“So that I Never Fail to Warn and Admonish”: Pastoral Care and Private Conversation in a Seventeenth-century Reformed Village

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how the pastor and parishioners of an early modern Swiss village negotiated privacy and exposure in their shared mission to create a Christian community. The chapter describes how, after witnessing the suicide of the school teacher of his parish in 1631, village pastor Hans Rudolf Fischer decided to keep a diary of the personal encounters with his parishioners, as well as minutes of the monthly local moral court sessions over which he presided. His notes, which span a period of ten years, present Fischer as a pastor eager to listen to and alleviate the sorrows of his parishioners, yet by no means shy to reprimand privately and publicly those he considered to lead a sinful life. The contribution shows how villagers established their own informal networks through private conversations and how parishioners and pastors were able to access, distribute, or control private information within the confines of their roles within the village.

On 20 October 1631, the village of Brütten was left in shock by the suicide of the local schoolmaster, Lienhart Weber. The village pastor, Hans Rudolf Fischer (1601–85), in particular, was stunned to hear that Weber—a man he held for a pious Christian—had been drawn to kill himself. After the villagers had burned the schoolmaster’s body, the pastor began to inquire among his parishioners, seeking explanations for Weber’s tragic fate.¹ Much of what he was told was the kind of slander bound to surface about a man who had disgraced himself in the eyes of his community by the manner of his death. The dead schoolmaster’s best friend told Fischer that Weber had been “lewd and obscene in his speech like no one else” and had been chasing after the young girls of the village.² Two village officials even suggested that Weber had been secretly involved in Anabaptist circles and implied that he had engaged in bestiality. However, the statement of Weber’s wife was disconcerting to the pastor in a wholly different way. Her husband, the woman told Fischer, had long been seen as a loner and oddball among the villagers and had increasingly withdrawn himself, praying alone and haunting the forest where he eventually killed himself.³ Completely unbeknownst to Fischer, Weber appeared to have suffered from a deep and long-lasting crisis in both his social life and in his faith.⁴ About any of this, Fischer confided to his notes, he had been “wholly unaware and unknowing”, despite the relatively small size of his parish—only around two hundred parishioners lived in the village and surrounding hamlets—and despite having had a long and pleasant conversation with Lienhart Weber merely a few days before his death.⁵

Pastor Fischer’s investigations among his parishioners reveal much of his ignorance of the most mundane realities of life in his community—an impression frequently reiterated in scholarship on early modern rural pastors. The relation between Protestant pastors and their rural parishioners, historians have argued, was largely characterised by mutual incomprehension, if not outright hostility, with some even claiming that the end of the sixteenth century witnessed a new wave of anticlericalism rising up across Protestant Europe.⁶ While such a grim view has been countered with examples of a lively culture of dialogue, adaptation, and compromise between pastors and villagers, pastors certainly did struggle with the task of reconciling a host of different—and sometimes contradicting—demands: from religious authorities’ calls for order and confessional adherence, to their parishioners’ desire for spiritual services and advocacy for their concerns, to their own need for self- and familial sustenance.⁷ How did this complex blend of demands impact the pastor’s relationships with his parishioners? How did it impact his life and work in the village?

The records of pastor Hans Rudolf Fischer offer a fresh perspective on the dynamics of pastoral care in early modern rural Europe. After the death of Lienhart Weber, Fischer began to chronicle a large part of his daily interactions and conversations with the members of his parish.⁸ Beginning in late 1631 and ending a decade later in 1641, Fischer chronicled his life and work in brief but succinct monthly entries, offering a unique insight into early modern parish life. Largely, historians have approached the early modern parish with the help of visitation reports and—for Reformed territories—consistory protocols. Available over long stretches of the early modern period for a host of Lutheran, Reformed, and some Catholic territories, such records have enabled scholars to reconstruct post-Reformation pastor-parishioner relations to remarkably complex degrees.⁹ At the same time, a narrow reliance on visitation and consistory records threatens to exaggerate the significance of institutional and disciplinary encounters between pastors and parishioners at the expense of informal modes of interaction.¹⁰ As Judith Pollmann has argued, using personal diaries, journals, and chronicles alongside visitation and consistory protocols offers a more encompassing view of the activities of local church representatives, providing valuable insight into the variety and importance of their daily, informal encounters with parishioners.¹¹

Specifically, Hans Rudolf Fischer’s notes enable an exploration of the various negotiations between pastors and parishioners taking place through private conversation. Talking in private, this chapter argues, was a crucial tool within the repertoire of pastoral care in the early modern village. It was essential to the pastor’s role as guardian of souls since private talk allowed Fischer to discreetly identify and address concerns which touched on such sensitive matters as honour, reputation, and social status. Furthermore, talking in private was key to fulfilling his duties as guardian of laws and morals and head of Brütten’s consistory. The consistory required active participation of its lay members to function as the central institution for moral oversight in the parish. However, local hierarchies and dynamics often prevented it from working in this way.¹² Private appeals, in turn, allowed the pastor to address and negotiate the collective handling of issues which the consistory and village community were divided on.

Hans Rudolf Fischer’s record-keeping was situated within greater trends towards increased regulation of rural religious culture within the Zurich Reformed Church. In 1628, the Zurich synod replaced the disparate set of rules and regulations which had accumulated over the previous century with a comprehensive framework for rural church life.¹³ In the first place, these regulations contained a detailed catalogue of pastoral responsibilities. The pastor was to preach the word of God, administer the sacraments, oversee the local school, and visit the sick. He was also to act as guardian of divine law and “admonish every day and night, seeking in particular and by all means that his teaching bears fruit and that it is followed obediently by all people”.¹⁴ Matthew 18:15–17 provided the foremost model for pursuing this latter task.¹⁵ First, the pastor was to reprimand offenders “fatherly, friendly, virtuously, diligently, earnestly” in person and, where this was impossible or unsuccessful, the pastor was to ask a relative or friend of the offender for assistance.¹⁶ If all these measures had failed, the pastor was supposed to turn to the parish consistory. The synod’s directive from 1628 specified that once a month, parish elders, officials, and the so-called Ehegaumer (literally, “moral guardians”) were to meet with the pastor after church service. This so-called Stillstand (for the fact that its members “stood still” while the other parishioners left the church) was to discuss moral transgressions, reproach offenders, and, if necessary, report delinquents to higher authorities. In another mandate from 1636, the synod further required pastors to keep written protocols of these Stillstand sessions.¹⁷ Although these measures were adopted only slowly and reluctantly in many places, a growing number of parishes introduced consistories and kept written records of their sessions in the course of the following years.

Situated within these larger transformations in seventeenth-century Zurich Reformed culture, Fischer’s turn to writing also arose out of a state of deep personal and communal crisis. Fischer had already served the parish for five years at the time of the schoolmaster’s suicide. Before this incident, the pastor explained in one of his earliest entries, he had considered it unnecessary to keep a record: “I and the sworn jurors decided all occurring incidents in such a way that we could hope to have given our best, followed the laws of our gracious lords, and defeated evil and planted good”.¹⁸ Lienhart Weber’s death robbed him of this confidence. The pastor hoped that keeping a written memory of his activities would push him to remain vigilant and assertive in his future work “so that I never fail to warn and admonish”.¹⁹ Philip Benedict writes that for pious men such as Fischer, “maintaining such documents served at once as an instrument of self-monitoring and self-improvement, as a way of sharing with others one’s personal experience of grace, and as a means of establishing a personal record of God’s graces and mercies that could be reread in times of ebbing faith to revive one’s assurance of one’s own election and to prompt a more ardent service of God”.²⁰ In Fischer’s case, furthermore, this exercise was of an essentially communal nature—the tribulations suffered by Brütten’s inhabitants inevitably constituted the pastor’s very own moments of divine temptation and grace.

Fischer’s records, meanwhile, not only predated but also surpassed the Zurich synod’s regulations in breadth and detail. After all, the synod’s writ from 1636 only asked pastors to protocol consistory sessions—an order already hard enough to enforce in most parishes.²¹ Fischer’s records, in turn, move seamlessly between documenting official sessions and public acts and revealing deeply personal observations and intimate encounters. The pastor divided his records into two volumes, entitled “Acta Brüttensia Publica” and “Acta Brüttensia Privata”. Fischer subtitled the former as “a written inventory of what I said and did with my trusted parishioners of Brütten during the monthly Stillstand in church and parsonage in the presence of the village bailiff, the Ehegaumer, and elders of the parish”, while he called the latter a “short inventory of what I said and did at times with my parishioners in the parsonage and other places”.²² “Public” and “private”, in Fischer’s understanding, thus constituted different realms of pastoral activity—one being the “public” institution of the Stillstand, the other being the practice of individual, “private” talk with his parishioners.²³ Both Fischer’s “public” and “private” interactions were inherently part of his responsibility of “diligently overseeing his whole flock daily and tirelessly”, and his decision to distinguish between them in his writings seems to have been first and foremost a means to provide an orderly account to prospective readers.²⁴ In all likelihood, Fischer intended his account to also serve as testimony of his activities to his successors in office and as proof of his diligence and thoroughness at a time when the death of Lienhart Weber had called those very qualities into question.²⁵ This is underscored by Fischer’s readiness to abandon his categorisation for the sake of comprehensibility—if an issue arose within one volume, Fischer would often document further steps in this matter within the same volume, no matter the place and mode of interaction. Thus, notes on consistory meetings found their way into the “Acta Privata” while intimate conversations between pastors and parishioners, in turn, spilled over into the “Acta Publica”.

Not much is known about Hans Rudolf Fischer before he arrived in Brütten. Born in 1601, the Zurich citizen was ordained in 1622 and became deacon in the city of Winterthur in 1623 before taking over the parish of Brütten in 1626.²⁶ To his great advantage, Fischer had his own house in Brütten and held some property in a nearby village, thus rendering him less dependent on contributions from his parishioners than many of his colleagues. The parish he had been allocated comprised around 200 parishioners in the village itself and surrounding hamlets. Households in Brütten seemed to have been relatively well-off—one villager told Fischer how no one had ever heard of a household forced into bankruptcy—yet the threat of dearth and poverty still remained tangible.

Although dominion over Brütten was shared in a complex arrangement between the Catholic abbey of Einsiedeln and the Reformed city of Zurich, religious life was strictly organised along the terms of the Zurich Reformed Church.²⁷ The Zurich city council passed the mandates and doctrines binding for the community and claimed jurisdiction over all disputes and offences. Although integrated into these larger worldly and spiritual hierarchies, power relations in 1630s Brütten retained a strong communal aspect. The village was governed by officials put forward by the village assembly itself who were then confirmed in a process of negotiation with the village’s rulers.²⁸ Local jurisdiction as well as the administration of village finances and commons lay in the hands of the Untervogt (usually referred to by Fischer as simply Vogt or “bailiff”) and two elders or Dorffmeyer, who reported to the bailiwick’s highest official, the Landvogt of Kyburg. Pastoral care and moral oversight in the village needed to factor in this division of powers and its occasionally conflicting understandings of order.²⁹

This chapter will approach Fischer’s conversations with his parishioners from two perspectives. In the first section, the focus will be on Fischer’s pastoral care in the sense of Seelsorge—cure of souls. Tracing Fischer’s effort to aid people afflicted by grave spiritual doubts, this section reconstructs a shared concern with sin and salvation expressed in a vocabulary that drew on tenets of Reformed belief on both the pastor’s and the parishioner’s side. However, it also shows how the pastor’s attempts at accessing people’s concerns were hampered by his position within the village and towards higher authorities. In the second section, this chapter then seeks to relate Fischer’s account to questions of moral oversight and discipline in early modern rural life. Looking at Fischer’s attempts to moderate Brütten’s drinking culture, this section argues that local power relations turned the local consistory into a relatively minor vehicle for the enforcement of Reformed norms. Fischer’s campaign against drinking was founded upon personal initiative and an occasionally successful, occasionally tenuous combination of private admonition and public reproach.

Pastoral Care and the Threat of Melancholy

The threat of melancholy—which had struck Brütten so violently with the suicide of the schoolmaster—never quite dissipated during the following years.³⁰ In his efforts to prevent another such tragedy, Hans Rudolf Fischer was constantly on the lookout for any signs of crisis among his parishioners. His conversations with parishioners struggling with spiritual doubts make up a large part of his records and confront us with a side of early modern rural pastoral care we are hardly familiar with.³¹ Seeking to counter the spread of melancholy, Fischer needed to find ways to access a community that was partially indifferent or even hostile to his aims. Wielded the right way, community networks could aid his cause, yet they could just as easily turn against Fischer. Furthermore, the pastor also needed to balance his roles as caretaker of sick bodies and souls with his role as agent of discipline and order. This task required establishing different modes of address as well as different modes of confidentiality in his conversations with parishioners.³²

Fear for the salvation of the soul was a common affliction in 1630s Brütten. The pastor’s conversations reveal a widespread concern among his parishioners about the severity of their sinfulness and the limits of God’s grace—fears that were intimately connected to experiences of deprivation and social exclusion. Parishioners traced back their state of poverty and strife to God having abandoned them due to their sinful way of living—an abandonment perceived, despite Fischer’s frequent reminders of God’s grace, as permanent and absolute. One parishioner once told Fischer about being struck in broad daylight by a sudden vision of evil spirits on horses chasing him, shouting that “he has gorged and boozed all his life, sworn to do right so often yet done nothing; his belief is void, and he must come away with them”.³³

Faced with such existential sorrows, Fischer often liked to sit down with parishioners and explain to them the conditions of God’s grace and the extent of Christ’s sacrifice. “Two and a half hours” he spent with two widows on one occasion, as he noted, “comforting them and teaching them on a number of issues”.³⁴ Often, Fischer simply marked extended personal lectures by adding an “etc., with amply more words” (mit wytgloüffigen worten) at the end of an account.³⁵ In these conversations, the pastor presented divine grace as the defining factor in the relationship of believers with God. Fischer insisted in one such conversation that a “heartfelt trust in God the Almighty” was necessary so “that He in His pure grace and by Christ’s merit forgives our sins”.³⁶ Furthermore, faith in God was not just the path to salvation but also the most useful remedy against worldly concerns, for even though “God often withholds His help for long” (as the pastor conceded), He “still lives and His helping hand has not been withdrawn”.³⁷ At the same time, Fischer assured those shaken in their faith that moments of doubt were not only common, but could even be a mark of piety. “Even the most pious children of God”, the pastor consoled one parishioner, “yes, most of them indeed, often sink into grave doubts and great temptations”.³⁸ To underscore his points, Fischer drew extensively on scripture, bringing a Bible, prayer books, or works by leaders of the Zurich Reformed Church along with him on his visits and littering his lectures with citations from the Old and New Testament.³⁹ Although his parishioners certainly fashioned these biblical and catechetical examples to their own understandings, they formed a shared source of solace and edification for both parties.⁴⁰

Female parishioners, particularly those at the fringes of Brütten’s family networks, showed little hesitation in sharing their sorrows with the pastor. The village midwife repeatedly turned to the pastor when the death of a newborn threatened to bring her into disrepute.⁴¹ Several of Brütten’s widows also sought the advice and help of the pastor in disputes with neighbours and relatives, with one Margretha Wäber complaining to Fischer that “she is abandoned by everyone, has much debt and barely manages to sustain herself”.⁴² To those women whose material welfare and standing in the village was—either by occupation or by misfortune—tenuous and dependent on the goodwill of family and neighbours, the pastor represented both a kind spirit to turn to as well as someone able to put his weight behind their cause.⁴³ An outsider to the village’s family networks and yet a man conferred with the authority of his pastoral office and his position as head of a household, Fischer could act as an advocate for concerns which had a difficult standing within the village’s family networks.

Fischer’s spiritual care was thus tangled up with parish hierarchies and dynamics, a fact which became most evident in his ambiguous relationship with the male parish elite. On the one hand, male heads of households—or housefathers —shared and supported Fischer’s mission of strengthening faith in Brütten, not least by actively partaking in the Stillstand. Housefathers also informed Fischer of neighbours and friends struggling with their faith, even if they insisted on doing so in secret.⁴⁴ Furthermore, even if they denied the allegation, housefathers suspected of being afflicted with melancholy were open to discussing their doubts and temptations to some degree and—as Fischer liked to stress—often expressed gratitude for his edifying words.⁴⁵ Yet, at the same time, housefathers clearly viewed the pastor’s intervention with suspicion or even outright hostility.

The case of Ulrich Morff is illustrative in this case. In February 1633, “a good friend” informed Fischer that “Morff has been seized by severe melancholy concerning his salvation”.⁴⁶ While Morff himself stubbornly denied suffering from spiritual afflictions and attributed his occasional outbursts to either anger with his sons, too much drink, or bodily ailments, Fischer kept watch. Over the following weeks, the pastor gathered clues from different sources and questioned acquaintances and relatives of Morff until it finally became clear that Morff was indeed involved in several lawsuits and afflicted by crippling fears of death and damnation.⁴⁷

Useful information often reached Fischer through confidential and convoluted channels. While looking for clues on Morff’s case, Fischer once travelled to nearby Oberwinterthur to confer with Morff’s sister, who professed to have heard nothing. Overhearing their conversation, her daughter-in-law, however, told the pastor how some days earlier, Morff had drunkenly lamented to a neighbour that “he has great sorrow in his house”.⁴⁸ Afterwards, Fischer confronted Untervogt Jakob Steffen, who told the pastor that Morff’s wife had confided in his own wife, disclosing that Morff had indeed said that “praying is futile, he is lost”. Morff’s wife, the bailiff told Fischer, had explicitly demanded that “one shall not tell the pastor about this”.⁴⁹

In response, Fischer was intent on establishing a reputation of discreetness and secrecy, even withholding the identity of some of his sources from his own notes. Fischer emphatically assured distressed parishioners that he would keep their conversations private and took care to present himself as a spiritual advisor rather than a spiritual authority. “And if he reads something in the Holy Gospel which he does not understand”, Fischer once noted telling Ulrich Morff, “or if anything else is on his mind, he shall visit me in secret in the parsonage. There I will help him repent with God’s aid and keep to myself what he says and laments”.⁵⁰

Despite such assurances, no male parishioner ever actively sought out Fischer’s advice and some fiercely resisted the notion that they suffered from melancholy. Housefathers did communicate their grief to friends and neighbours in more or less subtle ways (for instance, by refusing to eat or staying awake all night) and yet sought to keep such information from reaching Fischer.⁵¹ Bringing in the pastor in such situations always held the risk of incurring the wrath of one’s friends and neighbours. One Dorffmeyer complained to Fischer in 1632 how “it is said about him that he tells the pastor everything that goes on in the parish. If somebody says something, the people hate him”.⁵²

For the early modern rural pastor, spiritual care was hardly a straightforward affair.⁵³ Pastor and parishioners clearly drew on a shared vocabulary to express fears and concerns which placed questions of grace and salvation at the centre of individual and communal life. Based on these shared concerns, the pastor also managed to establish intimate relationships with many of his parishioners, in many cases women, becoming privy to fears which went to the core to their social and spiritual existence. However, parishioners could also stubbornly refuse the pastor’s offers of spiritual aid, particularly when matters of patriarchal honour, authority, and autonomy were at stake. Pastoral care in the seventeenth-century village necessitated a combination of zeal and restraint, an awareness of power relations within the community and its households, as well as persistence in repeating one’s message over and over. Talking in private formed a crucial part of these efforts as it allowed pastors to cut through the tight bonds of family and village communities, to build a wide-ranging network of informants and supporters within the village and beyond, and to bypass the conventions of honour and reputation which required that so many concerns remained unspoken.

Pastoral Care and the Threat of Drink

If the private discussion of spiritual doubts and melancholy could already put a strain on the relationship between pastor and parishioners, what about the public reproach of sin? In theory, the Stillstand was in charge of calling to order “perpetrators of both tablets of the Ten Commandments […] and all statutes of our gracious lords concerning common piety, discipline, and honour”.⁵⁴ As outlined above, biblical precedence provided a model for this process which proposed private reproach first, admonishment in the presence of one or two witnesses second, and finally, admonishment before the consistory or even the whole parish.⁵⁵ Yet how did such a model square up against reality?

One persistent topic in 1630s Brütten seems especially suited to discuss this question—village drinking culture. After the Reformation, drinking habits had been increasingly subjected to official regulation, particularly in Reformed territories where authorities sought to curtail the occasions, places, and times in which their subjects got drunk with increasing detail.⁵⁶ Fischer also liked to remind his parishioners that the drunken spirit could not pray but was instead prone to swearing and cursing, to neglecting his Christian duties towards his family and neighbours, and committing other offences against the divine order. “First”, Fischer explained, “he and other such fellows will reject the call of God, then they will neglect Christian prayer for themselves and their wives and children. But where there is no right prayer, what does the evil spirit not do?”⁵⁷ While Fischer worked hard to convince people of the dangers of drinking, collective boozing did remain a key practice of early modern sociability, in Brütten as elsewhere—as a parishioner once cheekily retorted to Fischer, “if all drunkards go to hell, it sure must be mighty large”.⁵⁸

Communal conviviality in Brütten centred on the house of Untervogt Jakob Steffen.⁵⁹ As bailiff, Steffen occupied the highest-ranking office in the village and was charged with various judicial and administrative duties. At the same time, Steffen also held the only licence in the village to serve food and alcohol in his house—a business which, for want of extensive property, was crucial to sustain his household. His inn provided the central stage for Brütten’s adult male villagers to make merry and indulge in drink.

Jakob Steffen was therefore a key figure in Fischer’s attempts to turn Brütten into a more sober and pious community in more than one way. As bailiff, Steffen was an important aide of the pastor, repeatedly supplying Fischer with the latest village rumours, denouncing his co-parishioners during Stillstand meetings, or accompanying the pastor on visits to troublesome parishioners. However, Fischer and Steffen were also frequently at odds with one another, particularly when it came to the role of the Stillstand in controlling drinking culture. During Stillstand sessions, Fischer would often lament the drinking bouts in the bailiff’s inn, while Steffen, in turn, would strike back when the pastor became too domineering.⁶⁰ Early in 1644, after being reproached repeatedly by Fischer, Steffen once retorted in front of the whole consistory: “[H]e does not care about me, does not fear me, wants to host people, wants to go to heaven as much as me, knows the way as well as I do”.⁶¹

Like the other Stillstand members, Steffen too clearly struggled with reconciling the established traditions of communal life with his oath to divine and worldly authorities. Meanwhile, Fischer’s own approach to the Stillstand was beset with inconsistencies. On the one hand, the pastor sought to portray the consistory as a place for the parish community to resolve its own conflicts. Repeatedly, the pastor insisted that it was not him, but the other consistory members who needed to lodge and decide on accusations.⁶² A number of times, the pastor even experimented with convening the Stillstand in front of all parishioners “so that the whole village may hear what one does in the meetings and it is deplored all the less if a juror brings something forward”.⁶³ On the other hand, Fischer stressed that the consistory ultimately remained accountable to the Zurich authorities. During consistory sessions, Fischer frequently reminded deviant parishioners of the oaths that they had sworn to their rulers, referred to recently proclaimed mandates and prohibitions, and invoked the harrowing measures of punishment at the disposal of the Zurich council.

Reconciling the different understandings of order and authority that came to collide in the Stillstand remained a notoriously thorny issue, and the consistory retained an ambiguous position within Brütten’s conflict culture. Certainly, the Stillstand did not figure as a measure of last resort or as a definite turn to formal processes when all informal means had been exhausted without improvement. Most of the ‘usual suspects’ instead found themselves cited before the Stillstand one month, admonished by the pastor in private the next, and cited to the parsonage and reproached by the pastor again the following month. One short period in the convoluted conflict between bailiff and pastor may serve to underline this dynamic. In November and December 1634, the pastor privately reprimanded Jakob Steffen several times for his impropriety in hosting gatherings at his tavern, addressing the topic anew the following month in a Stillstand session. An altercation between Steffen and a Dorffmeyer landed both in front of the regional court the following February, after which they were admonished before the Stillstand yet another time in May. For a couple of months, things were quiet until, one Sunday in September 1635, the pastor again admonished Steffen in private for cursing at his family.⁶⁴ Stillstand proceedings were thus much less dependent on any abstract model than on village politics re-negotiated on a case-by-case basis.

A crucial part of Fischer’s efforts at creating a more pious community involved the use of informal village networks. In this effort, private talk was essential. For one, private talk allowed the pastor to get a sense of the disruptions caused by boozing culture within the community itself. Fischer occasionally mentioned “rumours going round in the whole village” that bailiff Steffen sometimes reached into the community’s coffers to settle his personal accounts.⁶⁵ Even some of the regular patrons of the bailiff’s inn, Fischer noted, seemed to be rather uncomfortable with the pull that Brütten’s drinking culture exerted on them. The pastor learned as much when he confronted the newly elected Dorffmeyer, Hans Balthensperg who, despite having once been an exceptionally sober fellow, had developed a habit of spending his days in Steffen’s inn after he had taken office. The regretful Balthensperg professed to “know well his mistake” but declared that “if he did not drink like the others, they would despise him”.⁶⁶

Brütten’s drinking fellows, furthermore, incurred significant expenses at Steffen’s inn while simultaneously neglecting their household duties, leaving their wives behind with scarce funds and mounting work.⁶⁷ “One after the other, wives go to the bailiff’s house, crying and wailing in the morning and afternoon to fetch their husbands”, Fischer wrote in 1638, “and they complain that their men are being taken away and made as licentious as the bailiff himself”.⁶⁸ Some of these women actively addressed Fischer, imploring him to make their husbands amend their ways. Anna Rösch, the pregnant wife of Jagli Trindler, turned to the pastor in April 1638, stricken by grief over the drunkenness of her husband to such degree that “she could not properly pray anymore and […] is robbed of her wits and senses”.⁶⁹ Fischer sought to harness this current of despair and discontent among Brütten’s female parishioners by appealing to the bailiff’s wife Barbara Bachmann instead of the bailiff himself. Fischer visited Bachmann personally and also sent his own wife Dorothea over to talk to her, “hoping something might be accomplished this way”.⁷⁰

At other times, Fischer turned to friends and relatives of offenders for advice and assistance. Communal work ostensibly offered the most innocuous environment for such inquiries. In May 1632, while clearing the local forest with the other villagers, Fischer approached Jagli Trindler, the son of the drunkard Joseph Trindler, for advice on his father. Fischer and Trindler agreed to let the family try to deal with the problem themselves for another month, after which Fischer would bring the matter before the Stillstand.⁷¹ The following year, Fischer used the communal cutting of the hay to talk to another parishioner called Jörg Balthensperg about the case of a neglected elder widow among Balthensperg’s relatives. Balthensperg promised to fulfil Fischer’s assignment “to inquire into the matter diligently and earnestly, but in secret, and as if he was merely asking for no reason at all”.⁷²

Talking in private also gave Fischer the opportunity to deploy a vocabulary that differed distinctly from his appeals in the Stillstand. While his lectures in the consistory were dominated by appeals to oaths and mandates, the menace of God’s punishment loomed large in Fischer’s more intimate reprimands. The threat of boozing and its accompanying sins to the salvation of the soul in the afterlife were one thing. “This I wanted to tell him as guardian of his soul”, Fischer implored one notorious drunkard, “that it is burning, that the sword of divine punishment will certainly come over his soul and body if he does not turn his life around”.⁷³ The pastor extensively played to his parishioners’ fear of divine punishment in both the afterlife and in the present. The unrepentant, he insisted, were never safe from divine wrath and were particularly vulnerable when their mind was weakened by drink. “He sees well how our Lord can come so suddenly at times when we would not suspect it”, Fischer warned another parishioner, adding that “if God would strike out at him at such a time when he lies there in all drunkenness like a dead man, think how bad could it turn out”.⁷⁴ Notorious drunkards, Fischer suggested, effectively revoked their covenant with the Lord and excluded themselves from God’s protecting hand.⁷⁵

The divine community Fischer invoked with such words was certainly meaningful to his parishioners as well, and yet it was only one of several that they found themselves a part of. Although the Brütten Stillstand charged villagers—including its own members—with drunken swearing, cursing and adultery, excessive drinking on feast days, or missing church service while drunk plenty of times, it never acted to curb the practice of drinking itself. Contrary to Fischer’s demands, the Brütten Stillstand only enforced those rules that Brütten’s boozing fellowship itself considered integral to their cherished practice. Nevertheless, the pastor’s efforts were hardly a lonely crusade. Fischer took up concerns related to him by villagers—particularly by those afflicted by the consequences of drinking culture without playing much part in it—and tried to act on them according to the possibilities available to him. Although official responsibilities as well as spiritual convictions could provide strong motives to support the pastor in his mission, they could hardly override material needs and the mutual dependencies upon which the village community was founded. Like the pastor himself, villagers too needed to manoeuvre between different communities of belonging as well as the value systems attached to them. Private talk allowed a negotiation between these systems and their competing demands without openly calling into question the integrity of the village community.

Conclusion

Hans Rudolf Fischer was part of a movement seeking to impose Christian order on all aspects of rural life. To achieve this end, the pastor needed to navigate Brütten’s intricate web of conflicting concerns and agendas without causing further strife. For this task, the consistory often turned out to be too harsh an instrument, however crucial the pastor doubtlessly considered it. The Stillstand demanded its members to publicly break with their relatives, drinking fellows, and neighbours—an act many were unwilling to perform. Abetting his initiatives in the Stillstand with the help of informal networks built through private talk could ease this process. Yet, private talk also constituted an entirely separate realm of interaction—one which allowed the pastor to identify and address individual concerns in more subtle ways and to invoke different registers of Reformed orthodoxy. At the same time, private conversation and public condemnation could never be neatly discerned from each other despite Fischer’s best efforts. Fischer’s embeddedness within village circles encouraged restraint in his handling of the consistory while the shadow of his institutional role as an agent of disciplinary control loomed over his intimate interactions.

Hans Rudolf Fischer’s “Acta Publica” and “Acta Privata” provide testimony of the multiple practices, occasions, and sites of pastor-parishioner interaction in the early modern parish. A magnified view of the social fabric of the early modern rural parish opens up in between the lines of Hans Rudolf Fischer’s diaries, revealing a village where questions of gender and status determined the division of work, property, and authority, the organisation of sociability, as well as the understanding of emotional and spiritual affliction. Not just the pastor, but each of his parishioners also needed to conform to conflicting demands: Bailiff Jakob Steffen needed to fulfil his role as the secular guardian of order in his community while supporting his family through the proceeds of his inn; widows needed to maintain the outward veneer of familiar harmony while fighting their own children for a liveable allowance; the village midwife needed to figure out how to avoid becoming the scapegoat after a newborn’s death. While Fischer—like many of his fellow pastors—could often see himself on a lonely mission against a parish which was at best indifferent and at worst hostile, his notes reveal him and his parishioners as firmly placed in a common pursuit for a Christian community. In private conversations in the parsonage, on the streets and fields, and in people’s homes, Fischer deeply shaped his community in intimate interaction with his parishioners.