as such. The site and the travel were social levelers as well. In awe of the site and its wonders or on the road, travelling as pilgrims to the site, part of the petition and penitence being also holy, sacrosanct, all of it a rite of passage and all of them on that road considered the equal of everyone else. A pilgrim goes "... shorn of status or rank, to find salvation for themselves and their loved ones, to heal their souls from sin and guilt, and to heal their bodies from pain. A pilgrim is integrated with the Holy, not with society, which is why a spontaneous pilgrimage can be so dangerous for rulers: pilgrims are responsible to no one but God..." [pp 61-2].
But despite what it meant or how awesome the experience, the transaction was usually much more concrete. At a pilgrimage site, in those days, indulgences were usually sold for money or valuables. Relief from guilt or misery, however it was manifested was purchased. The tradition of church officials or their proxies selling indulgences came officially from the 11th century when only the pope could offer an indulgence for remission of sin. These were later farmed out to Bishops and then Monasteries and then eventually to any humble church or rustic pilgrimage site that might apply. Niklashausen had such a Marian pilgrimage site which was where Hans Behem our shepherd, our drummer began to be sought out by early May.
In the thirteenth century theologians explained that an indulgence was technically a return for services rendered. If an applicant did something for the church, then the church would enlist the aid of its treasury to intercede on the applicant's behalf. This intercession came from the wide population of living and dead saints, from Christ, from Mary. They could provide aid, relief from pain, bread, remission of sin. They could even aid the applicant or reduce hardship for them when they reached Purgatory. But first you had to make an offer and then ask what you wanted. [pp 62-4]
But this shepherd said that he had the power to grant salvation, the remission of sins and so on. Pilgrims didn't need to go to Rome they could come to Niklashausen instead and also that Purgatory, he thought was an invention of the church. People thought they could steal a bit of his cloak or touch him or hear him and they would be healed. A pilgrimage to Niklashausen sounded like a great deal, for relief, for salvation. [p. 64-5]
Pilgrims could also be a very sad lot. Examples are given [pp 65-6]. On p. 67 he gives a long quote from chronicler Georg Widman from the late 1540's and pp 68-70 tell old abbot Johann Trithemius' version published in 1514 in Wurzburg. Told as an errant fool's tale. Certainly something not to do.
The next holiday that Wunderli organizes his subject around was the feast of Corpus Christi. Rather than a local, early summer holiday, this one came six weeks later, mid-June, and was designed instead to bring sanctity to the city and its established power by showing the continued centrality of the church.
There was a procession, the Eucharist was carried by the ministers of the bishop out of the church and through the streets of the city and out the gates into the countryside. The local bishop was in Wurzburg and he had virtual control of that city as well as the surrounding bishopric that included Niklashausen [pp 72-3].
Rudolph von Sherenberg, the current bishop of Wurzburg was not the first bishop who had control of the city [pp 78-82]. Wunderli tells the story of that and how dependent and subject the city was on the acts of the reigning bishop: here he picked the mayor, he held the power of the purse, he could marshal armies. If he was corrupt the city fell into debt. If he got the city out of debt it was due to levies and taxes and tithes paid by the people, not by the church or even public servants.
This bishop was a reformer and a 'reformer' in that day and age meant that a past church was always better than a present church. There was a past Golden Age when everyone was more pure and good and a good reforming bishop led the way to emulate and regain those prior virtues of morality and spiritual purity [p 77]. Rudolph lasted nearly thirty years and tried to be responsible but had inherited a great deal of debt as his predecessor was hopelessly corrupt and warlike. Constant news of the hordes in June moving through his city, across the Main and west to Niklashausen, was deeply troubling to such a reformer. But so was the concentration of wealth in Jewish hands to this bishop [pp 83-5].
"So, on June 13, Corpus Christi Day, the day that Bishop Rudolph was given full authority to stop the Drummer, the bishop marched in a procession of power, authority and hierarchy. First came the mendicant friars, followed by monastic clergy, both as escorts to the secular clergy, who were led by the bishop, who in turn carried a vessel containing the Eucharist.... Then came the town council, the masters of the crafts, and so on, down to the servants of the burghers. Nobody doubted that Bishop Rudolph was the most powerful man in Wurzburg and its surrounding countryside." [pp 73-4].
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all quotes from Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen by Richard Wunderli, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1992.
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