Elizabeth Peters: Borrower of the Night

Tony should have picked me up that night, but that was one of his weapons in our not-so-unarmed cold war: no concessions to femininity, not even common politeness. If I wanted to be liberated, Tony’s manner implied, I could damned well be good and liberated. I had no intention of engaging in a vulgar debate on the subject; if he couldn’t see for himself that basic courtesy has nothing to do with sexual competition, I was not the girl to point it out. I would have picked him up if I had owned a car, on such a stinking wet, dreary night.

With my thoughts running along those lines and my face covered with a thin sheet of ice, I cannot be blamed for greeting him with a snarl instead of a smile. He was as rosy and warm as a nice baby when he opened his door; behind him a cheerful fire crackled on the hearth, and the half-empty bottle on the coffee table indicated that he had been lightening his heavy labours with bourbon. That was his ostensible excuse for not picking me up; he had a dozen books to read and review for the next issue of the university history journal.

He gave me a beaming smile and let me take off my own coat. I threw it, soggy wet as it was, onto the couch. That was wasted effort; I should have thrown it at his notes. He was as neat as a cat about his academic work, and a complete slob otherwise. He pushed the coat off onto the floor and sat calmly down in the damp patch it had left. He started typing.

‘I’ve got two more books to do after this one,’ he said, pecking away. ‘Take a load off.’

I poured a drink since he hadn’t offered me one, and sat down on the floor near the fire. Books were scattered all over the place, where he had presumably flung them after looking them over.

The fire and the bourbon gradually restored my equanimity, and I felt a faint stir of affectionate amusement as I watched poor, unsubtle Tony pecking away at his antique typewriter. He typed with four fingers – two on each hand – and the effort made his tongue stick out between his teeth. His hair was standing on end, there was a black smudge across one cheek, and beads of perspiration bedewed his upper lip. He looked about eighteen, and damned attractive; if I had had the slightest maternal instinct, I’d have gone all soft and marsh-mallowy inside. I seem, however, to be totally lacking in maternal instincts. It’s one of the reasons why I fight marriage. I watched Tony sweat with the kindliest feelings, and with certain hormonal stirrings, but I didn’t have the slightest urge to rush over and offer to do his typing for him. I type sixty words a minute. Tony knows that.

‘We’re supposed to be there in half an hour,’ I said.

‘If you’ll keep quiet, we’ll make it easily.’

‘You plan to read two books and type out a review of each in twenty-five minutes?’

‘Read?’ Tony stopped typing long enough to give me a look of honest indignation. ‘Nobody reads these things. Don’t be silly.’

He started typing again.

I picked up the nearest book and glanced at it.

‘I see what you mean,’ I admitted.

All the books were inches thick; I don’t know why scholars judge accomplishment by weight instead of content. This one was the heaviest of the lot, and its title, in German, was also ponderous.

‘ The Peasants’ Revolt: A Discussion of the Events of 1525 in Franconia, and the Effects of the Reformation ,’ I translated. ‘Is it any good?’

‘How would I know? I haven’t seen that one yet.’

Tony went on typing. Casually I began leafing through the book. Scholarly prose is generally poor, and scholarly German prose is worse. But the author had gotten hold of some new material – contemporary letters and diaries. Also, the subject interested me.

In recent years, students have done a lot of complaining about ‘relevance.’ No one can quarrel with the basic idea: that education should have something to do with real life and its problems. The trouble comes when you try to define the word. What is relevant? Not history, according to the more radical critics. Who cares what happened in ancient Babylon or medieval England? It’s now that counts.

They couldn’t be more wrong. Everything has happened before – not once, but over and over again. We may not be able to solve our problems through what are pompously called ‘the lessons of history,’ but at least we should be able to recognize the issues and perhaps avoid some of the solutions that have failed in the past. And we can take heart in our own dilemma by realizing that other people in other times have survived worse.

Social upheaval and revolution are old issues, as old as society itself. The Peasants’ Revolt, in the southern and western provinces of Germany, is not one of the better-known revolutions, but it has some interesting parallels with our own times. The peasants are always revolting, says the old joke. It’s a sick old joke. The peasants had plenty to revolt about. There had been many rebellions, by groups driven to desperation by conditions that make modern slums look like Shangri-La, but in the sixteenth century social discontent and misery found a focus. The focus was a real rebel – a renegade monk who called the Pope bad names and loudly proclaimed the abuses of the Establishment. He even married an ex-nun, whom his bad example had seduced from her vows. His name was Martin Luther

Although his teachings gave the malcontents a mystique, Luther was against violence. ‘No insurrection is ever right, whatever the cause.’ And, in the crude style which was typical of the man at times, ‘A rebel is not worth answering with arguments, for he does not accept them. The answer for such mouths is a fist that brings blood to the nose.’

The autocratic princes of the rebellious provinces agreed with both comments. Many of them approved of Luther’s attacks on the Church, since that institution restrained their local powers, but they definitely did not like complaints from their ungrateful subjects. They applied the fist to the nose. The Peasants’ Revolt was savagely suppressed by the nobles and the high clergy, many of whom were temporal princes as well as bishops of the church.

Today the province of Franconia is one of the loveliest parts of Germany. Beautiful old towns preserve their medieval walls, their Renaissance houses and Gothic churches. It’s hard to imagine these quaint old streets as scenes of violence, and yet this region was the centre of the rebellion; blood literally flowed like water down the paved gutters. The city of Würzburg, with its lordly fortress looming over the town, was the seat of a prince-bishop whose subjects rose up and besieged him in his own castle. Another centre of revolt was Rothenburg, now the most famous of the medieval cities of Germany.

I visited Rothenburg on a summer tour one year and promptly fell in love with it. Among its numerous attractions is a castle – Schloss Drachenstein, the home of the Counts von und zu Drachenstein. Although I admit to a sneaking weakness for such outmoded relics of romanticism, I was not collecting castles that summer. It was one of those coincidences, which Tony and other romantics like to think of as Fate, that Tony had spent a summer doing the same thing I did. We were both in search of Tilman Riemenschneider.

A sculptor and woodcarver, Riemenschneider was probably Germany’s greatest master of the late Gothic. The tomb sculptures and altarpieces he created are concentrated in the area around his home town of Würzburg, where for many years he served as a councillor. At the time of the Peasants’ Revolt he was an elderly man, prosperous and honoured – a good, respectable member of the Establishment. It wouldn’t have been surprising if he had supported the Church which had commissioned many of his works, and shaken his greying locks over the depravity of the rebels. Instead, he joined his fellow councillors in support of the peasants’ cause. When the rebellion was suppressed, he ended up in the bishop’s dungeon; and although he came out of it alive and lived for six more years, he never again worked with his hands. The altar at Maidbronn, finished in 1525, was his last work.