The Talk of the TownPub Date : 2022-02-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0007
Carla Roth
{"title":"Tales of the past","authors":"Carla Roth","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the role of orality in the formation of historical narratives. Rütiner often recorded several different accounts of significant events and did not change earlier entries even if they conflicted with later ones. His notes serve as a reminder that most people in sixteenth-century St Gallen would not have encountered the past in the form of a well-ordered chronicle, but as a set of slightly haphazard, fragmented, and contradictory tales which changed considerably over time. The chapter studies how St Gallers used objects and places as mnemonic devices and how, over time and over many conversations, complex historical events were boiled down into a series of highly symbolic scenes. Changes in the way past events were retold, the chapter argues, offer us important insights into the storytellers’ present and allow us to observe history in the making.","PeriodicalId":245444,"journal":{"name":"The Talk of the Town","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126957095","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Talk of the TownPub Date : 2022-02-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0002
Carla Roth
{"title":"Taking note of a ‘wondrous time’","authors":"Carla Roth","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0002","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":245444,"journal":{"name":"The Talk of the Town","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122877805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Talk of the TownPub Date : 2022-02-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0005
Carla Roth
{"title":"Gossip and the value of social knowledge","authors":"Carla Roth","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter argues that although gossip was condemned in theory as an inherently disruptive and primarily female form of communication, in practice it provided essential and highly valued information for anyone who sought to navigate St Gall’s social world. The chapter explores how male and female gossipers of all social levels—from St Gall’s Protestant reformers to Rütiner’s most frequent female informant, the elderly midwife Anna Bösch—used gossip to present themselves as bearers of privileged social knowledge and to raise ‘communicative capital’. The chapter then turns to gossip about crime to show that where such talk survives, it can also shed new light on well-known early modern sources.","PeriodicalId":245444,"journal":{"name":"The Talk of the Town","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130875375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Talk of the TownPub Date : 2022-02-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0003
Carla Roth
{"title":"Informants and networks","authors":"Carla Roth","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter exploits one of the most unique features of Johannes Rütiner’s Commentationes, namely the fact that Rütiner named his informants, their sources, and the context in which information was exchanged in over seventy per cent of his notebook entries. Combining these ‘references’ with evidence from St Gall’s rich archives, the chapter offers a reconstruction of Rütiner’s information network and outlines its social and geographical dimensions. The chapter argues that even educated St Gallers like Rütiner relied heavily on their personal, and overwhelmingly oral, networks to supply them with information from all over Europe, and occasionally beyond. Rütiner’s place between two powerful, well-connected and well-travelled, but fairly separate social groups within St Gall—the weavers’ guild on the one hand, and a circle of learned men and Protestant pastors on the other—therefore put him in a prime position for collecting information.","PeriodicalId":245444,"journal":{"name":"The Talk of the Town","volume":"95 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131928007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Talk of the TownPub Date : 2022-02-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0006
Carla Roth
{"title":"Rumour, news, and trust","authors":"Carla Roth","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on the circulation and reception of news in sixteenth-century St Gall. Through an analysis of sixteenth-century conceptions of fama (rumour, reputation, news) and a series of case studies relating to rumours about witchcraft in the Black Forest, a volcanic eruption in Naples, and an Ottoman–Catholic alliance, the chapter traces the processes by which fama became fact in the eyes of Rütiner and his contemporaries. Since it was usually impossible to verify news independently, St Gallers relied on an elaborate system of ‘source criticism’; a system which often worked in favour of oral news because it made people’s trust in a piece of news conditional on their trust in the messenger. St Gall’s newsmongers, in turn, used the flexibility of oral news to adjust their stories to their audience’s expectations, to present themselves and their sources as trustworthy, to hide their reliance on anonymous printed news, and to discredit their competition on the marketplace of information.","PeriodicalId":245444,"journal":{"name":"The Talk of the Town","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125908020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Talk of the TownPub Date : 2022-02-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0004
Carla Roth
{"title":"Obscene humour and sociability","authors":"Carla Roth","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on sexual and scatological humour, a type of humour typically perceived as gendered and located on the margins of acceptable speech. By tracing the circulation of such humour through conversations in St Gall, the chapter instead highlights the popularity of such material and the social esteem enjoyed by those who could draw on it to provide entertainment. By embedding obscene humour within its cultural and social contexts, the chapter moreover calls into question the notion that obscene humour represented a safety valve for men’s sexual aggressions against women. In the context of sociability, such humour instead worked as a kind of communicative currency and offered jokesters an opportunity to display their social skills, their proficiency in Latin, and their sexual experience.","PeriodicalId":245444,"journal":{"name":"The Talk of the Town","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126040956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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