EPISODE 9 TRANSCRIPT
Ryan:
I'm here with Allyson Creasman, associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon university. Allyson, your specialty is the Reformation, the German Reformation in particular, and I wanted to talk to you today in particular because, in certain circles, Reformation writings about plague are getting a good bit of attention. Martin Luther wrote this tract that circulated widely in Germany; it was printed in something like fifteen editions and was a response to plague in his own time. I recently recorded that, and it's available on our Beatrice Institute podcast. It’s fairly long—it took me about 45 minutes to read it out loud, you can imagine—it's one of those things where you can tell he’s getting to the end, and then he comes back and he's like, “I'm going to write another two pages.”
Allyson:
That's typical Luther!
Ryan:
But I think it's particularly interesting to back up a bit, and put Luther and the means of dissemination there and what he was actually doing by writing and publishing this tract [in context]. Your recent book is Censorship and Civic Order in Reformation Germany. And in that book you're looking at publication, what it means to print and to have freedom of speech in this new burgeoning economy of print, and then whether or not censorship is just.
And it strikes me that in the present time, it can be difficult to know whom to trust on the news. We have headlines concerning lies and misinformation, and these are nearly as common as headlines about positive findings and research developments. So to what extent has credibility been a major issue in times of crisis in the past?
Allyson:
Well, I think it's always been an issue, and particularly in Luther's time, it probably would have been an even more pressing issue than it is today. In the 16th century, when Luther was writing, the field of journalism as a professional discipline hadn't yet emerged. And so there was really no consensus at that time as to the standards of reporting and how you could recognize and evaluate truth in print. Nowadays, we trust that professional journalists are going to be objective in their reporting, that they're only going to report information that they know to be true.
But in the 16th century, printers just printed whatever they thought they could sell. And it would be very difficult for a reader to know what that was based upon. Oftentimes, they were simply reporting rumors. Often news accounts were very sensationalized. And so, news of issues of important public interest, like stories about plague or information about wars, would be very difficult for readers to know that they could trust. And this was a real problem for political authorities at the time, because the press circulated information that was of dubious quality.
Political authorities recognized that this had the possibility to not only mislead the public, but also to call their own legitimacy into question and shake public confidence in their political leadership. So it was something that early modern officials tried to very carefully regulate, particularly when it came to important issues like news about war or news about plague. A rumor coming out that there was plague in the area could very quickly spark panic. And so, early modern authorities were very keen to try to stop that kind of rumormongering. Not only in print, but also in the oral culture, in the streets.
Ryan:
When you say the press, are we talking newspapers, or what? What are the means of dissemination? What's the publication structure at the time?
Allyson:
You don't have a periodical press, like newspapers in the way that we would recognize them today, until the latter [half of the] 17th century. You don't get newspapers that are coming out on a particular, predictable interval, like a weekly paper or a daily paper, as I said, until the latter [half of the] 17th century.
So in Luther's time the news accounts that would be circulating, were usually just these ad hoc broadsheets that would come out whenever a printer had information that he thought would be of public interest. So they came out on a very unpredictable interval.
And as I said, the basis on which they were reporting was never entirely clear. And so, the trustworthiness of that information would not have been immediately obvious.
Ryan:
Interesting. And it's also interesting that, as far as I could gather, Luther's plague letter was essentially a compilation of the types of things that he would say from the pulpit.
And he was specifically exercised to address plague from the pulpit when he heard a rumor. In Wittenberg, it was reported that some grave diggers had gotten drunk and were making fun of the corpses that they were supposed to be burying by standing them up and jeering at them. And then on one occasion they pushed the widow of one of these dead bodies into the grave, as a joke. Everybody was outraged. Luther was outraged. This contemporary letter says that he preached for hours on this occasion. So, how does that kind of oral dissemination of news, how would that fit into the kind of ecosystem of information at the time?
Allyson:
I think it would probably have been the primary means by which most people got information about issues like plague in the area. You have to keep in mind that literacy rates were really pretty low, at this time. In an urban community like Wittenberg—Wittenberg was not a very large city, but it was nonetheless a city. There was a university there. The literacy rates in a community like that might have been maybe 30% of the male population, with women usually less literate at every social level. Once you moved into the countryside, the literacy rates dropped dramatically, down to maybe 3% or 4% of the population.
And so most people couldn't have turned to these printed, new sheets to get information. They got their information through word of mouth, that talk in the streets, about these kinds of issues. And so, in that kind of environment, rumors about plague would have been really pretty explosive, or potentially very explosive, to the extent that they're circulating false information.
That could be a real challenge for the local authorities. A story such as you recount would have been deeply disturbing, understandably so, for people in Wittenberg. I'm sure that Luther felt that he needed to speak out forcefully to try to calm people's fears and to smooth over some of the distress about these kinds of reports.
Ryan:
In his letter, he has this section that surprised me. It's a section that is stridently urging people not to forsake their home and their family, husbands not to leave their wives, mothers not to leave their children in time of plague. And when I read it the first time, I thought, “He's being sensationalist here; nobody would do that.” But then it turns out that this was actually a significant problem in the bubonic plague, which was far worse, more intense than anything we're experiencing now.
And so he publishes this so-called open letter, but it's a letter that doesn't make much sense to me as a letter, because it's in response to a fellow clergyman from another city who had inquired from Luther two years prior what to do about the plague. Luther is only now getting around to responding, and so it seems to me that it's meant not for that particular audience, but for this wider audience. How does something like that work, and what do you think Luther's intentions were in publishing this letter, and publishing it at the time he did?
Allyson:
The publication of his response to this letter comes out, I believe, in 1527. And by that point, Luther was famous all over Europe, and he was receiving letters from all over Europe asking for advice on a variety of matters. And this perhaps accounts for why it takes him so long to respond, because he's getting inquiries like this from all over the place.
If he felt that his response addressed an issue that was of wider interest to readers, he would often arrange to have his response published. So what he does here with his response to this particular inquiry is not all that unusual for him.
With regards to the actual inquiry that he gets, my understanding is that the clergyman had queried whether or not it was acceptable for Christians to flee from a deadly plague, or whether they had an ethical and moral obligation to stay in their communities and help care for the sick and accept God's judgment upon the community. And Luther deals with this question at some length. But I think the reason why he probably felt that this was an issue that would have been of wider interest to the public is because, unfortunately, in accounts of the plague, beginning with the first major outbreak of the black death in the 1340s and then in the recurrent outbreaks of plague well into the 18th century, we see over and over again reports of people deserting not only their communities, but their homes, and in some cases, even their loved ones. So this, unfortunately, was apparently a very real and common problem.
In his introduction to The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio very vividly recounts stories of people in Florence who, at the height of the plague in the 1340s, had been abandoned by their loved ones. These sick and dying people are very pitifully standing at their windows calling out to passersby in the street to come in and help them. We see accounts like this from all over, in that first initial outbreak of the plague. So it was a very real concern.
The bubonic plague at this time was typically not just bubonic plague, but also pneumonic plague, which meant that it could pass from person to person, and so it was much more contagious. And, for that reason, people were in deadly fear of this disease. And that's why authorities were so keen to suppress rumors about the plague, because once the word got out that there was plague in the vicinity, people would flee and sometimes abandon their responsibilities at home.
Ryan:
And so, in the midst of all of this, Luther had actually been asked to leave the city. The idea was to take the University of Wittenberg and move it to a plague-free area, but he insisted on staying, along with several of his fellow clergymen. He writes in a letter to a friend in 1527 that his house has become a veritable hospital. Why? So he invites the entire Bugenhagen family to come live with him. Why, are there no other alternatives?
Allyson:
Yeah, it was very unusual at this time for cities to have a kind of dedicated plague hospital, even in communities that had a hospital—they typically didn't admit infectious patients into those hospitals.
So when the plague broke out in an area, they would set up a kind of temporary plague hospital, or a “pest house,” as they would call it in Germany, and that's where they would care for those people affected by the plague. And Luther was living in the former Augustinian monastery in Wittenberg, where he had lived as an Augustinian friar. There was a lot of space there. It was essentially a dormitory, so it would be a perfect setting to establish one of these temporary plague hospitals.
Ryan:
So I envisioned him with his fairly new wife pregnant with their second child (and I think their son was sick at the time). I envisioned him just inviting more people into the house—I’m imagining my own house, inviting other families, and I'm thinking, oh my goodness. But this, this makes more sense.
Allyson:
In better times, he and his wife, Katharina, would rent out rooms to students at the local university as a way to supplement his income as a pastor and a university professor, so they usually had a lot of boarders living in their home. Taking in the Bugenhagen family and these people afflicted by the plague probably would not have been that much of a stretch on the house’s resources.
Ryan:
I recently heard that you could think of the effects of plague as being consistent with a certain notion of secularization in the Reformation: that as people were not able to congregate together in church, it sacralized the household and secularized the church. Maybe that's more the case today than it was then. But hospitals make us think twice about this kind of simple secularization hypothesis, right? Why is that?
Allyson:
Well, healthcare, and the care of the needy in general, was throughout the medieval period often the responsibility of the Roman Catholic Church, in various religious institutions. So monastic houses would often serve as hospices or hospitals for the care of the sick and the dying.
What we would consider just basic healthcare was often a kind of religious obligation and a religious function that the Church and its various institutions tended to carry out. But already by the time you get into the latter half of the 15th century, It starts increasingly to be seen as a civic obligation.
So in larger cities, where there was enough wealth concentrated, you start to see the city governments establishing hospitals and running these hospitals independently of the Roman Catholic Church. You also start to see wealthy benefactors establishing hospitals in cities, or sometimes corporate organizations like trade guilds might establish a civic hospital. So healthcare is starting to become a little bit more secularized even before the Reformation comes on the scene. But in those areas that go Protestant, one of the first things that happens is the local city government takes control of the religious institutions that had previously been run by the Roman Catholic Church. And they confiscate that wealth and redirect it for civic purposes. They reform the poor laws, but often what they would also do is redirect those funds for the maintenance of a hospital and for the provision of healthcare.
So the Reformation accelerates that process of secularizing healthcare. But that trend was already underway before the reformation gets going.
Ryan:
And then what we see in the time of plague is that that trend reverses itself for a time, because those nascent institutions aren't set up for plague. So you get people caring for each other out of charitable, religious duty in their own homes.
And that's part of what Luther is arguing in the letter, that if you're able to care for your neighbors and for your family, it's your charitable duty as a Christian to do so.
Allyson:
You don't start to see really strong networks of hospitals in general, or plague houses and regulations regarding quarantine and sanitation ordinances, before the middle of the 16th century. So in the time that Luther's writing, the 1520s, these kinds of institutions would have been rare. I think he mentioned that in the letter, that it would be a good idea if every city established hospitals like this. But he says something to the effect that there's very few of these kinds of institutions and therefore neighbor has to care for neighbor.
I think what Luther is pointing to is a feature of early modern life that was fundamental to their society. This is a time in which there's not a lot of the communal resources that we take for granted, like the maintenance of a hospital or a police force, for example. These kinds of things were left up to the community to organize for itself. So in that kind of a situation, this Christian obligation of helping your neighbor, this principle of good neighborliness was a foundational idea. It was a kind of imperative that magistrates and moralists appealed to constantly in this time period. And Luther is reflecting that same basic idea in this letter.
Ryan:
Would Luther be on Twitter if he were alive today?
Allyson:
I don't think there's any doubt that Luther would be on Twitter. One of the things that made Luther successful as a reformer was his very savvy ability to use every means of communication that was open to him to get his message across.
He not only used the power of the printing press to get his ideas across—he also wrote hymns, often based on popular folk songs. Many of the hymns that Luther wrote continue to be sung across the Christian world today. His greatest hit is undoubtedly “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” which is still very widely included in Christian hymnals today. Because the literacy rate was so low, he also used visual propaganda to get his ideas across, partnering with artists to communicate his sometimes arcane theological ideas in visual forms that were not only very arresting, but easy for even an unlettered person to understand. He harnessed every form of media that was available to him to get his ideas across. And if Twitter had been around in the 16th century, I'm sure he would use it.
Ryan:
And Instagram and Tiktok?
Allyson:
Oh yeah! He’d be on all of those.
Ryan:
Well, moving away from Luther a bit, a recent Wired op-ed declared Twitter and Facebook must not allow Trump's COVID-19 lies.
What can debates over lies and censorship in the early years of print culture teach us about controversies over fake news today?
Allyson:
Well, I think one thing it can tell us is that this is not a new controversy. Since the very origins of the printing press, this has been a debate. Early modern authorities saw the printing press as a double-edged sword, that it was a gift from God in the sense that it helped communicate information. But, it was also criticized for presenting information indiscriminately to an audience that was not really capable of discerning truth from falsehood. And so true information and false information—fake news, if you will—was served up indiscriminately, without much of a way to identify the truth from the false information.
And it was also recognized that this was potentially very destabilizing: to the extent that truth and falsehood are presented in this indiscriminate fashion, it can undermine public trust in legitimate sources of information. And in the early modern period these kinds of—to the extent that the printing press disseminated, what we might call fake news or conspiracy theories about marginalized groups, for example, propagating the the slanders of the Jewish blood libel, for example, or propagating sensationalistic stories about witches—in the early modern period, that could actually cost people's lives. So fake news was a problem back then, it was recognized as a problem, and it was it was dangerous, as well.
Ryan:
And was one response to it censorship?
Allyson:
Absolutely.
Ryan:
So, I think of the early modern period as the birthplace of modern notions of censorship. But I think the baseline assumption coming out of the Catholic middle ages is that, of course, censorship is an important plank in the civil society; any just and well-functioning civil society must have censorship. But then the question begins to arise more broadly, I gather—and what does the conversation look like around censorship in the early 16th century?
Allyson:
I think there was a broad consensus that the government, and I would include in this both ecclesiastical officials and secular political officials, had not only the right but the duty to police public expression to the extent that it was necessary to secure public order and public peace, and also to police orthodoxy in religious matters. And you would find the same type of consensus in a Catholic as well as a Protestant community. Martin Luther himself served as a censor, in his capacity as an official of the University of Wittenberg, and he wrote that he fully recognized the fact that his own writings would be censored and that that was entirely legitimate.
His one proviso was that you could not censor the Scripture. So the Godly truth, as he saw it, had to be free and unfettered. But censorship otherwise would have been, I think, unproblematic for most early modern people, whether they were Protestant or Catholic. It was seen, as I said, as necessary to the public and the religious order of the society.
Ryan:
So one of the—back to Luther—I think one of the reasons that his letter has been popping up a good bit on social media is that he has some things to say about social distancing that sound like Anthony Fauci. You might've, you know, [seen] them in the news yesterday. And so that's pretty cool.
But if you dig into the letter, he also has some things to say about plague that are very foreign to us. And I think the most prominent one is that he, along with many of his contemporaries, believed that plague was spread by evil spirits.
And this doesn't mean that it was just a spiritual thing: they understood something of the biological transmission of the disease, but they thought that evil spirits were the were the efficient causes of the transmission. What other ways was plague understood at the time, in religious terms, and not purely what we would recognize as medical terms today?
Allyson:
Early modern people tended to hold simultaneously different views about the causes of the plague. And Luther's letter I think is a really good reflection of that.
So plague could have both supernatural and natural causes. It could have direct causes and more remote or indirect causes. I think most early modern writers, whether theologians or medical practitioners, would have all agreed that ultimately all, really all, disease is sent by God, either as a punishment for our sins or as reflected in the book of Job. God may grant Satan a license to afflict humanity, to test our faith, but ultimately, all disease is a reflection of the will of God in some sense or another. And when Luther talks about evil spirits as being the cause of disease, I think that's what he's talking about. He seems to be suggesting that God, for reasons known only to himself, has given the devil a license to afflict us in this fashion.
He talks at one point about how the enemy (that is, the devil) has sent poison into the world to cause the plague. So that's a clear reflection of this supernatural causation of disease generally, the plague in particular.
But it was also very widely believed that the plague was caused by some kind of poison. It's some kind of contagion. This is centuries before the germ theory of disease, but they're thinking about this as actually kind of similar to what we would recognize as a germ theory. That somehow or another, some kind of poison has been released into the world. It may be because there was some malalignment of the planets that caused the earth to emit some kind of noxious, poisonous vapors—but once the air is poisoned and we inhale it, this poison can actually multiply within our bodies, and that's what's making us sick. There's also this notion that the plague can be caused by what we would recognize as purely natural causes, like some kind of environmental contaminants, some pollution, unsanitary conditions. I think at one point in the letter he says something like, the plague in Wittenberg is caused by filth. He talks about how vapors coming from the graves of the people who have died from plague could contaminate the air.
Ryan:
—Which we now know to be true!
Allyson:
Yeah! So we've got a bunch of different theories of causation in Luther's letter. But ultimately all of it is, as far as he's concerned, because God has let the devil afflict us in some fashion.
It was, I would have to say, kind of unusual in this period to attribute the plague to the work of the devil or evil spirits or demons. Unfortunately, by the time you get into the 16th century, the plague was a familiar visitor in early modern communities and had been ever since the major outbreak in the 1340s. And so people understood it as a natural disease, and it was kind of unusual to attribute this disease to demonic activity in the way that, say, a more inexplicable form of illness might be attributed to the devil or, increasingly, to witches.
So Luther's demonic causation of plague is kind of unusual in this period—but it may reflect something about Luther. By this time, by the time you get into the 1520s, or 1527, his thinking is taking on an increasingly apocalyptic tone and he wouldn't have been the only person at this time to have this kind of mindset.
There was this sense that the world was headed to the end times, and what was happening around them, including the outbreak of the plague, could be seen as one of the afflictions that was going to precede the apocalypse—that the devil was more active in the world because the world was coming to an end.
Ryan:
That very interesting, because something about the current political alignments around COVID-19 are making it such that the American religious communities that I might expect to give an apocalyptic reading of the plague are actually not doing that, because they tend to be in areas that are, in some cases—the Bible belt has not been hit as severely as the Northeast, Northwest. But this is making me want to keep my antenna up for that and look around the world and see, are there apocalyptic responses to this particular plague? Because in many ways, even though it's not as bad as the bubonic plague, it's more momentous, because this isn't the 25th wave in 200 years. This plague that we've had is the first that the entire world has experienced.
Allyson:
Yeah, I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out. There are many parts of the world today where belief in the demonic and belief in witchcraft is still very, very much alive. It will be interesting to see if the same kinds of associations that Luther's making here also pop up in some areas of the world that are impacted very acutely by COVID-19.
Ryan:
Right. Christianity in the global South is much more open to these ideas of a spiritual world and spiritual warfare.
Allyson:
Yes, definitely.
Ryan:
So, a good number of sociologists of religion have been commenting on the future of religion. I think besides gyms being shut down and schools being shut down, the other major way that people are experiencing a breakdown of community is churches being shut. And some sociologists are saying that this is just going to accelerate trends in American and European culture. That we're already moving Christian practice from a communal and public kind of lifestyle commitment to something that is private and individualist.
Others are saying that it may actually bring about a renewal of communal association through religious practice because we all now realize how much we needed and miss community. I imagine some similar dynamics were at play in plague times and Reformation Germany. Do you have any sense of the kind of sociological ramifications of plague in, say, Luther's time? What happened in the, say, 1530s, once this plague was gone?
Allyson:
I can't say specifically what happened in Wittenberg once the plague left, but the the studies that have looked at the impact of plague in late medieval and early modern Europe generally tend to find that there's greater investment, greater attachment to the Church in its institutions after the plague dissipates, precisely for some of the reasons that you mentioned. People feel the need for a community, and particularly in a society that would often tend to see visitations of the plague as an expression of God's wrath, investment in the Church, charitable giving would be perhaps one way to prevent a recurrence of the plague, a way to appease God's wrath for human sinfulness.
To the extent that this shows up in the historical records—at least in the writings that some people left behind recounting their own personal experience with the plague—they often speak of feeling a greater dependence—it made them more aware of their dependence on God and God's mercy, and more aware of their need for God. And so, rather than causing them to turn away from the Church and their spiritual community, they seem to be even more invested in it than had been the case before the disease had affected them.
Obviously there's going to be a financial impact in the early modern period, particularly in communities where the pastor’s salary is being paid by the local community. If there's a very high mortality in that community, it's gonna make it difficult for them to actually fund the operations of the Church. But in the communities where it's been studied, from what I can see, over the long term it seems to make people more committed to their church and their spiritual community. And so perhaps we'll see the same thing here.
Ryan:
Yeah. Interestingly, there's a kind of mini tradition of post-apocalyptic commentary on plague in the 1380s in England that I'm familiar with. And this is distant enough not to be experiencing whatever immediate repercussions, right? A generation distant from the first bubonic plague in 1348 to 51. But what people there are saying is “You would think, if anything were to change people's ways and bring them to Jesus, it would have been the 40 to 60% of our population being wiped out, but in fact, nothing has changed. People are even more corrupt than they were before.” This was a common trope in preaching. And it doesn't mean that there was no effect of the plague, but it's an interesting post-climactic way to approach the effect of plague.
Allyson:
Yeah. I've heard some historians speculate that because the Black Death had such a massive demographic impact that it might have actually undermined public confidence in the Church and its teaching. You know, if the Church was really preaching the truth, then why would God let this happen? And so, it perhaps is not surprising that in some segment of the population, there would be this cynicism that sets in, in the wake of such a very massive outbreak as you had in the 14th century.
By the time you get into the 16th century, as I mentioned, plague is more familiar. It's almost like a seasonal thing, unfortunately, by the 16th century, and it doesn't have the same demographic impact as the Black Death had had. So, I think what happened in the 1340s and thereafter is quite a bit different than the early military experience.
Ryan:
So what have you been reading, or watching, or listening to while you've been shut up at home, that you can recommend to others?
Allyson:
Well, we just finished classes this semester, and in my Early Modern and European survey, we started the semester by reading some stories and some passages from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, which is set, of course, at the height of the Black Death in Florence in the 1340s. Very, very vivid accounts of how that disease ravaged that community. We started reading that at the very beginning of the semester, little knowing that by the end of the semester, we would ourselves be social distancing because of a pandemic.
So I've been thinking a lot about that book, and I actually went back and read some of the stories. And I think that what I take away from it is that, first of all, social distancing works. And second, it's a hopeful message, that after this is all over, things aren't going to go back to normal; life's going to be different. But there will still be something to celebrate.
Ryan:
That's so interesting! Chris Nygren also opened one of his classes this semester with the Decameron, and then, obviously, came back to it, the whole class, with new eyes later, and he's been sitting down to read the whole thing recently.
Allyson:
I mean, the stories are entertaining in any sort of context, but given what we're dealing with right now, it really resonates, I think, to a much greater degree.
Just in terms of my reading for fun, I just finished a book by Christina Thompson called Sea People, which is about how the islands of Polynesia were settled and how scholars actually can reconstruct those migrations. It's really a fascinating account, has absolutely nothing to do with Coronavirus or the early modern period, but it was really pretty interesting.
Ryan:
Yeah, we need those things, that have nothing to do with this!
Allyson:
And I plan to start reading, I haven't started yet, but I just picked up a copy of Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, the last installment of her trilogy on Thomas Cromwell. So I'm looking forward to that because I read the first two novels and enjoyed them very much.
Ryan:
I heard this one is even longer than the others. Is that right?
Allyson:
Yeah, but the others, I thought, were not only very entertaining, but historically very well informed.
Ryan:
Well, Allyson Creasman, it's been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for making the time.
Allyson:
My pleasure.