Norbert Schindler. Rebellion, Community and Custom in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiv + 311 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-65010-6.

Reviewed by Eileen Crosby (Independent Scholar)
Published on H-German (December, 2004)

Eavesdropping on the Past

Norbert Schindler's essay collection, newly translated into English, analyzes a variety of ordinary and extraordinary happenings in the towns and villages of early modern Germany. He interweaves these case studies with a sustained commentary on the methodological issues facing historians of "popular culture." In doing so, he demonstrates that careful, penetrating investigations of utterance, interaction, and ritual are still an effective means of deepening our understanding of human experience in the past--however one wishes to categorize those investigations. Although a general argument loosely links these essays, one cannot help feeling that Schindler's purpose in the book is more to provide new models for writing history than to make new arguments: these essays reach out to historians writing in the historical-anthropological tradition, imploring them to consider more carefully the contexts of historical change in which the phenomena they analyze occurred. At the same time, Schindler appears to want to reach a broader audience of cultural and social historians, demonstrating how techniques of close reading along with serious engagement of the insights of scholars outside history can illuminate dimensions of the past that may once have seemed forever obscure.

As the book jacket reminds us, Schindler is "the leading exponent of historical anthropology" and "a founding member of the journal Historische Anthropologie." This collection, first published in German in 1992 under the title Widerspenstige Leute, comes with a newly written introduction for the English translation. Schindler's introduction places his work in the context of two scholarly debates: the one, German and deeply political; the other, international and methodological. Schindler ultimately rejects both political and theoretical objections to the study of popular culture, arguing that "theoretical debates completely detached from our own research experience ... tend to lead nowhere" and that merely distancing ourselves from use of the terms "popular" or "the people" does not bring us any closer to understanding how those categories emerged or what they meant to those who first used them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (p. 6). Admitting that microhistorical studies can lapse into "navel-gazing," Schindler favors a more self-conscious and methodologically precise approach to sources, urging practitioners to locate those moments where "inexplicable anomalies arise" and discover the "normality" of "deviant" acts and behaviors (p. 7). Historical anthropologists have also been criticized for letting reconstruction of the internal logic of events or phenomena take precedence over consideration of historical change. A great strength of these essays is that they do not fall into the trap of analyzing only the internal logic of the phenomena under consideration. Schindler instead places most of his case studies within the contexts of broader patterns and well-known arguments about early modern society, ones concerning aristocratic decline, urbanization, reformed Catholicism, and the objectification of lord-subject relations, among others. By keeping his gaze on each event or phenomenon itself, however, he avoids letting his investigations "becom[e] ... functionalist ... repair shop[s] for macrohistorical problems" (p. 8).

Schindler is well aware of the irony present in his decision to follow his eloquent call for renewed attention to "the history of those ... whose own voices still go unheard" with an essay on the well-chronicled life of a sixteenth-century nobleman (p. 14). He makes clear, with a gesture to David Sabean's work on Herrschaft, however, that his real interest is not in any specific social group, but in the relationships among groups, and, specifically, in the individual and collective actions taken to erect and maintain relationships of authority. Schindler's interest in the anomalous case is clearly what drew him to the story of Count Gottfried Werner von Zimmern of Messkirch. He begins his inquiry by pointing to a number of apparent contradictions in the count's behavior: why would the product of an illustrious, if declining, family lovingly care for his own sword and armor while ordering his father's jousting equipment melted down for its metals? Was there a reason, aside from eccentricity, for the count's disproportionate spending on elaborate building projects and ivory compasses? What led the same man who had cultivated the skills of courtier in his youth--presumably subtlety and self-control among them--to, axe in hand, attack a peasant caught stealing pigs? Schindler explains the first two apparent contradictions by pointing to von Zimmern's failure to produce a legitimate heir. Family history became meaningless, and von Zimmern was determined to pass on as little wealth as possible to a cousin's branch of the family. This explanation reminds us that generalizations about "aristocratic behavior" not grounded in specific biographies might easily reach erroneous conclusions. Schindler places Gottfried's violence in a broader context, arguing that the first decades of the sixteenth century were transitional ones for the European nobility, which had not yet perfected reliable techniques of social distancing and whose local authority always depended on face-to-face encounters and threats (at least) of violence. Schindler's vivid anecdotal material--one of the strengths of the case-study approach--illustrates the point well.

Other essays address less obvious exercises of power, such as the custom of nicknaming. Nicknaming was an insiders' practice that gained much of its power from its ability to exclude those who could not get the joke. While apparently driven by the need to distinguish among people with like Christian names in the increasingly populous and diverse urban centers of the sixteenth century, the practice also afforded rich opportunities to comment on the behavior of others. The expression of values evident in nicknaming, argues Schindler, ran counter to what elites might have hoped for or expected. Popular nicknames for well-known thieves and burglars, for example, exhibited clever word-play, but not disapproval, while the local whores' nicknames often alluded to the family history that led to their eventual vocation, rather than expressing chastisement.

By examining the relationships of specific groups of non-elites to members of the local elite, Schindler avoids implying that any one, socially coherent group was the carrier of popular culture. Similarly, Schindler's essay on carnival and "the world turned upside down" succeeds in describing conflicts over the control of meaning without reducing the participants in those conflicts to representatives of particular socio-economic or socio-legal groups. Schindler's interest is in the carnival inversion of religious rites and he is sharply critical of those in the German folklorist tradition who see carnival antics as ultimately under the control of and in the service of ecclesiastical authorities. Schindler's alternative emphasizes the opportunities for give-and-take that imposing meaning on carnival rituals provided. A well-chosen case study of a mock religious procession in Reformation Lüneburg supplies concrete illustration of the struggle over meaning that Schindler wants us to see.

Schindler then turns to the role of humor in early modern public discourse, chastising German folklorists for ignoring the contributions to this subject of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. As with carnival symbols, Schindler's interest is in the ambiguity of humorous acts and events and with the contests over meaning they produced. This focus on ambiguity serves well to bolster the recurring argument of this collection, which is that a kind of dialogue could and did take place in the Reformation era, one that often transcended socio-legal and socio-economic interpersonal boundaries. With the institutionalization of both Protestant and Reformed Catholic churches, the possibility of such dialogue--the space for it--narrowed almost to non-existence. It is here that Schindler states most clearly the larger argument that frames these essays and the reason for his interest in this period in European history: "the historical interlude of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries [was] the great age of popular culture" (p. 133). It was a time "when the hold of the church, with its hostility to the senses, began to loosen and the economic circumstances of the lower classes improved" and "before the disciplining of the senses and the rigid conditioning of the body by the new alliance of church and state set in at the end of the sixteenth century" (p. 133). Schindler is on firm ground in demonstrating the existence of a richly comic, irreverent, energetic public life in the sixteenth century, but it is more difficult within the confines of this work to demonstrate the absence of such a culture before the fifteenth century or its decline after the sixteenth. Although reminders of this cultural transformation are what hold this work together, readers may need to look beyond these essays before deciding if that transformation was as profound as Schindler and others believe.

In his next case study, Schindler turns to an investigation of how the custom of "pulling the plough" changed in the course of the early modern period. This Ash Wednesday ritual, widespread in German-speaking Europe before the Reformation, allowed the young men of a town or village to harness all the unmarried local women to a plough or a "block" (a large log) and force them to pull it through the streets. Departing from a straightforward interpretation of the ritual as a manifestation of the patriarchalism of the era, Schindler argues that the custom could give women a chance to prove their strength and solidarity. Schindler's discussion of the transformations enacted on the custom after the Reformation provides the essay's most instructive moments. Some refashionings of the ritual fused it with the carnival staging of mock weddings and marriages in which gender roles were fully reversed. One consequence was that the ritual could be readily appropriated as a vehicle for criticizing the new, more demanding marital norms that accompanied the Reformation. Other revisions eliminated the harnessing and pulling stage altogether, emptying the custom of its original meaning and leaving both participants and later folklorists to speculate about the metaphorical meanings of incorporating a block of wood (a tree) into the marriage ceremony. Schindler is particularly disturbed by these interpretations, not just because they reveal the nineteenth-century folklorists' predilection for finding agricultural and fertility rites in any rural custom, but also because they left later students of rural life ready to assume that almost any custom dated from "time immemorial." This essay gives Schindler a platform on which to demonstrate his distance from the folklorist tradition by showing that investigations of ritual practices need not and should not ignore historical change.

Change is also at the heart of the fifth essay, "Nocturnal Disturbances," which concentrates on the activities of groups of young men. Schindler points to the presence of a "subliminal consensus" between village adults and youth in the face of ecclesiastical authorities' attempts to suppress youthful nocturnal adventures (p. 206). When this consensus broke down in the eighteenth century, it had a parallel in the way propertied urban families distanced themselves from the violence of journeymen and other frequenters of town taverns. This general pattern of social realignment in Europe is well known to those familiar with, for instance, Keith Wrightson and David Levine's work.[1] Although Schindler's essays are heavily footnoted, readers will look in vain for data to back up statements such as "the violence of confrontations diminish[ed] markedly between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries" (p. 214). Schindler's strength in this work is instead his ability to squeeze meaning out of superficially insignificant events and phenomena.

In his final study, Schindler sets out to read the records of the Zaubererjackl witchcraft trials (1675-90) "against the grain," looking for what they can reveal about the lives of the beggars who were the main targets of prosecution (p. 238). A note to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Carlo Ginzburg reminds us of the relative newness of his approach in the late 1980s.[2] Schindler's reading of the trial records tries to reconstruct a beggar culture in which necessity and opportunity led men and women to rely on a combination of begging, wage work, prostitution, and theft. Arguing against views that impute a "magical world-view" (p. 285) to the beggar population, Schindler places responsibility for the extreme violence of the Zaubererjackl trials firmly with the "Counter-Reformation church," which, by insisting on a "strict separation of the sacred and the profane ..., no longer had room for free-roaming beggars" (p. 282). Schindler ascribes the apparent willingness of some of the alleged witches, two-thirds of whom were male and one third of whom were under age sixteen, to admit to acts of sorcery during their interrogations to a coincidence of beggars' fantasies of power, on the one hand, and the fears of their powers, on the other, within communities that were institutionally and morally ill-equipped to respond constructively to a growing and more aggressive population of beggars and vagabonds.

Schindler's afterword assesses the influence of E. P. Thompson (to whom these essays owe a great deal) on German historical scholarship both before and after Thompson's death in 1993. With its clear aim at Schindler's German contemporaries, the afterword begs a return to the question of the intended audience for this collection. For those already familiar with close studies of early modern town and village life in Germany, many of Schindler's questions and hypotheses seem to cover well-trod ground. For newcomers to the social and cultural history of early modern German-speaking Europe, Schindler's work poses difficulties. This is because Schindler engages ideas such as Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus and Winfried Schulze's juridification argument without fully explaining how he understands those ideas. In this regard, Schindler's work is not introductory. It is a book written for insiders that will likely be read by outsiders: if this inspires the latter to read more deeply in the literature that shaped the historical-anthropological approach, perhaps that is not such a bad thing. But perhaps the readership that Schindler and his publisher most had in mind are those actively engaged in close studies of early modern English and American social life. As those engaged in such work know, cross-fertilization between these scholars and their fellow historians of continental Europe is still only an occasional event. If this collection opens up new lines of exchange, it would be, likewise, not a bad thing.

Notes

[1]. Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (New York: Academic Press, 1979).

[2]. For more recent inquiries into bureaucratic narratives, see Peter Becker and William Clark, eds., Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

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Citation: Eileen Crosby. Review of Schindler, Norbert, Rebellion, Community and Custom in Early Modern Germany. H-German, H-Net Reviews. December, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10056

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