Bertrande’s husband argued with his father over missing grain and used the quarrel to desert family, village and wife without leaving a trace. Even though everyone knew Martin disliked married life and appeared to be fed up with family restrictions, no one believe that the desertion would be permanent. Men often came and went with unpredictability. And, the life of a peasant woman was always busy. They worked the fields, had household duties and child care. In the fields they hoed, trimmed grapevines and cut grapes during harvest. Together with husbands they rented and farmed land, sheared sheep, managed the cows and calves. They spun thread for the weavers, made bread and cheese for sale. Women lent out money, and widows of merchants sold grain, millet and wine. As everywhere and at all times, they were midwives and village healers.
But Bertrande was neither wife nor widow and had no legal remedy because without proof of Martin’s death, she was not free to remarry. Then in the summer of 1556, a man presented himself to her as the long-lost Martin Guerre. Previously, this man had been known as Arnaud de Tilh, alias “Pansette.”376 This Pansette was a man with a big appetite who had a silver tongue, loved sex and drinking, was bright and jocular, the exact opposite of Martin Guerre. But, the village accepted the return, even though some were skeptical. Bertrande now had the husband of her dreams. She bore two daughters in three years. One infant lived; the other girl died.
Together, Bertrande and Pansette decided to make this invented marriage a permanent one, loving one another and delighting in their time together. Initially they had good reason to believe it would work. Peasant traditions over the centuries, only very recently overlaid by canon law, from the late twelfth century until 1564, held that what makes a marriage was the consent of the partners, even in the absence of a priest or any witness. If they exchanged tokens of consent and had intercourse, the two were joined in an indissoluble union.377 After 1564 the Council of Trent required the public reading of bans (intent) and a ceremony performed by a parish priest for a marriage to be legal.
Additionally there is reason to believe that the new protestant movement was spreading in which Pansette and Bertrande took serious interest, along with other neighbors and people of the village. The region of Langedoc was the stronghold of the Cathars two centuries earlier and was never strict in adherence to church doctrine. Maybe the couple hoped that the changes would come quickly enough to help them after they heard of the new marriage law in Geneva, which said that “marriage was not a sacrament and a wife abandoned by her husband, if she was innocent of the cause, after a year if inquiry obtain from a consistory a divorce and permission to remarry” can be obtained.378 But the happy status quo was not to be maintained. Pansette engaged in a dispute with Pierre Guerre, Martin’s uncle and patrimonial head of family. This dispute led to court and to Pansette’s being jailed. Pierre tried to bully Bertrande into claiming this man was an imposter, but initially she refused.
Now Bertrande was caught in a terrible trap, believing her soul to be endangered. If she defended Pansette and lost, Bertrande could be accused of willful adultery. The courts were currently sentencing adulterers to the death penalty. If she sided against Pansette, what happened to the inheritance of her daughter, what happened to her personal standing as a virtuous woman in her village, and what happened to Pansette?
As it turned out, Bertrande had ample time to consider these matters from the confines of her prison cell. At the first trial, Bertrande successfully walked the tightrope during her testimony. But in the spirit of high melodrama, there is a second trial at the very end of which the original Martin Guerre appears in the courtroom. Pansette is now suspected of using magic to win his way in life, and although he never confesses, the court finds against him. His crime, they found, was more serious than an imposter, and the courts sees him guilty of trying to steal an inheritance, which is to say that they sentenced him for going against the system of patrimony and endangering the rights of men. In addition, he had knowingly committed adultery. Therefore, Arnuad du Tilh, alias Pansette, received the death penalty by hanging, after which his corpse was to be burned.379 The court records reveal some of the decision-making process the judges undertook. They discussed burning the accused alive as befits the death of one who uses magic if found guilty of sorcery, but they only went half way, burning his dead corpse. They also considered torture, but decided against that too because the men of this court did not want him to break under torture and name Bertrande as accomplice.
As for the beautiful, obstinate but now frail female prisoner, the judges “decided to accept her good faith; the female sex was, after all, fragile. She would not be prosecuted for fraud, bigamy, or adultery and her daughter would be declared legitimate.”380
The last page of the novelized account of Bertrande’s life by Janet Lewis ends with her departure from the court. “Bertrande did not see the crowd. Leaving the love which she had rejected because it was forbidden (Pansette), and the love which had rejected her (Martin), she walked through a great emptiness to the door, and onto the streets of Toulouse, knowing herself as at last free, in her bitter, solitary justice, of both passions and of both men.”381
Arnaud du Tilh was hanged in front of the Guerre home, not far from where he and Bertrande had slept as husband and wife.
The Reformation
At this point in the strange chronology of the Inquisition, which weaves itself through time and space, gathering momentum and changing course when required, a new thread emerges. It is the life and times of German born Martin Luther. Martin was born the second son of peasants Hans and Margarette Luder on Nov. 10,1483, baptized within 24 hours and named in honor of the saint of the day, Martin of Tours. His birthplace, Eisleben, is located in what is today the German Democratic Republic. In later recollections, Martin will cite the “severity of his parents’ domestic regime and the somber (Catholic) piety tinged with superstition.”382
It was soon realized that the teenager possessed natural verbal skills, and his early education sought to capitalize on them. At the age of seventeen in the spring of 1501, Martin entered the University of Erfurt, graduating with a Master of Arts degree in 1505. His plan was to enter the faculty of law in May of that same year. But after only one month and possibly due to the threat of plague, Martin left to stay with his parents. That summer while traveling alone during a fierce storm, events occurred which would change the twenty-one year old’s life forever.
According to Jesuit author Jared Wicks, Martin Luther
In terror cried out for the help of St. Anne, promising to enter a religious order and take vows if he were spared death or injury by a lightening bolt. Sixteen years later Luther prefaced his polemical attacks on monastic vows with a letter to his father in which he claimed that he had not entered religious life freely but under the compulsion of a vow uttered in the face of death.383
True to his word, Luther entered the house of the Hermits of St. Augustine and in 1506 took his vows as a priest. When he celebrated his first mass, he was again “struck by terror at the words of the consecration,” but this anxiety attack was probably exacerbated by the presence of Luther’s father who “was not fully reconciled to his son’s religious vocation.”384
His mentor Johann von Staupitz tried to help Martin with spiritual guidance in the face of the young man’s melancholy broodings by telling him to look steadily at the Savior. Luther took this advice. After returning from a protest pilgrimage to Rome where he saw for himself the highly indulgenced Roman shrines and made his general confession, which he said brought no lasting inner peace, he returned to Wittenberg University as Professor of Sacred Scripts, advanced to his doctorate in 1512 and began his first major lecture course. Through his own lectures to students, Luther arrived at his revolutionary conclusions about reform of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1518 he wrote to an associate,
I plainly believe that reform of the Church is only possible through the total uprooting and replacement of the canons and papal decretals, and of scholastic theology,
philosophy and logic, as they are now taught. My convictions on this have developed to the point that I beg the Lord each day that as soon as possible the pure study of the Bible and the Fathers of the Church might be reestablished.385
Martin Luther would not have been able to make this statement nor hope for fulfillment of it if a new invention had not come into being about fifty years earlier.
In 1454 Johannes Gutenberg, a German printer, is credited with the invention of printing from movable type. Within two years a vulgate translation of the Bible was printed in Mainz. The introduction of the Christian Bible, now translated from the Latin and printed in German, intended for wide public distribution made Martin Luther’s dream into a reality. However, the distribution of this new communication would also have the effect of disseminating anciently negative attitudes toward women along with reduction of their rights and social standing. When Luther speaks of the fathers of the church, it is to Paul he refers, the same preacher who advocated keeping women silent and subservient.
As a reformer, Luther’s own personality and attitude toward life cannot be ignored. The teachings of Jesus are actually not his focus. He writes,
Our total concern must be to magnify and aggravate our sins and thus always to accuse ourselves of them more and more, and earnestly judge and condemn them. The more deeply a person had condemned himself and magnified his sins, the more fit for the mercy and grace of God.386
Luther had an unresolved relationship with his strict and critical father, found himself unhappy with monastic life into which he believed he fell by trickery, and suffered from depression and anxiety throughout his lifetime. These two seemingly unrelated circumstances: The printed Bible in German and Luther’s adoption of mental self-flaggelation as the preferable road to salvation will pave the way for grave consequences for womankind. The information in the Bible which the average person was previously unable to read, will be used as ammunition against women and the teachings of Martin Luther to his all male student body, the future jurists and churchmen, will encourage negative judgments about females. Condemnation of sins will be heightened to the point of sadism during the hundreds of years of the Inquisitional trials against WomanSpirit across Europe. This authoritarian, self-deprecating, pleasureless doctrine will become the new Protestant movement. It is terse, strict, joyless and sexless. It will be divided many times into sects from Luther to Calvin and on to the Methodists, the Puritans and Baptists. Wicks says “central to Luther’s early work was the relentless call to renounce all traces of positive self-assessment before God.”387 This relentlessness was presently directed toward the men in his world, priests and scholars. It had not yet been applied with vigor and ferocity toward women.
It is in his Treatise on Indulgences criticizing the shameless ways of raising money for the building of the basilica of St. Peter in Rome that Martin divulges his own deep self-hatred. “We must be diligent to fully cure the infection of our nature and thirst to come to God out of love for him, hatred of this life and disgust with ourselves.”388 At this point Luther was still writing as a priest of the Catholic Church. How many others that he taught would adopt his attitude? These students and fellow churchmen would be the same as those who sit as supreme judges of the Inquisition. These are the same men who will bring thousands of women before their courts, watch as they are tortured, watch as they are burned alive in public spectacle. One does not need to look further for the answer to this sadism. If men were required to think and feel so negatively toward themselves when they also believed they were superior to women, what did they project onto females?
As a consequence of this treatise, the Church brought charges against Luther, citing him for teaching suspect doctrines about penance and papal authority. It also brought Luther very close to being labeled a heretic. Nevertheless, he persisted.
Luther’s stern doctrine of the theology of the cross was intended to be in sharp contrast to both the indulgences of the Catholics and the excesses of the protected clergy. In his 1518 lectures he taught against free will, free choice and for the concept that the individual was always a captive of sin. In that same year, his Treatise was reprinted thirteen times. He called for the active reformation of the Church. His own personality which was enormously productive while being emotionally anguished and increasingly defiant against the outside world began to incise deeply on Western Christians. However, as a result of his criticism of pope and church, Martin Luther was excommunicated in January, 1521. The politics had also shifted, and the new Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V declared Luther an outlaw. This edict made it a crime to print, sell, purchase or read any of Luther’s works. Martin was then imprisoned in 1512 at Wartburg Castle. A benefactor thought he had acted with benevolent intervention, but this isolation threw Martin into sieges of depression, painful constipation and repeated “attacks by Satan.” While imprisoned he completed his translation of the New Testament in eleven weeks during one of the phases of excessive production. It was at this time that he evolved his concept of “authentic worship” and questioned both celibacy and monastic vows for the priesthood. When word got out, “this led to wholesale departure from the monasteries and convents of Germany and shortly thereafter he complained about the lack of spiritual intention and prevalence of carnal motivation in these people whose lives he feared would give the reformation a bad name.”389
The Reformation was beginning to go beyond the control of its founder, and Luther voiced concern about a host of splinter groups such as the Anabaptist, the spiritual charismatics and the growing insistence on the legitimacy of secular rulers. Peasant uprisings in the spring of 1525 fermented largely based on inspiration taken from a phrase of Luther’s, which was “the freedom of the Christian man.” While vigorously maintaining his own right to speak out against the establishment, Luther was not willing to give the same privilege to peasants. It was Luther’s position that people should not present their aspirations for freedom as Christian claims to their overlords. For this he cited Paul who taught submission to established authority and then referred to Christ who taught non-resistance.390 Clearly, Luther was shocked by the violence of the peasant uprisings, the violence of the repression against them by secular authorities, and the charges that he had spoken out as a hireling of the princes. Very soon, the entire Reformation was out of his control.
In the same year as the peasant revolt, Luther married for the first time. His wife named Katherine von Bora, who had been a Cistercian nun, came to live with him in the former Augustinian monastery of Wittenberg. Although Luther was to live many years, his later life was fraught with mental and physical illnesses, peculiar behavior and fits of public rage which was embarrassing to his followers. He could no longer influence the revolutionaries, the spiritualists and humanists who were far more optimistic than Luther could ever be. In an ominously unfortunate stance late in life and
Disappointed that the Reformation had gained few Jewish converts, Luther attacked their perverse reliance on lineage and homeland, and recited Jewish calumnies against Christ and the crimes attributed to them by popular medieval legends. Declaring Jews a plague and disastrous misfortune for Germany, Luther recommended destruction of their synagogues and homes, confiscation of Jewish religious books, prohibition of rabbinical teaching, and either their expulsion or reduction to a simple agrarian life.391
From 1527 to 1546 this truly miserable man suffered from a combination of gallstones, a ringing in his ears, sieges of despondency and depression, anxiety and panic attacks manifesting as fears of imminent death. He did finally die of a heart attack on Feb. 18, 1546, and was buried at the castle church of Wittenberg.392
The basic rule of the Protestant was that life must aspire to doctrine and
the truth of doctrine is not judged by the moral failing of those who profess it. Luther once declared that even if Rome had observed the traditional religion with the discipline of the hermits, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory, Bernard, Francis and Dominic, its false doctrine would still hav
e made the Reformation necessary … The new reformers were scholastics because they approached their task with the tools of humanism and because they rejected so many traditional scholastic doctrines as unbiblical.393
This strict adherence to the words of the newly translated Bible, both Old and New Testaments, superseded the need for reliance on the Pope or the Catholic church for interpretation of the holy word, and that was its point. With the assistance of this book, it was no longer necessary for people to rely on the village priest to tell them what was holy; they could know it for themselves by reading. But, once again, it was only men who were empowered to interpret these passages, and then only the scholarly men who were educated in universities which prohibited women. By bringing forward translations in local languages of this two-thousand year old document, much of which was meant to suppress women, the reformers brought on repression of the most virulent sort bolstered by reliance on the ancient words of the Levite scribes and the Hellenized Paul.
Interestingly “scholars have argued that without humanism the Reformation could not have succeeded, and it is certainly difficult to imagine the Reformation occurring without the knowledge of languages, the critical handling of sources, the satirical attacks on clerics and scholastics, and the new national feeling that a generation of humanist promoted … On the other hand, in the Protestant schools and universities culture found a permanent home. The humanist curriculum, with its stress on languages and history, became a lasting model for the arts curriculum. Classical rhetoric also a received a new importance in the training of Protestant clergy.”394 The problem with this particular humanism, this history and the arts curriculum referenced, was the complete and total omission of women. It was as though women did not exist. The men doing the writing believed that the idea of contributions to society made by women was irrelevant and, therefore, wrote around the presence of women as though the world was comprised of only one human gender: the male.
Daughters of the Inquisition Page 47