At Christmas 1529, Johannes Rütiner, a relatively affluent linen trader, began the first of two volumes of notebooks which detailed news, gossip, rumour and jokes within his town of St Gall, a Swiss Protestant community of four to five thousand souls. Written in inexpert Latin, Rütiner carefully composed notes for a full decade on his neighbour’s conversations concerning ‘past and contemporary events, economic developments, family histories, accidents, crimes, and scandals’ (p. 3). In all likelihood, Rütiner never intended for his notebooks (known as the Commentationes) to be read, even by members of his own household. In The Talk of the Town, Carla Roth skilfully explores Rütiner’s notebooks as a route into early modern cultures of information, orality and sociability. In tracing how Rütiner and his community received, processed, discussed, disseminated and re-told news, stories, histories and humorous anecdotes, Roth makes a fascinating argument about the connection between meaningful information and social bonds and reputation. This superb micro-history demonstrates how oral exchanges, and what Roth coins the ‘communicative capital’ (p. 12) of the teller, were fundamental to the circulation of information in the sixteenth century.
In the introduction, a clear argument is made for the interpretive value of Rütiner’s notes, ‘an unpolished record of the talk of St Gall’ (p. 9), as a window onto early modern oral cultures. Since the central protagonist noted down the identity of his informants, and often their sources and networks, Roth is able to unpick the processes through which contemporaries evaluated the value and trustworthiness of the information they were receiving. Chapters 1 and 2 offer broad contexts to Rütiner’s life, community and writings, and the social and economic profile of the jokers, gossipers and tale-tellers whose voices feature across the Commentationes. Interestingly, men and women from a broad swathe of St Gall society feature as Rütiner’s informants, including artisans, merchants, the town’s executioner and the vivacious elderly midwife Anna Bösch, who gossiped and joked about the domestic politics and sex lives of St Gall’s civic elites. Unsurprisingly though, it is male voices that dominate the pages of the notebooks overall, especially learned men and Protestant clergy, and fellow guildsmen from Rütiner’s weaver’s guild. What follows is a series of thematic chapters which each focus on a different medium of communication. The discussion of obscene jokes and cultures of humour in chapter 3 illuminates the ‘social intelligence’ (p. 74) required to launch a successful jest. Joke tellers showed off a considerable degree of wit and ingenuity in crafting and communicating their humour, thus raising their communicative capital among fellow St Gallers. Likewise, gossip, communicated by both men and women, and the focus of chapter 4, held considerable social value. The male citizens of St Gall were negative, in theory, about gossip though ‘in practice they constantly relied upon, and took part in, the very talk they deemed immoral and untrustworthy’ (p. 80). Chapter 5 is a keystone discussion, which argues for the centrality of face-to-face exchanges and perceived trustworthiness in the dissemination of rumour and news. For sixteenth-century St Gallers, deciding whether to trust a particular piece of information was rooted in a social assessment of the reliability and reputation of the source. The final chapter explores the centrality of local places and urban landmarks in recalling and perpetuating tales from the past, a theme which will be familiar to scholars of custom and memory cultures. We also see how Rütiner and his informants skilfully adapted historical narratives, such as the tumultuous town coup of 1491, to fit the needs of the contemporary moment.
One of the central intellectual contributions of the book is Roth’s close excavation of the interplay between oral, written and printed cultures. Printed matter was a marginal presence in Rütiner’s notebooks, and in a community without a printing press or regular postal service, the citizens of St Gall were highly reliant upon oral informants for their local and international news. In everyday exchanges, such as the telling of jokes, printed matter was liberally adapted to meet the needs of the locality and audience. Moreover, trust in the message ‘was invested in specific sources of information, not a specific medium of transmission’ (p. 104). In deciding which was the most trustworthy account – be it oral communication, manuscript or print – contemporaries would consider the volume of voices, their proximity to the events they were describing, the reliability of different sources in the chain of information communication and the plausibility of the account according to the hearer’s own frame of reference (pp. 127–8).
The Talk of the Town also gives us an interesting perspective of a reformed community. Rütiner was a committed Protestant, with close ties to a wider group of active reformers in the town, including Johannes Kessler, author of a Reformation chronicle, the Sabbata. Indeed, various members of this circle were inspired by recent religious change (‘wondrous times’) to record their experiences in the late 1520s; a decade later, clouded by pessimism about the fate of the reformed movement, their writings dried up. The Commentationes gives us some unusual angles on major Reformation figures, from the ground up; as when Rütiner recorded local gossip that Heinrich Bullinger kept an inhospitable household, and Huldrych Zwingli was quarrelsome. This is a superbly written, deeply researched book that will be essential reading for urban historians, scholars of early modern information history and print and of the Reformation.
