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Essays in Medieval Studies 18 (2001) 53-66



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Ira Dei, Material Culture, and Behavior in the Late Middle Ages:
Evidence from German-speaking Regions

Gerhard Jaritz
Central European University

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In the German-speaking areas of the late Middle Ages, including central, south and southwest Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, discourse about material culture and behavior was sometimes extraordinarily rich. This is particularly true for all phenomena within the public sphere of life, especially those concerning outer appearance: dress, housing, festivities, food and meals taken outside the private house, and so on. In chronicles, laws, charters, travel literature, religious and secular literature, sermons, and in other forms, the discussion could become detailed and heated. The sources often deal with exceptional and special cases that had to be positively evaluated, or, more often, criticized, made fun of, condemned or prohibited.

Sermons and sumptuary laws played an important role in this discourse. 1 For German-speaking areas of Europe, urban sumptuary laws from the fourteenth, fifteenth, and the beginning of the sixteenth century are numerous. 2 During this period, about 600 surviving sumptuary laws were enacted by the urban or territorial authorities of the German Empire. They represented an important means of policing everyday life and its public material culture and generally sought to preserve the stability of the social system, sometimes with mixed results.

One factor in this discourse was status. Dress, housing, and patterns of consumption were used to make people aware of the God-given differences between humans. Broader economic, religious, and moral criteria, as well as aspects of the well-known "laudatio temporis acti" (praise of former times), also influenced this discourse. Sumptuary legislation was used to promote the "gemeinen Nutzen," 'common weal,' of late medieval and early modern society. In this context the sin of superbia, including pride and haughtiness, was identified as an obstacle to common weal which had to be fought against. Pride was of course one of the main [End Page 53] deadly sins, often at the head of the list because the first sin committed by mankind to provoke the wrath of God (ira Dei).

The connection of ira Dei to superbia was a deep-seated element of Christian thought. Saint Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373) stated in her Revelaciones about Adam: "Ira Dei super eum venit pro superbia, qua in sua felicitate Deum offenderat" ('The wrath of God came upon him because of his pride, through which, with his high spirits, he had offended the Lord'). 3 The thirteenth-century preacher Berthold of Regensburg (1220-1272) referred to the deadly sins as awaking God's wrath and punishment. 4 These references could of course be multiplied for both the early and late Middle Ages and for virtually all Christian lands. Consequently I do not wish to deal with the philosophical and theological discussion surrounding the wrath of God, something we find as early as late Antiquity, for example in De Ira Dei by the Christian apologist Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius, one of the most reprinted of the Latin Church Fathers (AD 260-c. 340). "God has authority," Lucius wrote; "therefore also He must have anger, in which authority consists." 5 It should be emphasized that, following Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225 or 1227-1274), wrath need not be understood as the excitement of God or as the disturbance of his inner peace. Rather, wrath was understood as his efficacy in making sinners feel that they had become separated from his will and were therefore to be punished. 6

Naturally, superbia was to a large extent connected with the material aspects of human life. One didactic and moralizing tradition treating the sin is the so-called "Good and Bad Thoughts" or the "Good and Bad Prayer," a theme also regularly expressed in visually contrasting images, mainly in the fifteenth century. 7 In a mid-fifteenth-century German woodcut, for instance, the good and pious man concentrates on the Passion of Christ in his thoughts and prayers. The haughty man only reflects on his riches--his house, horse, food...

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