From 1529 until 1539, an ordinary linen trader in the small Swiss city of St. Gallen, Johannes Rütiner, recorded details about some 2,000 conversations he had with fellow citizens, servants, and travelers on the road. This material was eventually bound into two volumes that remained secret during the author's life. Rütiner's Commentationes represent a quirky personal document collection from the sixteenth century, like the Wickiana in Zurich studied by Franz Mauelshagen or the Gedenkbuch of Hermann Weinsberg analyzed by Matthew Lundin. These works escape the conventions of genre since they were shaped by one individual's impenetrable motives and remained largely isolated from larger circuits of learned knowledge circulation. In her lively and insightful study, Carla Roth takes this corpus, written in rocky Latin and not organized beyond the sequence of moments when Rütiner decided to record what he had heard, and from whom, and deftly uses it to show how oral information flowed around St. Gallen and its neighborhood in the mid-sixteenth century.
The Commentationes are unusual in that they record the provenance as well as the content of the news, rumors, gossip, and slander that circulated in the tight-knit society of St. Gallen. Roth's introduction concisely reviews a range of theoretical literature to situate this remarkable collection, consistently emphasizing the “social dimension of early modern information exchanges” (2). Since “Rütiner meticulously recorded his informants, their sources, and the context in which information was exchanged,” his notes show us how information traveled and how “individual stories changed over time and over many conversations” (9). Roth evokes Pierre Bourdieu in postulating that Rütiner's interlocutors participated in a system of “communicative capital” where each person's access to information and social skills mattered more than their social status (13). Chapter 2 provides a quantitative analysis of Rütiner's informants by gender, status, age, and location where he interacted with them – over dinner or drinking, on the road, in city meetings, and in his own household. This data provides the foundation for the following chapters, which probe different dimensions of the very social and very oral world of post-Reformation St. Gallen.
In chapter 3, Roth explores the sexual and scatological jokes found in Rütiner's corpus, and offers a social perspective on material that has mostly been analyzed in literary or gender terms. She shows that “both men and women, artisans and the intellectual elite, made and enjoyed obscene jokes” (74), which were part of sociability around St. Gallen's humanist dinner tables as much as in banter between masters and female servants. Telling such jokes required social intelligence, making them an important site for generating and displaying communicative capital. The next chapter takes on the related field of gossip, which played a major role in Rütiner's Commentationes. Roth starts with Rütiner's reports from Anna Bösch, who served as a wet-nurse for his children on several occasions and delivered a stream of gossip that Rütiner eagerly recorded. Though poor and female, the personal information that Bösch's profession brought her and her ability to “‘sell’ her stories to an audience” (86) gave Bösch considerable communicative capital. Roth then questions the stereotype that gossip was specific to women by examining the abundant gossip by men about other men – even about Reformation leaders such as Ulrich Zwingli – that Rütiner recorded. The chapter ends brilliantly by juxtaposing written records from the courts with the extensive reports of city gossip that Rütiner preserved. This move reveals what citizens knew about trials and the events behind them – much more than is often supposed – and how gossip remained a key channel for negotiating status and social capital beyond the authorities’ reach.
Roth's fifth chapter examines the relationship among printed, manuscript, and oral communication in early modern Europe by looking at rumors about events outside St. Gallen, which was a relative communication backwater: printed information about events in the world was slow to arrive, leaving a vital role for oral transmission. After a lucid discussion of fama in general, Roth concentrates on the “Devil of Schiltach,” alleged to have caused a Swabian village to burn in 1533. Rütiner's descriptions allow Roth to trace how the story of this incident evolved in St. Gallen, and how access to communicative capital – in this case, trusted narrators who provided links to apparently reliable eyewitness testimony – shaped the local narrative more than what appeared in printed descriptions did. The trustworthiness of stories from afar depended not on the medium, but on the volume of voices reporting information, their proximity to the events or to eyewitnesses, the reliability of the links connecting the event to the current narrator, and the local plausibility of the resulting version. The final, somewhat fragmentary chapter looks at how narratives about the city's past developed and changed during Rütiner's recordkeeping, with focus on memories of a 1491 uproar in the city and of the critical battle of Kappel in 1531. Here too, Roth's attention to the social context of the “talk of the town” enriches our perspective on how urban citizens learned about their own pasts.
Carla Roth's elegant framing and stimulating analysis of a remarkable source provides both an enjoyable read and much food for thought about how the oral transmission of information worked in the sixteenth century, and how it works in general in human societies. Above all, her emphasis on talk's fundamentally social context makes an important contribution to the long-standing study of human communication across multiple media and different eras.
