The same year (1512) witnessed the appearance of another poetical, or at least metrical, satire by Murner, entitled “Schelmenzunft,” or the Confraternity of Rogues, similarly illustrated with very spirited engravings on wood. It is another demonstration of the prevailing dominion of folly under its worst forms, and the satire is equally general with the preceding. Murner’s satire appears to have been felt not only generally, but personally; and we are told that he was often threatened with assassination, and he raised up a number of literary opponents, who treated him with no little rudeness; in fact, he had got on the wrong side of politics, or at all events on the unpopular side, and men who had more talents and greater weight appeared as his opponents—men like Ulrich von Utten, and Luther himself.
No. 140. An Acceptable Offering.
Among the satirists who espoused the cause to which Murner was opposed, we must not overlook a man who represented in its strongest features, though in a rather debased form, the old spontaneous poetry of the middle ages. His name was Hans Sachs, at least that was the name under which he was known, for his real name is said to have been Loutrdorffer. His spirit was entirely that of the old wandering minstrel, and it was so powerful in him, that, having been apprenticed to the craft of a weaver, he was no sooner freed from his indentures, than he took to a vagabond life, and wandered from town to town, gaining his living by singing the verses he composed upon every occasion which presented itself. In 1519, he married and settled in Nüremberg, and his compositions were then given to the public through the press. The number of these was quite extraordinary—songs, ballads, satires, and dramatic pieces, rude in style, in accordance with the taste of the time, but full of cleverness. Many of them were printed on broadsides, and illustrated with large engravings on wood. Hans Sachs joined in the crusade against the empire of Folly, and one of his broadsides is illustrated with a graceful design, the greater part of which is copied in our cut No. 141. A party of ladies have set a bird-trap to catch the fools of the age, who are waiting to be caught. One fool is taken in the trap, while another is already secured and pinioned, and others are rushing into the snare. A number of people of the world, high in their dignities and stations, are looking on at this remarkable scene.
No. 141. Bird-Traps.
The evil influence of the female sex was at this time proverbial, and, in fact, it was an age of extreme licentiousness. Another poet-laureat of the time, Henricus Bebelius, born in the latter half of the fifteenth century, and rather well known in the literature of his time, published, in 1515, a satirical poem in Latin, under the title of “Triumphus Veneris,” which was a sort of exposition of the generally licentious character of the age in which he lived. It is distributed into six books, in the third of which the poet attacks the whole ecclesiastical state, not sparing the pope himself, and we are thereby perfectly well initiated into the weaknesses of the clergy. Bebelius had been preceded by another writer on this part of the subject, and we might say by many, for the incontinence of monks and nuns, and indeed of all the clergy, had long been a subject of satire. But the writer to whom I especially allude was named Paulus Olearius, his name in German being Oelschlägel. He published, about the year 1500, a satirical tract, under the title of “De Fide Concubinarum in Sacerdotes.” It was a bitter attack on the licentiousness of the clergy, and was rendered more effective by the engravings which accompanied it. We give one of these as a curious picture of contemporary manners; the individual who comes within the range of the lady’s attractions, though he may be a scholar, has none of the characteristics of a priest. She presents a nosegay, which we may suppose to represent the influence of perfume upon the senses; but the love of the ladies for pet animals is especially typified in the monkey, attached by a chain. A donkey appears to show by his heels his contempt for the lover.
No. 142. Courtship.
From an early period, the Roman church had been accustomed to treat contemptuously, as well as cruelly, all who dissented from its doctrines, or objected to its government, and this feeling was continued down to the age of the Reformation, in spite of the tone of liberalism which was beginning to shine forth in the writings of some of its greatest ornaments. Some research among the dusty, because little used, records of national archives and libraries would no doubt bring to light more than one singular caricature upon the “heretics” of the middle ages, and my attention has been called to one which is possessed of peculiar interest. There is, among the imperial archives of France, in Paris, among records relating to the country of the Albigeois in the thirteenth century, a copy of the bull of pope Innocent IV. giving directions for the proceedings against dissenters from Romanism, on the back of which the scribe, as a mark of his contempt for these arch-heretics of the south, has drawn a caricature of a woman bound to a stake over the fire which is to burn her as an open opponent of the church of Rome. The choice of a woman for the victim was perhaps intended to show that the proselytism of heresy was especially successful among the weaker sex, or that it was considered as having some relation to witchcraft. It is, by a long period, the earliest known pictorial representation of the punishment of burning inflicted on a heretic.