The peasants of Professor Wunderli followed the calendar and its rhythms in an unbroken string of festivals and holidays in between weeks of work. An uneven schedule that managed he asserts to bind the sacred and profane in ritual on every occasion. This was the normal flow of things, Carnival before Lent was just the natural first expression in the year. The end of winter blowout followed by at least 42 days of fasting. Binge and purge, play the fool maybe and get a little sloppy and then through penance, build dignity and frame it all in sacred structure. And within it remains the disparate and different roles of the elite clergy, the friars and so on, on the one hand and the peasant folks with their roles and humors on the other.
But what is most gracefully placed into this mix of sacred calendric structure, expectations, intentions, and some of class differences is what he calls enchanted time. Fantasy justice - what peasants might wish to happen and which during festival might get to be portrayed temporarily in uproarious, hysterical, hyperbolic buffoonery and then laughed at. Not real justice, fantasy justice and for a limited time. For show and not for real, but to be laughed at and then forgotten. Carnival was fun like that and then it was over. Enchanted time was over, until the next festival. Even Easter or Christmas it was not uncommon to show ridiculous portrayals before mass or during a feast afterwards.Next day, everyone went back to work. Carnival was over and work and penance and Lent lay stretched out for the next six weeks.
Lent of course in the middle ages was scrupulously kept and all over Europe, ministers and monks, friars and pastors knew their qudragesimale. Forty sermons meant to encourage the fervent with their individual penances. Forty or more different ways to nudge and coax and scold and convince the faithful to abide, to stay strong.
To stay strong, obedient and faithful and not slip back into enchanted time, into temptation.
"The message of Lent was to seek poverty of temporal material goods in order to gain eternal spiritual salvation. For many people in medieval Europe, particularly peasants, poverty was the normal condition of their everyday existence. Lent only justified and sanctified their misery. The great pilgrimage to Niklashausen was preached by a peasant shepherd, Hans Behem, for a peasant audience with the same Lenten message of 'sacred poverty' that friars had preached for centuries." p.29
Since Wunderli thinks the general uprising here was a general one from the surrounding area, he says, and the poverty of a peasant then being what it was, then it must have been their material condition that gave them a 'peculiar worldview' that led them to believe in and follow this shepherd. So because of what he said and their own material condition, they were led to rise up in the way they did.
During Lent the author describes what peasants didn't have: land, a sword, his own choice in clothing, often the privilege to make one's own decisions for his or her own life. Rent was due before subsistence food, tolls and tithes and taxes, too. The lords could claim it all with brute force if need be. To hunt or fish required privileges barred from peasants. Education too. You want to get to marry or have a child, go ask the lord. So there were many lessons about what peasants couldn't have.
Wunderli chooses the stereotype of the penny-pinching beggar, 'quibbling over farthings' as an apt one for this time and place. A struggle might offer some time with head above water for the many, but only with struggle. More likely they were stricken in disease or accident, bad medicine or the wars of the lords or the markets that came and went disrupting the natural flow of things. No wonder the peasant was hard at bargaining he says, -- it could mean the difference between survival and the fate of the many fallen.
"A change in routine, say, a gamble on a new crop, might bring a better life, but if it failed, a peasant household could face ruin and starvation. Just as they quibbled at the marketplace, peasants were forced daily to make tough-minded, rational choices over their existence; and their peasant-reason told them to live and farm in the old traditional, way. Peasants had to construct mental hedges around their materially constructed lives to protect themselves from change and disaster." p. 32
The lords saw it as a zero-sum game and so the peasants necessarily had to as well. There was no free land or streams or wood or food or shelter or medicine or education. "The rich prospered only at expense of the poor... if anybody gained in land or food, everybody else was deprived by the same amount.... One eye of the peasant was on available resources and the other on his neighbor's holdings. Land could not expand and grow; it could only be bought and sold or divided among heirs.... if populations increased, as it did after about 1450, then we would expect tensions to have sharpened between neighbors, between peasants and lords, between peasants and non-laboring clergy, as people struggled for land and food." p. 33.
How did they get through it, Wunderli asks on the next page. Together, at least, they had each other. And sermons every day if you could make it there. They lived their lives publicly. Everybody knew when there were pregnancies and marriages and births and deaths. Adultery was dealt with by the community and so were sicknesses. More tensions. histories of tensions. And resolutions. Norms were maintained by laughter as well as scorn and shame. If you had something new you must have stolen it from someone else, so why act so important? In making attitudes real for his audience, he gets right in there.
The author forces us to ask these questions for the peasant as their words weren't written down. Still, any model he warns us, may include 'stray fragments' of what they said, may come from models based on modern studies about peasants, but also must be based "... on our intuitions of what sort of mental structures might arise from material existence." p. 33.
He sees them as "...trapped, socially, economically, politically, and mentally in their own peasant world of poverty.... a 'culture of poverty'...". p. 34
Of course there was solace in poverty. Homo agricola sum. "I am a farmer" was the beginning of one of Jacques Vitry's Sermones Vulgares, extolling the virtues of poverty as the same as that of the apostles. Yes, famous popular sermons from 200 years before were part of the movement that began with Franciscans and Dominicans and a revolt against material corruption within the church. Hard work, Vitry would say was good but only because it enabled the penance of sin. Poverty was an even older Christian tradition going back to the desert hermits.
"Only the poor could free themselves from dependence on the world in order to be dependent only on God." p. 36.
Poverty was absolutely seen as a Christian value, not a stigma to be rejected. If the poor lived holy lives, like those who took vows of poverty and entered cloisters or nunneries and monasteries, they could still feel dignified in their faith while fretting less about their clothing. Not exactly holy but, like it, aspiring to it, but without the costume. But there were bonfires too in this season to throw out one's worldly goods. Purge senseless dependence, shed the cares of accumulated weight. Give it up for God.
It was still all the rage in Europe in those days for people to give it all up and travel around begging for subsistence as if they themself were God. Male mendicants, female Beguines would ask a favor or an offering or a piece of bread and say a prayer, a rosary or promise to. Everywhere from place to place. They practiced poverty as did the hermits and those gathered together in convents and monasteries if that was their order.They gave example as to what poverty was supposed to look like. Wunderli suggests, many travelling friars liked to lampoon and make mockery of authority figures. p. 37.
Our author calls this a 'cult of poverty' that ran through the length of Christianity tracing its way back to Christ and continuing in the present with sects like the Franciscans and Dominicans. Franciscans had developed their preaching and in time diverged internally with Conventuals and Observants who either did or did not own property. The Observants were those who did not own property and by their own admission were thus closer to the sacred ideal of poverty. Thus closer to God. The Franciscans and Dominicans were also devotees of and expounders of the cult of Mary. This is the time when, Wunderli tells us the cult of poverty crossed paths with the actual culture of poverty. [p.39]
It had long been the practice of travelling friars to come and preach against worldliness. John of Capistrano was one in the generation before who preached in Nurnburg. Tens of thousands came to hear him. The visits ended with giant bonfires with the crowds encouraged to cast off their worldly extras. Savonarola would do much the same in the generation after.
All quotes from Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen by Richard Wunderli, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1992.
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