Hans Sachs. by Eckhard BernsteinReview by: Richard Ernest WalkerThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 700-701Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2542663 .

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700 Sixteenth Century Journal XXV / 3 (1994)

illicit contacts with Christians or attempted to thwart the conversion of their friends and rel- atives to Catholicism; or recent converts suspected of apostasy from their newly found faith because of the relations they maintained with their former coreligionists and their lingering adherence to Jewish rites. Only two cases included in the present volume depart from this general picture. The first involves a jailer of the Holy Office, a "capitano Cesare," accused of showing favoritism to certain Jewish prisoners in exchange for services they had performed for him and his wife. The second, infinitely more significant, concerned the famous Rabbi Leon da Modena who, perhaps in a fit of understandable nervousness, submitted to the In- quisition in 1637 for its prepublication approval the manuscript of his book on the history of Jewish rites written for a Christian audience (which had already appeared anonymously in print in Paris earlier that year without permission). After being asked to make various changes, the work was published atVenice in 1638 and went on to enjoy many new editions until 1728.

The texts appearing in the Processi in their original orthography, with editorial interven- tion kept to a minimum but with a dense apparatus of textual and historical notes, make dif- ficult, though enthralling reading.The interested scholar would be well advised to use Pul- lan's excellent The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice as a guide, and to read, for the important background it provides, the introduction to volume one in the series of trials. There Ioly Zorattini provides essential information on the first Jewish penetration into Venice towards the end of the tenth century;Venetian measures, motivated by commercial interests, to encourage their settlement; the founding of the ghetto in Venice in 1516, the first such enclosure in Italy, and the model for later creations; the establishment in Rome in 1543 of the Domus Conversorum, the house of catechumens designed to stimulate conver- sions; and the changing fortunes of Italian Jewry during a succession of popes, reaching a nadir during the reign of Paul IV (1555-1559).The light shed also on the organization and procedures of the Venetian Inquisition and on the limits to the jurisdiction it enjoyed over Jews are essential preambles to entering the exotic world revealed in the pages of this impor- tant scholarly endeavor. Once again we have rich confirmation of the many interdisciplinary uses to which inquisitorial documents lend themselves.

John Tedeschi ............................. The University ofWisconsin-Madison

Hans Sachs. Eckhard Bernstein. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. 1993. 160 pp. DM10,90.

This short biography of the sixteenth-century shoemaker and literary figure Hans Sachs is a welcome addition to the body of information available to the scholars and students of German literature in the Early Modern period. It is all the more valuable in view of the cur- rent imbalance between subjective assessments of Sachs' role as a sixteenth-century person- ality and concrete, objective evaluations of his literary contributions. The author highlights in the preface some of the problems confronting those who would study Sachs as a person- ality in addition to analyzing his works: the absence of letters and/or diary entries; the mag- nitude of the Sachs corpus (more than 4,000 songs, 2,000 poems, 120 tragedies and comedies, 85 Shrovetide plays, and 7 prose dialogues); and a dearth of information concerning his con- tacts with contemporaries, or his travels abroad, or the impact of contemporary events on his personal and professional life.

In contrast, however, a strong point of this overview of Sachs' life and works is its ability to convey in some detail a sense of who Sachs was, what some of his personal and social con-

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Book Reviews 701

cerns were, and how he reacted to a time when strong opinions and controversy were the order of the day.

Sachs rode the crest of a literary wave in the years before his death in 1576, he sank into a trough of disrepute and neglect in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and he rose to a new literary life in the nineteenth century as hero of Richard Wagner's opera "Die Meis- tersinger of Niirnberg"(1868). Nonspecialists who know of Sachs today will most likely have in mind the Wagner image.

The literary activities of Hans Sachs in the early sixteenth century had two points of ori- entation: the city of Nuremberg and the emergence of Martin Luther. The appearance of "Die Wittenbergisch Nachtigall" (1523) marked a turning point in both the literary and per- sonal life of Sachs, for it presaged his destiny as a craftsman/poet and it marked his acceptance and support of the teachings of Martin Luther. In both areas the seat of his activities was

Nuremberg. Bernstein's service in this Sachs biography lies in the balanced presentation of points of

convergence as well as divergence between Sachs and Luther and, as well, in showing ways in which Sachs was in tune with his time and, more than is generally known, in conflict with his peers.While the animosity of the guild-singers in Nuremberg may be attributed to jeal- ousy of Sachs' skills and talent, the censorship of the city fathers of Nuremberg (1527), ad-

monishing him in so many words to recognize his place in society and stay in it, points clearly to the extent to which poetry and poets were part of the political climate of this im- perial city.

Despite its brevity (the text runs 133 pages with 63 contemporary and modern illustra- tions), Bernstein's text offers considerable information and suggests directions for future re- search. For example, is there a verifiable, direct relationship between Sachs' travels and his

writings? Or, how widespread was civic censorship in German cities in the sixteenth cen- tury? What are the points of reference between Sachs' literary representation of Lutheran theology in his poems and plays and the doctrinally accepted positions of Luther and others?

Bernstein's organization of the material provides a broad outline of the creative diversity of Hans Sachs and the highpoints of his literary and personal life. The four prose dialogues (1524) are key to an understanding of Sachs' views on the major religious and social contro- versies in early-sixteenth-century Germany.Analysis of these texts could form the basis for a clarification of his role as either chronicler or social critic.

Sachs' literary reputation rests on the form which dominates his output from 1514 until his death in 1576, the Meistersang. These songs, in which creativity and craftsmanship serve

complementary purposes, serve as a link between Sachs the shoemaker and Sachs the poet. The fact that he achieved the status of master in both disciplines underlines his determination to address the social reality of the guild system while striving also for creative independence and perfection.

No less important, however, are Sachs' theatrical efforts and contributions, the Fastnacht- spiele (Shrovetide Plays), skits, comedies, and tragedies. Whether as playwright, director, actor, or creator of dramatic texts to be read for pleasure and/or moral sustenance, Sachs el- evated secular drama to a level not previously attained in Germany.This is not to say that his

plays are theatrical masterpieces by modern standards but, as Bernstein points out, viewed within the context of sixteenth-century society and with respect to their function in that so-

ciety, they provide a rich image of both the man and the times.

Richard Ernest Walker ................. University of Maryland/College Park

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