Keith Moxey. Peasants, Warriors, and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xiv + 166 p. $20.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-226-54392-5.
Reviewed by David Mayes (Department of History, Sam Houston State University)
Published on H-German (March, 2005)
Keith Moxey's Peasants, Warriors, and Wives is a first-time paperback version of the book originally published in 1989. Primarily a collection of separate essays, it explores the content and production of woodcuts against the backdrop of Reformation Nuremberg. As an art historian, Moxey approaches the subject with questions that generally complement those of Reformation historians who have also worked on the subject of art and culture during the earlier sixteenth century. For those less familiar with the concepts and terminology of art history, the book can, at points, require slower reading and more gradual digestion. However, the clear organization of the chapters and text, along with the array of well-explained, vivid woodcut illustrations, facilitate the process.
In the introduction, Moxey spells out what he sees as the current approaches in the field of art history. One of them, which Moxey calls the "internal" position, analyzes the "internal structures" of a work of art in order to assess their aesthetic value or innovative artistic techniques. The other argues the contrary, that an artwork should be placed into the context of its historical circumstances in order for its significance to be properly understood. It is to the latter train of thought to which Moxey primarily subscribes. His book treats the artistic world in Reformation Nuremberg as something not isolated from the everyday life around it but rather in continuous dialogue with it, both in a passive sense (being shaped by external forces such as the sociopolitical culture) and an active sense (having a hand in shaping that culture). For the same reason Moxey also rejects Edwin Panofsky's position that works of art are to be understood and interpreted within what Panofsky considered to be the larger, more important context of "great works" of art.
Instead of proceeding directly to the artwork, Moxey spends chapter 1 on "Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century" and, more specifically, on the patricians who headed the town council, whom he finds to be crucial to the culture surrounding artwork production in the period. Moxey describes them as an apparently contradictory bunch--on the one hand adopting and installing Luther's Reformation, while on the other hand portraying themselves as pro-imperial on the wider Central European stage. Nevertheless, they had clear ambitions concerning activities within Nuremberg, including the production of woodcuts, which they intended to steer so as to transmit their elite interests.
In conjunction, Moxey explicates how the subject matter depicted in the woodcuts was not based on a direct observation of everyday life. That is to say, the artists' intention was not to depict accurately the activities of an historical event. Rather, the artists derived from an iconographic tradition a number of settings (a church anniversary holiday, a peasant holiday, various dancing motifs, a procession of mercenaries) and symbols already familiar to the viewer. The patricians, however, owing to their dominating influence, played an influential role in the crafting of the message sent by the woodcuts (a point argued in chapter 2). The patricians were, as Moxey explains, well aware of the polemical potential of the woodcuts because of the latter's symbolically potent visual sign system. Below the scene was also usually placed a text--the primary or linguistic sign system--which aided the viewer in interpreting the visual signs.
Moxey then moves on to demonstrate how the images used in woodcuts did not remain static in their usage and meaning. A transformation can be seen, for example, in woodcuts concerning the peasantry (the subject of chapter 3--"Festive Peasants and the Social Order"). Prior to the Reformation, the peasant served as a means for humor and social satire. In the context of a theater drama or literary piece, the figure of the peasant was seen poking fun at the vanities of high society, or ridiculing in sporting humor the sometimes crude, other times raucous if not licentious behavior of the peasantry itself. Moxey points out how the use of the peasant in these contexts was not so much a matter of depicting the peasant in a positive or negative light as it was utilizing the peasant to play on cultural stereotypes. Then, with the onset of the Reformation, the woodcut artists picked up on the more positive portrayal of the "common man" put forth by Lutheran theology, and depicted the peasant in their artwork as the representative of that common man. By the time of the Peasants' War, however, the peasants had interpreted the Reformation message through the lens of their socio-economically disadvantaged circumstances and understood it as a theology that liberated them from their servile status to a lord and its concomitant obligations. The armed uprisings that ensued were justified, in their minds, as attempts to correct injustices in the system if not to overturn it altogether. Luther summarily issued his condemnations of the uprisings as an unjust affront to the divinely instituted structure of authority.
Naturally, the Nuremberg patricians, adherents to Lutheranism and keen on securing the social order which the peasants had threatened, were no longer of a mind to have the peasant serve as a means for satire--even if only temporarily--in a world-turned-upside-down fashion in carnivals or printed form. Instead, the patricians had become hostile towards the peasant and were intent on having the peasant painted in a negative, critical fashion. By the 1530s, then, the peasant had become the object of scorn and ridicule. The peasant man or woman was now seen in the woodcuts as naïve and easily duped by a fraudulent dentist, or drunk and vomiting at a feast. For other members of Nuremberg's upper class, Moxey argues, seeing such imagery confirmed the superiority of their class and the inferiority of the peasant class.
For Moxey, this transformation of the festive peasant--in which the peasant went from being a means of social satire, to being a representative of the common man, and finally in the 1530s to being the target of social satire--occurred because the woodcuts were utilized to propagate a condescending, critical image of the peasantry. They also established a cultural foundation that then molded public opinion according to the patricians' values, values on which Nuremberg society, Moxey asserts, were essentially based.
Moxey carefully describes how similar transformations can be seen in other subjects familiar to a sixteenth-century Nuremberg audience. He addresses, for example, the image of the mercenary in chapter 4 ("Mercenary Warriors and the 'Rod of God'"). At the turn of the sixteenth century, the mercenary was often associated with the struggle against the mounting Turkish threat. The figure was heroically portrayed in woodcuts and sung about in pro-imperial songs. German humanists enhanced the image by stirring nationalist sentiment and rallying support for Emperor Maximilian I¹s efforts against the Muslim foe. The mercenary, in other words, was "a personification of imperial power" (p. 72) and identified with "the imperial cause" (p. 77). The Nuremberg council, with its pro-imperial policies, reinforced the image. However, while this image was still being disseminated, a different, contrasting one of the mercenary began appearing in woodcuts of the 1520s-1530s. Instead of standing in a valiant pose or as the standard bearer, as he had in the past, the mercenary was now seen intermingling with young female camp followers and also linked to rooster, or cock, figures (symbols of lust). Such woodcuts drew upon the less flattering stereotypes of sexual immorality associated with mercenary life. Mercenaries were also paired with skeletal figures (symbolizing death) holding an hourglass. Death, in other words, surrounded the mercenary, both because of the death he inflicted on others and for the death he himself was liable to suffer owing to his profession.
A shift had occurred in which the mercenary was now being mocked and satirized in various images. Moxey pins the source of this shift to the Northern humanists' and the Reformation's criticisms of how warfare was perceived. For Erasmus, the medieval "just war" doctrine merely justified the presence of barbarous, depraved mercenaries. For Luther, the Peasants' War persuaded him that earthly warfare was permissible but only as a temporal affair of the political authorities and not something to be waged in the name of Christ. Because he imagined the Turks as the "rod of God" to punish human sins, the kind of warfare to be waged against them was a spiritual one of repentance. From the Lutheran standpoint, then, placing the mercenary alongside the figure of death served to remind the viewer of the need for contrition instead of taking up arms.
Reformation scholars and art historians will both find Moxey's book a stimulating read. Not least it will leave one with a greater appreciation for how woodcuts shaped and were shaped by the culture surrounding them.
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Citation:
David Mayes. Review of Moxey, Keith, Peasants, Warriors, and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10348
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