El mercat monopolístic (o monopoli)

JOHANNES NIDER

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apply more careful analysis to it, most notably the partial edition of the work along with extensive commentary by Catherine Chène in the collection L’imag-inaire du sabbat, and the excellent study by Werner Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider. With these few notable exceptions, however, the Formicar-ius remains largely unexplored. In particular, relatively little effort has been made to understand the work as anything other than a treatise on witchcraft.⁵ To some extent, this remarkable ignorance about such an important source for late medieval religious and cultural history can be blamed on the Formicar-ius itself. The work is essentially a long collection of loosely related stories, instructional or illustrative of certain moral points, told by the theologian to his young pupil. Clearly these are exempla, brief edifying tales intended for excerp-tion and use in sermons.⁶ Thus the Formicarius naturally lends itself to being quoted. At the same time, it stubbornly resists analysis. While the work has its precedents in earlier religious literature, it is very much sui generis, not quite Wtting into any of the easy categories that encompass most of Nider’s other writings.⁷All of his other works discussed here have been more or less straight-forward theological treatises, each advancing a coherent position or argument and each more or less clearly situated within an ongoing debate in late medieval religious culture. The Formicarius is a far more literary work that can be read in many ways and for many purposes. For this reason, it is an extremely important source for the study of religious life in the early Wfteenth century generally, allowing access and insight into numerous aspects of the late medieval religious world. In earlier chapters I have considered this work insofar as it contains material touching on issues of witchcraft, heresy, and reform. But for my ulti-mate purpose, such a piecemeal approach will not sufWce. The larger meaning of the Formicarius and the full meaning of the accounts of witchcraft it contains can be grasped only when the treatise is considered as a whole.

Overall, the Formicarius is best seen as a work of reform. Here, however, Nider was not arguing for a return to strict observance and practice within a single ecclesiastical institution or religious order, nor was he debating with other theologians and reformers about the acceptability of a certain narrow status or mode of life. Rather, he aimed at a reform of the most basic and most important sort—a moral and spiritual regeneration among the faithful at all levels of Chris-tian society. Given that his great work was essentially a collection of preaching exempla, Nider would have intended this material to reach a wide segment of Christian society through the medium of popular sermons. As R. N. Swanson has written about late medieval popular preaching generally, such sermons would have been intended to “deWne sin, castigate, urge penance and a return to something like pristine innocence by the rejection of sin, and offer hope of sal-vation by acceptance and enactment of the requirements of the Christian life.”⁸

Title page of Formicarius, Douai 1602 edition. (Courtesy, the Newberry Library.)

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Incipit of the Wfth book of Formicarius, Douai 1602 edition. (Courtesy, the Newberry Library.)

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This is precisely the purpose that the stories in the Formicarius were designed to achieve. It was through these essential preaching functions familiar to any mem-ber of the Dominican order—the deWnition of sin, castigation, and exhortation to penance and right behavior—that Nider hoped to effect a reform in the broad-est sense across Christian society.

Like the Formicarius itself, the analysis here will be somewhat diffuse, but an overriding purpose will prevail. The overall structure and larger literary con-text of the treatise, as well as the forms, antecedents, and traditions on which it drew, provide the necessary background for understanding Nider’s great work.

Whatever its roots in earlier theological and didactic traditions, however, the Formicarius was very much a work of its own time. The various stories of mir-acles, wonders, and sin that Nider collected present a rich picture of the moral and spiritual landscape of Europe in the early Wfteenth century. Writing as a reformer, he pointed out many religious failings and shortcomings of faith, as well as much sin and corruption, but he also readily praised what was laudable in the religious world of his day, and he continually rehearsed the ways in which men and women could grow stronger in the faith. Although he intended his mes-sage for a general lay audience, his perceptions of the world and his concerns were deeply inXuenced by his own situation as a member of a religious order.

This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in his preoccupation with chastity and vir-ginity. Yet here, as elsewhere, his ideas were neither simple nor entirely straight-forward. Although such matters occupy only a portion of Nider’s attention in the Formicarius, exploring his thought in these areas clariWes his perceptions of female spirituality and ultimately, of course, his perception of women as espe-cially susceptible to the seductions of the devil and the crimes of witchcraft. Yet Nider’s concern over witchcraft was not rooted primarily in any fear of the sinful nature of women. Throughout the Formicarius he recounted a wide range of spiritual dangers that he perceived as threats to Christian society. He focused time and again on tales of visionary and demonic experiences. Indeed, it would not be unfair to say that such experiences were the principal subject of his great work. His preoccupation with these matters grew directly from his reformist concerns, and ultimately led him (even as they will lead us) to the matter of witchcraft.

CONTEXT, STRUCTURE, AND PURPOSE OF THE FORMICARIUS

If the Formicarius is a difWcult work to summarize and Wt neatly into a narrow genre, at least it is fairly easy to date and localize. Internal evidence clearly shows that Nider wrote the work mainly in 1437, beginning perhaps in late 1436 and Wnishing in early 1438.⁹During this period he was in Vienna as a

member of the theological faculty of the university there. Nevertheless, neither the Dominican priory nor the University of Vienna provided the main intellec-tual context for the composition of the Formicarius. The long treatise was, as Nider’s biographer Kaspar Schieler aptly put it, “really the work of almost his entire later life.”¹⁰The stories and examples that he related, drawn mainly from his personal experiences and discussions with clerical and lay authorities, reXect the geographic scope of his movements. That is, the Formicarius presents a picture of late medieval religious life across the whole southern swath of German-speaking lands: modern Switzerland, southern Germany, Austria, and the Rhineland as far north as Cologne. The stories and exempla related are set almost exclusively in this region, concentrated in areas where Nider stayed for long periods: Cologne, Vienna, Nuremberg, and Basel. This is also the region in which the Formicarius had its greatest, indeed almost its exclusive, readership.

Of the twenty-seven known manuscript copies of the work, virtually all origi-nated in this area.¹¹Yet to describe the context of the Formicarius as the entire area through which Nider moved in the course of his life, while in one sense cer-tainly true, seems too broad a categorization to be really helpful or informative.

More narrowly characterized, the real context for the composition of the Formicarius was clearly the Council of Basel. Of the many stories that Nider related in this large work, by far the greatest number he either heard or experi-enced directly during his time at Basel. Particularly with his stories of witchcraft, he must have begun collecting tales, if not composing the actual work in which they would eventually appear, while at the council. Many of the examples of witchcraft that he presented in the Formicarius were situated in the Simme val-ley, which lies some seventy-Wve miles to the south of Basel, in the Alps of the Bernese Oberland. He heard these stories, so he wrote, from the secular judge Peter of Bern, who had conducted numerous witch trials in the region. Nider maintained that he had conferred with Peter “extensively and profoundly”

about the subject of witchcraft.¹²In late 1428 or early 1429, before he came to Basel to stay, Nider visited Bern, and he could have met Peter on this occasion, or Peter might have come to Basel at some point in the following years. Cer-tainly at no other time was Nider so near to Bern for any extended period, and we have no indication that Judge Peter ever traveled extensively beyond Bernese territory.¹³Nider also heard stories of witchcraft from various other sources at Basel, including an account of the famous trial of Joan of Arc from the French cleric Nicolas Amici, a theologian and former rector of the University of Paris, who was attending the council.¹⁴In turn Nider may well have drawn on some of the material he collected in the Formicarius for a series of sermons he delivered when he returned to Basel brieXy in the early summer of 1438. Schieler goes so far as to maintain that he actually read out parts of his work to the council

fathers.¹⁵Whatever the case, while the Formicarius was not written in Basel, its composition was closely associated with the council. We may well picture Nider as a famous Wgure in Basel, known for always having an interesting and incred-ible story to tell and frequently seen going from member to member between the sessions of the great council (which were, after all, mostly held in his own pri-ory) collecting more fantastic tales to include in his sprawling work.

Throughout the treatise, the theologian’s lazy but curious pupil acted as Nider’s disciple, posing questions and taking in his wisdom. He also served as the learned theologian’s excuse for relating contemporary stories of the won-drous, miraculous, or demonic as edifying exempla, rather than expounding learned but dry theological argumentation on the many issues his student raised.

With each topic covered in the Formicarius and in response to every question the student posed, the theologian would begin by citing biblical, patristic, or scholastic literature. In each case his student, unsatisWed with these responses, would ask the theologian to illustrate his points with contemporary examples rather than ancient authorities. Moreover, it was through the voice of his pupil that Nider was able to raise ideas that were clearly commonly held but that he considered wrong or based on misunderstandings or misinformation. He could then respond to these notions and correct them in the voice of the theologian. It was the student and not the master, for example, who decried the worldliness of prelates and pastors in Germany, the student who complained that the great councils of Constance and Basel had been wholly ineffective, and the student who was shocked by the idea that women, the frail sex, dared to engage in such horriWc activities as witchcraft.¹⁶In each case Nider, in his thin guise as the the-ologian, then had an opportunity to comment on and refute these common misperceptions.

Nider organized the Formicarius loosely around the various forms and conditions of the lives of ants. Thus the Wrst book, dealing with the deeds of good men and women, he organized around the occupations of ants. The second book, dealing with revelations, was based on ants’ varied means of locomotion (some crawl and some Xy). The third, on false visions, was structured around the sizes of different kinds of ants. The fourth, on the virtues of saints and other holy people, he based on the stages of an ant’s life (egg, larva, mature insect), and the Wfth, on witches, he structured around the colors of ants (white, black, red). In addition, each of the twelve chapters of each book was based on one of sixty conditions of ants’ lives.¹⁷The reader quickly realizes, however, that this complex organizing scheme has almost nothing to do with the subjects Nider intended to discuss, and in fact all reference to ants generally vanishes after the Wrst few lines of each chapter. Nider began the Wrst book, for example, by divid-ing the labor of ants into three categories: some engage in productive labor,

some stand guard, and some devour the dead. This tripartite structure he then compared to the classic medieval division of society into three orders: peasants, who labored; knights, who fought (or stood guard, as Nider would have it); and clerics, who through their prayers tended to the dead. The lesson that the ants taught here, he concluded, was that all people could and ought to engage in some form of useful activity, whatever their station in life. From this point he launched into his discussion of various speciWc deeds performed by good men and women, without according ants much further mention.¹⁸

For inspiration and models for his great work Nider was indebted to a long line of moralistic dialogues, stretching all the way back to the famous Dialogues of Gregory the Great. He cited Gregory at several points in the Formicarius, and additional evidence of the importance that the last of the Latin fathers of the church held for Nider can be found in a work that may have served as a sort of preparation for the writing of the Formicarius: a collection Nider made of numerous exempla from various earlier sources. It exists in a single known man-uscript copy stemming from the Dominican priory in Basel and dated to before 1438. Containing more than 350 stories, this large compilation contains no prologue, introduction, or commentary of any kind, so we cannot be certain why Nider assembled the work. What is certain is that nearly a quarter of the exempla it contains are drawn from Gregory the Great.¹⁹ More recent works also served as inspiration and provided models for the Formicarius. Anyone familiar with Dominican moral literature will immediately recognize the simi-larity between a work based on ants and an earlier Dominican treatise based on bees, the Bonum universale de apibus of Thomas of Cantimpré, written between 1256 and 1261. Thomas provided a clear precedent not only for the use of insects as an organizing theme but also for the extensive discussion of demons and demonology found especially in the Wfth book of the Formicarius, and Nider acknowledged his debt to Thomas at the beginning of his great work.²⁰In this earlier collection of moralizing stories and exempla, Thomas had been con-cerned to encourage proper behavior among clerics, both high-ranking prelates and the lower clergy serving under them. Thus, like Nider’s treatise, his work can be seen as one of reform. Whereas Thomas dealt only with the behavior of churchmen, however, Nider was concerned more generally with moral reform across all of Christian society. Although he did bring some of Thomas’s tales of demons into the Wfth book of the Formicarius, ultimately he borrowed little directly from the Bonum universale de apibus.²¹

Another well-known medieval collection of wondrous stories in the form of a dialogue would have provided an important precedent for the Formicarius.

This was the Dialogus miraculorum, written between 1219 and 1223 by the Cistercian abbot Caesarius of Heisterbach.²²Nider drew on Caesarius explicitly

only once in the Formicarius, but given the fame of Caesarius’s collection and the similarity of its themes to those of the Formicarius, it seems likely that Nider would have seen it as a model for his own work.²³Like the Bonum universale de apibus a generation later, the Dialogus was concerned entirely with the behavior of clerics, here solely the monks of the Cistercian order, and was a work of reform. From this tradition of reforming moral treatises the Formicar-ius arose. In his great work, however, Nider pushed the idea of reform beyond cloister walls and even beyond the boundaries of the institutional church to include the entire Christian world. In his concern with moral and spiritual reform among the laity he revealed his debt to another reformist tradition as well, one just reaching its full strength in the late fourteenth and early Wfteenth centuries—the tradition of popular reformist preaching.

As a collection of exempla, the Formicarius would have functioned as a kind of preacher’s manual, a handy collection of ready-made edifying stories for use in sermons. Thus, although he wrote the work in Latin, Nider, an experienced popular preacher himself, would have expected the information contained in his treatise to reach every level of Christian society through the medium of ser-mons.²⁴Preaching, of course, had always been an important means of dissemi-nating religious teachings to the faithful and of correcting any errors in belief among the laity. Saint Dominic had founded the Order of Preachers to combat heresy and spread the true teachings of the faith through sermons. In the late fourteenth and early Wfteenth centuries, however, popular preaching had taken on even greater importance.²⁵During this period, widely (and wildly) popular preachers reached out to huge numbers of the faithful. The Dominican Vincent Ferrer, for example, traveled through Spain, France, and Switzerland, and the Franciscan Bernardino of Siena preached extensively across much of Italy in the early Wfteenth century. For such men, popular preaching became more than a means of spreading the church’s message to the people. It became a call for and means toward a general spiritual renewal throughout Christian society (a func-tion it retained until well into the next century, when the Protestant Reforma-tion was driven largely by the direct spread of the reformers’ message to a pious and concerned laity).²⁶Reformist popular sermons, R. N. Swanson writes, were intended to spread and strengthen the faith “through exhortation, through tales of the saints which provided good examples and showed prospective rewards, through reports of miracles, and with horror stories to warn against following a bad example and the penalties for those who neglected their duty.”²⁷ They achieved their goal as never before in Nider’s lifetime.

Nider’s Formicarius clearly placed him in the popular reforming tradition of moralizing preachers such as Vincent Ferrer and Bernardino of Siena. Nider praised both men in his great work, especially the Dominican Ferrer, noting

their preaching efforts and their work in the conversion of sinners back to strong faith. In fact, the Formicarius was the Wrst written account to devote signiWcant attention to the life of Ferrer, a future Dominican saint.²⁸Like both

their preaching efforts and their work in the conversion of sinners back to strong faith. In fact, the Formicarius was the Wrst written account to devote signiWcant attention to the life of Ferrer, a future Dominican saint.²⁸Like both