FM Päivi Räisänen

The Common People as Readers
South German Anabaptists and their uses of literature in the 16th century

The presented paper is an attempt to get closer to the reading habits of common men and women in the 16th century, a subject I am dealing with also in my doctoral dissertation. I have chosen as my starting point the forbidden sect of Anabaptists and its ordinary, mostly unlearned peasant members. There are two main reasons for this: firstly, there should be enough sources (court records) to trace down some patterns of reading and secondly, the case of Anabaptist sectarians can give us important clues to the connection between reading and behaviour in the early modern period.

My definition of "reading" is a broad one: it includes action (e.g. discussing texts) and oral distribution of texts in a culture dominantly based on oral communication. In my paper I will focus on the social context of reading: where, when, what and with whom did the common people and sectarians read? How were Anabaptist ideas transmitted among the unlearned? What was the relationship between oral and literate culture, or is such a distinction useful at all?

It is obviously very challenging to study the history of reading of ordinary people in the early modern period. There are only very few sources left that tell directly something about reading patterns of the common men and women, like personal letters or autobiographical material. The picture needs to be completed with ¾ or even mainly based on ¾ material that gives an indirect approach to reading. The main sources for this paper are records of the biannual church visitations of the duchy of Württemberg in southwest Germany that sought to control the religious orthodoxy in the parishes since the Reformation of the duchy in 1534.

I hope to reveal something not only about the reading patterns of sectarians, but of the common people in general. On the local level attitudes and behaviour of sectarians and non-sectarians seem surprisingly similar. The decisive difference between Anabaptists and ordinary villagers might lie in the interpretations Anabaptists made of the anticlerical and religious texts they had read. I will argue that Anabaptists were common people who let literature change their lives and outlooks so radically it made them join a forbidden sect. My paper describes the impact of Luther’s idea of vernacular bible-reading on the local level and suggests that the interpretation of the common man differed quite a lot from the hopes and ideals of Luther and the worldly magistrates.

The time-span from the beginning of the movement in the mid-1520s until the end of the century is rather long as I want to take into account the changes in the uses of literature among the Anabaptists during the 16th century. I am arguing that the role of literature changed during the century: in the early years Anabaptist ideas ¾ or propaganda even ¾ were mainly transmitted through channels of oral culture and even written texts were mostly read aloud to a listening audience. In the later 16th century, however, it was in the interest of the sect to preserve its own tradition and canonized texts to the following generations and this was easier when texts were actually written down.