Everyday Life in Sixteenth-Century German Jest Narratives

While the sharp debates about religion seem to have dominated the entire sixteenth century, in reality, most people continued with their ordinary lives, whether in the countryside or in the city, in Church or at court. Legal problems, crime, bickering, miscommunications, antisemitism, marital conflicts, economic aspects, tensions between administrators and their subjects, and the appearance of marginalized individuals (the poor, vagrants, beggars, etc.) dominated the common discourse especially since the 1550s. The vast corpus of German jest narratives ( Schw änke ) serves us exceedingly well to investigate the history of everyday life because these short prose texts invited the audiences to laugh about people’s shortcomings, ignorance, foolishness, greed, or aggression. For the first time in pre-modern literature, we hear about lansquenets, village mayors, urban lawyers, prostitutes, impoverished individuals, hangmen, and many other people populating the narrative stage. This allows us to investigate the social, economic, legal, or communicative conditions at that time because the intended laughter could be triggered only if the readers/listeners recognized their own material world to some extent or saw themselves well represented as the butt of the joke. Familiarity has always been a critical moment in all comedy or humor, so this study unearths what the various authors of these jest narratives have to tell us, looking at their own reality through the lens of entertaining fictional accounts, mostly disregarding the sharp conflicts between Protestants and Catholics. We hear as much about wealthy peasants as about impoverished aristocrats who cannot pay back their loans to a village community. Judges and lawyers emerge as critically important individuals maintaining social and political order. And, not as a surprise, the various authors laughed about the countless conflicts between husbands and wives, a timeless topic, but here more intensively profiled than before.