Part 12 (1/2)
Among German Humanists, Charitas Pirkheimer, of Nurnberg, stands preeminent. Through her brother, Willibald Pirkheimer, the friend and generous patron of Albrecht Durer, Erasmus, and a host of lesser Humanists, Charitas corresponded with many renowned men. Christopher Scheurl, ”The Cicero of Nurnberg,” said that in all his life he had known only two women, the pious Ca.s.sandra of Venice and Charitas of Nurnberg, who, ”for their gifts of mind and fortune, their knowledge and high station, their beauty and their prudence could be compared with Cornelia, the mother of Laelius and Hortensius.” In a letter to Charitas, Scheurl praises her for ”preferring the book to the wool and the pen to the spindle.”
These literary preferences, however, did not spoil Charitas Pirkheimer for practical life. As abbess of Saint Clare's she showed great administrative ability. Her annual reports of receipts and expenditures are models of clearness and accuracy. To manage, without serious friction, a large nunnery composed wholly of aristocrats (only the daughters of Nurnberg patricians and n.o.bles were eligible as members) was no easy task. But Charitas seems to have made herself beloved and respected by every sister. She kept her nuns busy with such good result that Saint Clare tapestries became famous throughout Europe, and orders from private and civic patrons poured in faster than they could be filled.
No more splendid fight was ever made by any woman for conscience' sake than that of Charitas Pirkheimer to preserve the integrity of her convent after the storm of the Reformation broke over Germany. And in the fight she conquered. The Lutherans succeeded in closing the houses of every other conventual order, both male and female, in Nurnberg; but Saint Clare's, through the valor of its abbess, remained intact until the last nun died late in the century. But it was a long, a bitter, and, often, a humiliating fight that Mother Charitas waged. Persecution was continued for years. The abbess and her nuns were denied the sacraments and confession. Three Lutheran preachers in turn, one of them a coa.r.s.e, vile man, were installed at Saint Clare's. Spies were placed in the convent to see that the nuns ”did not put cotton into their ears to shut out the preaching.” The convent school was broken up and all revenues ceased. Poverty sorely pinched the women of the convent. Insulting rhymes and obscene pictures were flung over the walls of the garden. The maids sent out to buy bread were hooted and even roughly handled by brutal men and fanatical women. A letter which Charitas wrote to Jerome Emser, thanking him for his Defence of the Faith, was printed with scurrilous marginal notes. The day had not yet dawned when a woman could, ”with seemliness,” said Willibald Pirkheimer, ”enter the field of public disputation.” Pirkheimer told his sister, in somewhat brutal language, that she had ”better have held her woman's tongue.”
Just when the future looked most dark for Saint Clare's, Philip Melanchthon sweetest, calmest, sanest spirit of the Reformation came to Nurnberg. He visited his old friend, Charitas Pirkheimer, in her convent. ”Would to G.o.d,” Charitas writes afterward, ”that every one were as discreet as Master Philip. We might then hope to be rid of many things that are vexatious.” Melanchthon quietly put a stop to the persecutions of the convent. From the date of his visit Saint Clare's remained comparatively undisturbed.
It is easy to understand how the ”Evangelist of Art,” Albrecht Durer, and Charitas Pirkheimer could be, as they were, the closest of friends.
But Conrad Celtes, the Heine of the Renaissance, and the stately, pious abbess of Saint Clare's would seem, at first sight, to have little in common. Nevertheless, a warm and long-continued friends.h.i.+p existed between these two.
The ethical note of the Renaissance was first struck in Germany. Even Conrad Celtes (the one Humanist in the Italian the Lorenzo de' Medici sense of the term that Germany has ever produced) could not quite deaden the Teutonic conscience. Celtes's writings are full of questionings that are almost startlingly modern. ”Is there, really, a G.o.d?” ”Will the soul live after death?” ”What is the nature of the force that produces lightning?” Then, in the very next line perhaps, the poet lapses again into sensuality. ”There is nothing sweeter under the sun than a pretty maid in a man's arms to banish care.” ”This,” says Bezold, ”was Celtes's heart-confession, and he lived up to it.” Bezold adds: ”In spite of his voluminous correspondence with them, Celtes did not appreciate good women. He really knew only alehouse wenches.” In the light of Celtes's letters to Charitas Pirkheimer, it is hard to accept this harsh judgment unreservedly.
The Renaissance and the Reformation in Germany are so closely allied that it is difficult to separate one energy from the other. Mental and spiritual forces are not easily anch.o.r.ed to dates. For convenience, however, we may say that the German Renaissance lasted from 1450 to 1519 as a distinct movement, while the Reformation largely an outgrowth of the Renaissance fell between the years 1519 and 1560. With the beginning of the Reformation the brotherhood of humanistic scholars.h.i.+p was disrupted. To German women the national unrest brought heartache and soul bewilderment.
Charitas Pirkheimer was not the only woman to ”forget her s.e.x and mix in an unseemly manner in disputes about which only men are properly qualified to express an opinion.” Argula von Grumbach, friend of Spalatin and wife of an officer at the Bavarian court, also brought much sorrow upon herself by writing a spirited letter, which was printed by her friends and rejoiced in by her enemies.
Seehofer, a young Lutheran master at the university of Ingolstadt, was accused of proselyting the students. He presented to his cla.s.ses seventeen propositions which he had deduced from the writings of Melanchthon. The rector of the university, by imprisonment and by threats of the Inquisition, compelled the too zealous young Lutheran to recant. At this point, Argula an emotional, warmhearted, and talented woman took a hand in the affair. She wrote the rector an impertinent letter, in which she spoke of Seehofer as a ”mere child of eighteen,”
and, with refres.h.i.+ng confidence in her own powers of oratory, offered to come to Ingolstadt to defend, publicly, both the young master and his theses. The university authorities ignored this offer, but the Catholic cartoonists of the time made the most of it. From every quarter of Germany Argula was a.s.sailed in mocking rhymes, to which she replied in counter rhymes. The verses on both sides are rather bad, though the plucky little baroness holds her own fairly well. For her ”indiscreetness” Argula was banished from court; and her husband, ”for not controlling his wife properly,” was dismissed from his lucrative position at the palace.
The real strength of Protestant women, however, lay not with its excitable Argulas, but with firm, steady, sensible women like Catharine von Bora, who became Luther's wife. It seems almost unjust that a girl possessed of sufficient spirit and courage to propose to the man she loved should, for posterity, be forever submerged under the appended t.i.tle, ”his wife.” Catharine von Bora's individuality was marked. Her wise management, as wife and mother, seems phenomenal when we remember how suddenly she was transplanted from conventual to secular life, but no healthy young tree ever better stood removal from shade to sunlight.
Catharine von Bora was descended from a n.o.ble but impoverished family.
At the age of ten she was placed in the convent of Nimtsch, near Grimma.
At sixteen she became a nun. In 1523, under the influence of Luther's preaching, she, with eight of her sister nuns, left the convent secretly by night and fled to Wittenberg. For her apostasy, Catharine's family cast her off. Luther found her a comfortable home and did his best to provide her with a husband. But Catharine, who, says Erasmus, was ”a wonderfully pretty girl,” would not accept either of the two suitors Luther recommended. Amsdorf, Luther's envoy, argued with her upon her stubbornness. Whereupon, Catharine replied, calmly, ”I will not marry Glatz, but I will marry either you or Luther, if you want me.” She meant that she would marry Martin Luther, for she well knew that Amsdorf's affections were already placed elsewhere. Luther, though somewhat surprised at the turn things had taken, accepted Catharine's proposal and the nuptials were duly celebrated amid the remonstrances of the Reformer's friends and the derisive howls of his enemies.
”Antichrist only can be born from this unholy union of priest and nun,”
was the scandalized cry of the Catholics. To which Erasmus made sarcastic reply: ”Then there must have been a good many Antichrists born before now.”
An indisputable testimony to Catharine's kindly nature is the affection which old John Luther and his wife felt for their son's wife. Catharine bore good, as evil fortune, with dignity. Her head was never in the least turned by the popularity of her husband. When princes visited the humble home at Wittenberg, she received them with simple, well-bred courtesy. When beggars came she welcomed them with equal cordiality. She had much to contend against. They were poor and her husband was over generous, not only in hospitality, but in constantly giving away household effects which his family could ill afford to spare. Martin Luther, too, was a man of storms. A woman less firm and tactful than his beloved ”Kathie” could hardly have lived peaceably with him.
In the evil days that fell after Luther's death, his widow did not lose her courage. She struggled n.o.bly to support herself and children. She followed the usual heart-breaking course of poor widows in trying to make a living. She sewed; she kept boarders; she turned her hand, patiently, to any honest labor that offered itself. War, flight from pestilence, and then sudden death so runs the record of the last bitter years of Catharine von Bora's active, helpful, n.o.ble life.
While a handful of earnest women were studying, thinking, praying, fas.h.i.+onable women in Germany were doing just what fas.h.i.+onable women always have done everywhere in all ages, just what they were doing long ago in Athens when Aristophanes made clever sketches of them, they were eating and drinking sumptuously; riding, visiting, backbiting, getting their daughters married, and trying to outdo each other in giving costly entertainments. It was this mode of life that necessitated the pretty dresses, ”as many as two a day” against which Geiler of Kaisersberg railed.
Every little German princ.i.p.ality had its court, and in nearly all these courts corruption reigned. The Italian or the Frenchman may be gracefully, even captivatingly wicked. But in a German sensuality is invariably coa.r.s.e, p.r.o.nounced, and revolting. There is something fiercely t.i.tanic in a German's embrace of evil. The student, who, leaving the doings of kings and queens, untangles thread by thread the biography of lesser men and women connected with these old German courts, has before him entertainment for a lifetime. In each of these small court circles he will find stories of sin, pa.s.sion, and remorse, beside which the tales of a D'Annunzio, a Balzac, or a Zola seem mere inchoate records of childish bravado.
The enormous effect of vice upon the women of the Renaissance and Reformation periods cannot be ignored in any true picture of the time.
Man's l.u.s.t was an accepted factor of everyday life. Very early, as we have noted in a preceding chapter, houses of prost.i.tution were established and regulated by law. The woman superintendent put in charge of such a house was required to swear formally that she would ”serve the best interests of the city” loyally; _i. e._, she must increase the revenues. She swore to ”induce to come in as many girls as possible.”
The inmates of a house of prost.i.tution continued to wear a distinctive dress whenever they appeared on the streets. This uniform served a double purpose. It was a convenience to the men, and it prevented the girls from escaping easily. When a distinguished visitor came to town, he was, even during the Reformation period, sometimes taken, soon after his arrival, to one of these houses by the chief magistrate, and the prettiest girls sometimes richly dressed, sometimes naked were brought before him for choice. Even in some private houses a similar form of hospitality was shown to male visitors, the prettiest maids of the house being detailed to ”attend” such visitors.
The lot of a German workingwoman in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was very hard. Her hours of work were from sunrise to sunset.
If she lived in the country, she did all the ordinary housework for a large family; she planted and harvested, she attended to the cattle, she sheared the sheep, gathered the flax, spun and wove the linen and wool, bleached or dyed the finished cloth, and with her needle fas.h.i.+oned it into garments for her husband, her children, and herself. In the country, grand ladies often had workrooms where as many as three hundred girls were employed. A city workingwoman was shut out by the guilds from any remunerative labor. She could seldom earn more than her board, no matter how hard she might work. Women's wages, except for sin, were pitifully meagre. That the majority of German workingwomen did remain chaste in spite of the ever present temptations toward vice speaks volumes in praise of the German feminine character.
In both city and country, spinning was looked upon as woman's natural occupation. ”She was pious and spun” is a common epitaph upon sixteenth century tombstones in Germany. ”Let men fight and women spin,” preached Berthold von Regensberg. Almost as soon as a girl baby could walk she was taught to spin. Little Gertrude Sastrow, at the age of five, asked one day what the princes at the Diet did. Her brother replied: ”They determine what shall be done in the empire.” ”Then,” her brother relates, ”the little maiden at her distaff gave a deep sigh and said dolefully, 'Oh, good G.o.d, if they would only decree that little girls should not spin!”
Luther bitterly resented the accusation that his teachings were responsible for the Peasant's War. He declared, truly enough, that the peasants, long ground between the upper and nether millstones of an oppressive n.o.bility and a greedy merchant monopoly, had again and again revolted long before he was born. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Protestantism, as representing individualism, had much to do with the social upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Both the Renaissance and the Reformation, or rather, the underlying force which produced both, made tremendously for Democracy.
The peasant woman's lot was doubly hard. The horrible outrages committed upon her during war make one's blood run cold even now, after centuries have pa.s.sed. In time of peace, too often, she was considered little better than a beast of burden. Men of the peasant cla.s.s gathered hazy notions of the world and its doings at the alehouses. But the cat or dog upon the hearth was not more dumb, intellectually, than the average peasant woman. One searches the records of history in vain to find, during the Renaissance and Reformation periods, a single peasant woman anywhere in Germany who rose notably above her cla.s.s.
The influence of Marguerite of Austria, aunt, guardian, and closest adviser of Charles V. upon the destiny of Germany was incalculably great. That Charles, instead of his rival, Francis I. of France, was chosen emperor was mainly due to Marguerite's persistent efforts in behalf of her nephew, whom she idolized. Marguerite kept the Fuggers constantly on Charles's side a stroke of wisdom that carried the election. The life story of Marguerite of Austria, daughter of Maximilian and granddaughter of Charles the Bold, is almost unknown to English readers. It is worth telling at some length for it ill.u.s.trates an important phase in the history of German womanhood the way in which royal girls were disposed of in marriage.