Taking note of a ‘wondrous time’

Abstract

This chapter introduces St Gall, Johannes Rütiner, and his notebooks, the Commentationes. Sixteenth-century St Gall was a small Protestant town on the border of the Swiss Confederacy. Despite its moderate size, it was well known for the abbey in its midst as well as for the production of high-quality linen which was highly sought-after all over Europe. The chapter reconstructs Rütiner’s education in St Gall and Basle as well as his career as a small-scale linen trader and office-holder in his hometown. It then discusses Rütiner’s Commentationes as part of a broader trend in St Gall that saw numerous citizens, and many of Rütiner’s friends, take up writing chronicles around the time of the Reformation. At the same time, the chapter draws attention to the many distinctive features of the Commentationes and their resistance to any conventional categorization. Written in unpolished Latin, lacking chronological order and containing a plethora of unflattering stories about St Gall’s elite—and some of Rütiner’s closest friends—the Commentationes were intended as a private memory aid, not as a chronicle to be handed down to future generations.