Daily Life During The Reformation (4 page)

Many in the movement of 1525 thought of it as part of the
Reformation and would have taken it for granted that it was appropriate to
apply God’s law as perceived by Luther to economic, political, and social
abuses; but many felt betrayed by Luther’s condemnation. Their political agenda
sought to remove the Catholic clergy, and, for some, to remove the aristocracy
from positions of worldly authority. They sought greater autonomy for villages
and more power for urban and rural commoners in the representative assemblies
of the states. There were attempts in southwestern Germany to adhere to the
model of the neighboring Swiss Confederation or programs modeled on
contemporary working political institutions such as peasant estates in Denmark
and Sweden with representative assemblies.

At the end of the revolt, little had changed except that
the population had been greatly bloodied and reduced.

JEWS

The situation for Jews in the sixteenth century was
lamentable. They had been expelled from various European countries under
terrible conditions and forced to seek refuge primarily in North Africa, the
Ottoman Empire, and Eastern Europe.

Many Jews, forced to flee the Iberian Peninsula under the
fanatical, insensate Queen Isabella in 1492, settled in Holland, especially
Amsterdam, where they were granted freedom of worship. In southern France, they
lived mainly in the port cities of Bordeaux and Bayonne, while in the German
city of Hamburg, Jews were welcomed and permitted to openly practice their
faith, although, as in Frankfurt and other places, they were restricted to
living in a ghetto.

Although some converted Jews would play a part in the
Reformation movement as teachers, printers, writers, editors, and publishers,
most had no appreciable role and only suffered the consequences.

In 1553, Pope Julius III displayed his anti-Jewish
disposition declaring the Talmud sacrilegious and blasphemous and placing it on
the Index of Forbidden Books, and some years later Pope Pius V expelled the
Jews from all Papal States except Ancona.

In Augsburg, they were forbidden to mix with Christians,
such act being, in theory, punishable by death.

The pressure was always there to convert to Christianity.
Defamation of Jews as morally and socially degenerate and their isolation and
abuse caused bitterness and hatred between Jew and Christian. Horror stories
about Jews killing Christian infants, poisoning wells, bringing on the plague,
desecrating the host by stealing wafers and burning them in the conviction that
they were destroying Christ himself, and impugning the Virgin Mary, always
appealed to a large audience.

Such stories circulated at all levels of society and were
subjects of sermons by coarse and ignorant monks trying to stir up passions
among the populace.

The Jews and Luther

In Luther’s early days, he seemed sympathetic to the plight
of Jews, knowing that Jesus himself was a Jew; and Jews who were aware of the
first stirrings of the Reformation welcomed it because it was dividing their
persecutors. Giving them false hopes while trying to win them over to his
cause, Luther stated that they should be treated in a friendly manner, hoping
that a policy of toleration would yield converts.

Failing to convert them en masse, however, he became
vindictive, his anti-Jewish sentiments emerging in his article, “Concerning the
Jews and their Lies,” published in 1543. Here, he asserted that no Jews,
heretics, Turks, heathens, false Christians, and hypocrites could be saved
without embracing the congregation of the faithful. He further urged people to
burn down Jewish schools and synagogues, confiscate their texts, and if this
did not succeed in converting them, they should be expelled.

Jews came to realize that neither Catholic nor Protestant
could be trusted. In his later years, Luther saw the Jews and Turks as allied
in a conspiracy to destroy the Holy Roman Empire on orders of the devil. For
him, Jews clinging obstinately to their own faith presented a rebellion against
God who had already punished them with continued misery.

One of Luther’s last recorded statements accused Jewish
doctors of poisoning their patients and offered advice to his successors that
“if the Jews refuse to be converted, we ought not to suffer them or bear with
them any longer.”

Despite Luther’s anti-Jewish stance, members of his own
circle included many who maintained a friendly approach to the Jews. One, the
noted theologian Andreas Oslander, issued a pamphlet anonymously discrediting
the libel and superstitious defamation.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the
Counter-Reformation sought to strengthen Catholicism and the papacy, many of
the regulations against Jews were tightened and increased.

Sixteenth-century German communities, which still permitted
Jews to cohabit with Christians, also found ways to degrade them. In Frankfurt,
4,000 Jews were confined to a ghetto and treated as criminals. They could not
leave except on important business, and two could not walk together. They were
obliged to soften their voices so as not to offend Christian ears, and special,
identifying badges with such symbols as an ass, a dragon, or garlic, had to be
worn on their clothes and attached to their houses.

WOMEN OF THE REFORMATION

The average life span for women of the times was about 24
years. Lack of sanitation was the primary cause of death. Giving birth at home,
with only an often-inexperienced midwife in attendance and little thought of
hygiene, endangered both mother and baby and often had fatal results. Girls
would be married as early as the age of 12, and five, six, or seven children
were often the result—each one a potential death threat. About 12 percent of
young women whose parents found it a burden to feed them and with no suitor in
sight were incarcerated in convents. Upper class women of impoverished families
could suffer the same fate.

While the great majority of women were illiterate peasants,
strongly attached to their village priests, and reluctant or slow to change their
allegiance from the Catholic to the Protestant Church, others of noble birth,
educated and enlightened, as were some of the wives and friends of reformers,
had a significant impact on the Reformation and helped shape the events of the
time. They were able to read the scriptures for themselves and make their own
judgments.

After years of convent life, for example, Katharina von
Bora became intrigued by the growing reform movement. She was 18 when Martin
Luther issued his 95 Theses from Wittenberg, and unhappy at the convent, she
plotted with several other nuns to escape. Secretly contacting Luther, the
women pleaded for his assistance. On the eve of Easter 1523, he sent someone to
rescue them. The nuns escaped by hiding in a covered wagon amidst fish barrels
and fled to Wittenberg. Katharina eventually married Luther.

Her dedication to the welfare of her husband and to her
household would have been typical of the women of the times; up before dawn,
she worked into the night maintaining the animals and crops on their land,
cooking, washing, gardening, and looking after the many guests who came to see
her husband. Similarly, wives of artisans or merchants were often partners in
the business, as well as managers of affairs at home. They kept accounts and
records of other business matters that might be required while their husbands
concerned themselves with production or trade. Farmers’ wives tended the
cottage, looked after the children and the meals, milked the cows, worked in
the vegetable garden, and gathered wood, along with endless other chores.

There were many thousands of outstanding women involved in
the Reformation on both Catholic and Protestant sides. Some we hear of only
fleetingly, while others were more prominent.

Not only were uneducated women of the Catholic faith
reluctant to change. Caritas Pirckheimer, one of the most learned women in
Germany, was well known for her
Journal of the Reformation
, written while she was abbess of the
Convent of St. Clare. This records her struggle with the Nurnberg city council,
and presents a defense of her convent life and of her Roman Catholic faith at
the advent of Lutheranism when the city council tried to pressure the nuns into
accepting the new reforms and renouncing their vows. She was an advocate of
equal rights and the right of individuals to choose whatever style of life and
faith they preferred. Her views reflected those of many Catholic women, both
nuns and others, whose voices have not been heard.

Early in 1522, the Bavarian government banned Lutheranism,
fearing the social unrest that would come with it. Students were more sensitive
to the changing situations than most other people, as conflicting views were
generally expressed in the classrooms of universities. The following year, a
university student, arrested for advocating these ideas, was accused of heresy
and forced to publicly recant or face the flames. Such actions discouraged
student religious dissent out of fear of the authorities.

2 - THE SETTING

LANDSCAPE

The
lives of many sixteenth-century Europeans were determined to a large extent by
the physical topography. The land was much less densely settled than today, and
there were still immense areas of woodland and marshlands. The dark,
impenetrable forests of southern Germany and Eastern Europe provided almost
impassable barriers. Roads were primitive, often muddy trails in winter and
swirling dust in summer. Those connecting major cities were usually rudimentary
and dangerous, not only because of their condition but also because of brigands
that lurked along the route. Distances were considered in terms of towns,
lodgings, taverns, tolls, and river crossings rather than political
sovereignty.

POPULATION

About 85 percent of the European population were peasants,
10 percent were middle class (merchants, tradesmen, and townsmen), and the
remaining 5 percent belonged either to the nobility or the clergy with the
wealth and power concentrated in their hands. Europe was still recovering from
the devastating effects of the Bubonic Plague that killed a third of the
population in 1348. The lethal epidemic continued to strike periodically here
and there throughout the next several centuries.

The population in millions at the end of the sixteenth
century has been estimated as:

People everywhere were prone not only to rampant disease
but also to death caused by wars, famine, and childbirth. In rural areas an
average of about 50 percent of children died before the age of seven.

When times were difficult, unskilled rural laborers poured
into the cities causing overcrowding, begging, and theft to the extent that many
cities would not let them reside within the walls. Nor did they like the shanty
towns that grew up outside, whose residents entered the gates every day to look
for work or beg for alms at the doors of the churches.

SOCIAL CLASSES

Society was structured in three traditional estates: the
first consisted of members of the Church who looked after souls and whose
prelates lived mostly in a state of luxury. At the low end of the hierarchy,
the village priest might be as poor as his parishioners. The first estate was
the most powerful, owning or controlling a good third of all European land and
collecting enormous revenues from taxes, dispensations, and indulgences, paying
little or no taxes itself. It had its own courts to try and punish those who disagreed
with its beliefs and was well known for its ability to forge documents to prove
its claims. The second estate comprised the nobility that ranged from kings,
princes, and dukes down to the knights— mounted men-at-arms who served the king
or local princes, engaged in war and who were supposed to protect the people.

The third estate encompassed the middle and lower classes.
The bourgeoisie of the towns who owned shops and businesses were often well
enough off. Laborers were less fortunate, owning little and being poorly paid.
Those who worked the land for a living often did not own it and ranged from a
near slave of the landholder (both secular and ecclesiastic) to a free peasant
who generally rented his house and land. These were the people who worked hard
and supported the first two estates with their labor and taxes—the latter in
money or kind.