Johannes Pauli and the Strasbourg Dancers

JOHANNES PAULI AND THE STRASBOURG DANCERS ? Few records on the life and career of Johannes Pauli have survived. It can be surmised from external evidence, plus autobiographical notes in his own writings, that he was born in Alsace about 1450 and educated at the Franciscan school at Thann, south of Strasbourg.1 After his ordination, he served as teacher, preacher, and priest in many assignments. In his administrative functions, he was guardian of such significant convents as Berne and Strasbourg, and custos of a constellation of south German convents.2 Pauli, a Conventual, was a gregarious and outgoing man who enjoyed the world outside of convents. Among his enthusiasms was the art of homiletics, which he both taught and practiced.3 He was an ardent disciple of Geiler von Kaysersberg, the celebrated cathedral preacher at Strasbourg; and after 1510, when Kaysersberg died, he edited and published four volumes of his sermons and tracts. Only after that did he begin what was to be his literary monument. This was Schimpf und Ernst, meaning humorous and serious, an assemblage of 693 usually short tales, exempla, anecdotes, and personal observations. Schimpf und Ernst, was published in Strasbourg by Johann Grüninger, who had also published Pauli's editions of Geiler's work. As Pauli's preface indicates, the manuscript was finished in 1519. The Grüninger press had by then turned much of its energy to publication of the 1SCe Robert G. Warnock, "Johannes Pauli," Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, eds. Kurt Ruh et al., 2nd ed., 8 vols, to date (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977- ) 7: 369. 2An incomplete list appears in John R. H. Moorman, Franciscan Houses (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1983) 64-64, 189-90, 464. By a rule of the Order, assignments were changed every three years. As custos, Pauli would have supervised "an average of eight or nine Convents" (692). 3Many of the monitory tales in Schimpf und Ernst display wise and foolish homilists at work in parishes. Thanks to the Poor Clare scribes at Villingen, 28 complex sermons preached by Pauli in 1493-94 have also survived. See Robert G. Warnock, ed., Die Predigten Johannes Paulis, Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen 26 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1970). Franciscan Studies 92 (1992) 204 ARLENE EPP PEARSALL controversial writings that preceded the Reformation, and did not publish Schimpf und Ernst until 1522.4 Since no record shows that Pauli was alive after 1519, he may not have seen the first edition. But Schimpf und Ernst was printed and reprinted, translated, pirated, amended, and curtailed or enhanced by many publishers in Germany and elsewhere. It enjoyed its popularity for the next two hundred years.5 Like many other churchmen of his time, the Pauli of Schimpf und Ernst was critical of obsolete and corrupt ecclesiastical practices. In tale after tale, the greed and lechery of clerics, the egotism and silliness of popes, the blatant marketing of pardons and indulgences, and other clerical misdeeds are attacked or lampooned. Pauli's approach to such lapses was severe but goodnatured ; he preferred to show human imperfection as comic rather than catastrophic. On social and political issues, however, he could be stiff-necked and conservative. An epidemic of St. Virus's dancing in the region of Strasbourg, that is to say in the region where he spent most of his career, offered him an opportunity to react to an important historical event in the open-hearted and sympathetic way characteristic of him. To the extent that he reacted at all, however, his reaction was unfeelingly punitive. Rather than address the medical and social issues raised by the epidemic, he followed the prevalent thinking of clerics and peasants, and sought to blame the sufferers for their suffering. It will be useful to consider the epidemic of St. Vitus's dancing in the Strasbourg region as it really occurred and as it was diagnosed in medical and religious discourse. After this, some of 4A single polemical work was published at Strasbourg in 1518, but 76 between 1519 and 1522. Only Griininger published both Catholic and Protestant treatises. Miriam Usher Chrisman, Strasbourg and the Reform (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967) 98-99, 301-02...