Undankbare Gäste: Abendmahlsverzicht und Abendmahlsasschluss in der Reichsstadt Ulm um 1600: Ein interkultureller Prozess (review)

Kaul closes this publication of his 2001 dissertation invoking T.S. Eliot's conception of culture in Notes towards the definition of culture, first published in London in 1948. Nor does that reference jar at the end of Kaul's study of those who did not participate in the Lutheran Supper in Ulm in the first quarter of the seventeenth century.

Kaul proposes, following David Sabean's formulation of an "Abendmahls-problematik" (Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany [Cambridge University Press, 1984], Chapter 1) to show that early modern subjects were not "acculturated," but that their interactions with "Machthaber" were more often compromises (p. 3). To do so, he draws upon 436 cases of "Abendhmahlsverweigerung" from Ulm. In his treatment of those cases, Kaul accepts, foremost, Eliot's division of "elite" from "lower" culture into two discrete entities. In his organization of materials, Kaul accepts as well Eliot's sense of culture as something apart. The first chapter after the introduction treats the "demographic, social, economic, and political situation" in Ulm and the state of the "lutherischen Ulmer Kirche" at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The following two chapters—3, on prescriptions for the practice of the Supper, its reception, and the categories given for refusing to partake, and 4, on facets of the "Abendmahlproblematik in Ulm"—hardly refer back to the earlier chapter. Kaul's conclusion reaffirms the divisions, between elite and subject, between material and religious, that he asserted in his introduction.

At the heart of this book are a handful of quite wonderful close studies of individuals who refused to partake of the Lutheran Communion (Chapter 4, passim). While Sabean is clearly the inspiration for Kaul's attention to blacksmiths, their children and spouses, soldiers, and others who could not get along with their neighbors, Kaul does not share Sabean's delight in all that these individuals reveal about early modern social dynamics. Nor does he share Sabean's attention to the contingencies of Herrschaft and the play of idiosyncracy in relations of power. Thus, in his discussion of the motives given for refusing to participate, Kaul presents a series of pie diagrams which treat those individuals in aggregates that override their idiosyncracies. The first, for example, represents percentiles of the general reasons individuals gave for refusing: unclear (9%), religious (18%), "sonstige Gründe" (12%), godless life (19%), uncertainty on the part of authorities if the person was avoiding the Supper (10%), envy, hatred, and enmity (32%). His handling of his evidence is not informed by work on the complex dynamics of courts, the play of personal faith and communal integration in the liturgy, the rich body of work, also inspired by Sabean's, on social outcasts, and the ways individuals were marginalized.

At the center of this book is a conceptualization of "culture" that more than twenty years of scholarship has challenged, rethought, and refined, in part, at least, inspired by Sabean's insights, not only that those who refused to partake are worthy of study, but that the liturgy is an extraordinarily complex site culturally, socially, theologically, and personally.