Paper Memory: A Sixteenth-Century Townsman Writes His World by Matthew Lundin (review)

Lundin's study revolves around a unique personal "archive" consisting of five major volumes and other material compiled by Hermann Weinsberg, a Cologne law licentiate, from the 1550s to the 1590s. The corpus, which includes a three-volume personal chronicle (Gedenkbuch) of more than 2,000 folios, embodies the author's growing obsession with permanently establishing his patriline in its eponymous (though recently acquired) Haus Weinsberg, and with finding a way to preserve his own personal memory from oblivion. Lundin shows how Weinsberg sought permanence through a will and fideicommisum that were modeled on aristocratic practice and traces Weinsberg's invention of twenty-four generations of previous "housefathers," along with his lengthy instructions to the near-eternal line of successors that he envisioned. Success, however, eluded him. His immediate descendants fell to squabbling and murder, and his effort to document himself in meticulous detail only "reinforced Herrmann's experience of flux" (220). The "confused and contingent identities of burghers" resisted his efforts to invent new modes of permanence, and though he was initially "intoxicated with the power of paper," Weinsberg's project ultimately failed (183, 210).

Lundin's close reading of Weinsberg's oeuvre, contextualized in light of contemporary practices of memorialization, provides insight into the intentions of this eccentric scribe. Relevant literature from subfields—including the study of Hausvaterliteratur, the history of memory, and the history of writing—bolsters Lundin's analysis where needed, and recent theoretical work from Ricoeur to Greenblatt is evoked with a light touch.¹ What sets Lundin's approach apart from much recent scholarship about early modern Europe, however, is his willingness to engage seriously with a psychological perspective.

The meltdown of psychohistory and the decline of trust in Sigmund Freud during the last generation have made early modernists understandably wary of invoking individual psychology as a way to understand a remote and differently constituted era. But the peculiar features of Weinsberg's oeuvre, which Lundin brings out masterfully, require taking his mental states seriously. Weinsberg obsessed about male mortality, for example; the idea that families' memory could be lost was deeply disturbing to him. Frequently drawing on popular tropes and influenced by his humanist education and by his father's personality, his writing took a turn toward secretive expansiveness after his second wife's death. His imagined successors as patriarch of Haus Weinsberg became a captive audience for increasingly scrupulous descriptions of his daily life and thoughts.

Lundin provides textual evidence that plausibly demonstrates certain aspects of Weinsberg's psychological make-up; other points rest on more circumstantial arguments about the scope of Weinsberg's opus and the conditions of sixteenth-century Cologne. In the end, Lundin stops short of major theoretical claims about how to understand individual psychology in the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, his intrepid probing of Weinsberg's "anxious work of cultural salvage" invites us to consider the value of psychological perspectives in understanding both curious individuals like this compulsive writer and the society in which his grandiose, if fruitless, project took place (245).