[707] “Werke,” Erl. ed., 60, p. 78. In the first edition of the German Table-Talk, 1566, p. 307. Cp. against O. Waltz, on the authenticity of the account, N. Paulus, “Hexenwahn und Hexenprozess vornehmlich im 16. Jahrhundert,” 1910, p. 39.
[708] Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 380, said between October 28 and December 12, 1536. Cp. Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p. 121: “The village pastor and the schoolmaster had their own way of dealing [with the witches] and plagued them greatly. But D. Pommer’s way is the best of all, viz. to plague them with filth and stir it well up and so make all their things to stink.”
[709] Lauterbach, “Tagebuch,” p. 56.
[710] Ibid., p. 74 (Khummer).
[711] Ibid., p. 111.
[712] Cp. N. Paulus in his art. on Kroker’s edition of the “Tischreden in der Mathesischen Sammlung” (“Hist, polit. Blätter,” 133, 1904, pp. 199 ff., 208 f.).
[713] W. Preger, “Tischreden ... nach den Aufzeichnungen von J. Schlaginhaufen,” p. iv.
[714] Cp. N. Paulus, ibid., p. 40; Kroker, pp. 156, 158, 262. Kroker says (p. 158), “Luther probably made use of a colloquial word for phallus, or something similar.” Luther is complaining of the excesses to which the Catholics gave themselves up on pilgrimages, and which the Pope constantly indulged in. One MS. there cited omits the passage altogether. The Table-Talk of Mathesius (p. 141) contains the following speech of Luther’s in 1540 under the title “Exemplum verecundiae Lutheri”: “Rochlicensis princeps. Is interrogabat ‘Qui vocatur verum [sic] de domina vestra natante cum equite per aquas? Non volo autem obscoenum audire sed verum.’ Ich mein, das heisst: die × ausgeschwembt”. For the liberty which Aurifaber permits himself in the matter of toning down and weakening the original text of the Table-Talk, cp., for instance, the remarks in the Preface to the Cordatus Collection. What the latter gives in all its crudity (see the twenty-four passages there quoted by Wrampelmeyer) Aurifaber either does not reproduce at all or does so in an inoffensive form, or accompanied with such expressions as “to speak decently,” etc. Cordatus knew and acknowledged that it was an “audax facinus” to write down all he heard, but his opinion was that “pudorem vincebat utilitas”; Luther, who was watching his work, never gave him to understand by so much as one word that it did not meet with his approval.
[715] “Beil. zur Münchener Allg. Ztng.,” 1904, No. 26.
[716] G. Evers (“Martin Luther,” 6, p. 701), for instance, says that “In his Table-Talk we find not merely plain-spoken, but really cynical discourses, and much which to us sounds obscene. Still, his admirers may possibly be right when they absolve him of indecency or of any intention to arouse sensual passion.”