The 16th-Century Scholar and the American President’s Wife

Georgius Agricola is considered the founder of geology.  Born in Saxony, Agricola studied classics at Leipzig University, taught Latin and Greek, and, in 1522, began to study medicine.  He became a practicing doctor in 1527 at Joachimsthal, a center of silver mining.

Agricola’s geological writings reflect an immense amount of study and first-hand observation, not just of rocks and minerals, but of every aspect of mining technology and practice.  His greatest work, De Re Metallica, means “On the Nature of Metals,” but the word metal includes any mineral. In this book, which remained the standard text on mining for two centuries, Agricola reviewed everything known about mining, including ores and strata, equipment and machinery, means of finding ores — he rejected the use of divining-rods and other magical means — methods of surveying and digging, assaying ores, smelting, mine administration, and occupational diseases of miners.

Agricola made fundamental contributions to mining geology and metallurgy, mineralogy, structural geology, and paleontology. He noted that rocks were laid down in definite layers, or strata, and that these layers occurred in a consistent order and could be traced over a wide area.  His work paved the way for further systematic study of the Earth and its rocks, minerals, and fossils. He died in 1555, one year before the posthumous publication of De Re Metallica.

In 1905, Lou Henry Hoover, an American woman who had studied geology at Stanford University, found a copy of De Re Metallica in London.  When she learned that it had never been translated into English, she used her knowledge of Latin and geology to work on a translation.  Her partner in this project was her husband, an experienced mining engineer named Herbert Hoover, later president of the United States.  The Hoovers worked with great care for five years, utilizing their knowledge of mining, and geology, and expanding their knowledge of Latin and medieval units of measure.  Herbert Hoover performed laboratory experiments to verify Agricola’s information.

Illustrated with Agricola’s 289 original woodcuts, the book shows how mining was done and a great deal about life in the early 16th century.  The Hoovers’ work still stands as the best and most scholarly study of Agricola’s own careful scholarship.  It remains in print.

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Biographical information on Agricola from the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

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Dances of Death

St. Mary’s Church, Lübeck, Germany, 1463

Death is everywhere.  Does not common sense and experience teach this?

St. Mary’s Church, Berlin, c. 1485

So why should we wish to consider the fact over and over in our art, even in our entertainment?

St. Mary’s Church, Beram, Croatia, 1474

Why should all our festivals and carnivals feature morality plays in which death leads us away to our respective fates?

Jesuit College, Lucern, Switzerland

Why should the Dance of Death have become so popular in art that no artist feels his career complete until he has painted or engraved one?

Merchant, Hans Holbein Dance of Death, 1538

It is the plague, some say. Since the plague, Europe is obsessed with Death.

Cemetery of the Innocents, Paris, c. 1424

But if we are, as a common mind, obsessed with Death, why should our art not provide an escape rather than a study of the subject?

Church of Nørre Alslev, Falster Island, Denmark, late 1400s

Perhaps, it is more like a builder who must walk the high rafters of the new granary or climb to the heights of the cathedral. How can he master his fear?

Anonymous–early 16th century

“You get used to it,” one fellow told me. “You just go as high as you dare, and, when you’re comfortable there, you go higher.”

Clusone, Italy

Perhaps this is why we look so much at death, study death, handle death in our imaginations. Perhaps go so far as to mock Death. That we might, by these safe encounters, be less afraid.

Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, 1517, Berne

I view a painting of Death. And then I go home and eat my lunch, and so, I have, once more, walked the high beam without incident. And I am a little less afraid.

St Nicolas’ Church, Tallinn, Estonia, late 1400s

Perhaps, a very modern thinker might say: Macabre. Weird. Eerie.

Trinity Church, Hrastovlje, Slovenia, 1490

But, Gentle Reader, have you never read a scary book or viewed a frightening image purely for pleasure? Is there not a writer of great popularity known as Steven King?

Artist unknown, probably printed by Heinrich Knoblochtzer, Heidelberg, late 1400s

Could the popularity of all things terrifying be motivated by the same impulses that make our Dances of Death popular?

Chapelle Kermaria, France, 15th century

Just another way to walk on the highest rafter?

Local scene, yesterday

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Capito thanks that most excellent site: Death in Art for most of these images.  There the Reader can find information on the location and history of each Dance of Death and a discussion of the genre.  

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Jon Sayles, Heinrich Isaac, and a Hound

All parts of all music performed by Jon Sayles.

You see jugglers.  You see sword swallowers.  You see a man with a tiger in a cage.  You see a man with a Turk in a cage.  Relic sellers rattle their wooden saints’ medallions or their bones.  A mime follows you, imitating your movements for a few seconds.

Entertainers and vendors work the crowd of people making their way to the dedication of a new church.  Or celebrating a saint’s day.  Or just coming to a market fair.

You see a group of coarse players enacting the story of Pope Joan, who pretended to be a man and was elected pope until she bore a child and came to ruin.  A Meistersanger fills the air with a lyric poem set to music.  His song tells of Neidhart, who found a violet and rushed to tell the Duchess, but while he was gone, a peasant picked the violet, sending Neidhart into a rage.

You have brought your food from home, dried meat, bread, and a crock of pumpkin compote.  But you cannot resist the food vendors.  The sausages sizzling in skillets.  The whole hog rotating on a spit turned by a dog-powered treadwheel.  The very salty radishes.  The gingerbread cookies shaped like St. Anthony’s pig.  The beer flowing in rivers from casks and kegs.

There is music.  Hurdy-gurdies.  Pipes and tabors.  Portive organs.  Bagpipes.  A fidel.  But what are the tunes?  (Take a deep breath, relax, and listen, Gentle Reader.  Time travel takes only a few seconds.)

Perhaps you hear Die Katzenpfote (Cat’s Feet  1:37).

Or Ich Weiss Nit (I Know Nothing  2:16).

Or, my own favorite, Shaerffertanz.  (Shepherd’s Dance  1:37).

These wonderful songs, and many more, are available for free, thanks to the talent, generosity, and love of music of Jon Sayles.  Today, Capito speaks with this musician, blessed by Euterpe.

Capito:  Thank you, Master Sayles, for agreeing to speak with me.  And thank you for the wonderful gift of this music.  How did you become interested in classical guitar?

My mother was a music major, and my father, a naturally gifted jazz pianist.  He brought me a ukelele when I was about seven.  I learned to play it and a Roy Rogers plastic guitar at that time.  There have been numerous music teachers whom I owe huge thanks, and I have dedicated my site to them.

Capito:  And what prompted you to devote so much time and effort to early music?

At the University of Hartford, I was fortunate to work with Joe Iadone, a world-class lutenist, who introduced me to early music.  I taught music until 1983 and then switched to software development.  Now I take my two weeks of IBM vacation in December to record new tunes for the website.

Capito:  Your site has an interesting collection across several centuries and countries.  You have brought these songs out of rare academia and given them to the world.  And what a great job you do in performing them.  Let’s listen to a few more tunes composed by Heinrich Isaac.

Maudit Soy  (1:21)

And here’s the hound.  Der Hund  (the Dog 2:29)

Isaac is a very popular composer.  He was a singer for Duke Sigismund (a Habsburg) in Innsbruck in 1484.  The next year, he went to Florence, where he was employed as a singer at the church Santa Maria del Fiore.  He composed several important pieces in Florence, under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici.  Isaac performed in Rome for the coronation of Pope Alexander VI.  In 1496, he moved to Vienna.  He was court composer for the Emperor Maximilian I and remains in his employ, though not in Innsbruck.  One of Isaac’s most famous works is the poignant Insbruck ich muss dich lassen (Oh Innsbruck, I must leave you.)

Here’s what I, Capito, know.  It is one thing to be a scholar of history, learning dates, wars, movements, religion.  Even knowing details of food, clothing, and farm implements.  But only when the music of a people comes alive for you, do you feel their soul.

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Capito thanks Susan Iadone for her help with this post.

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What Day is It?

“Sweet Calliope!” Zell said, as he dragged the end of the bench back farther from our table at the Hog Snout and slid onto it.  “What is that smell?”

Regretfully, I stopped chewing long enough to answer him.  “Quail.”

“Quail!”  He pushed up the sleeves of his robe and reached into the basket on the table.  “How came we by quail?”

“Michael,” I said.

The young monk looked embarrassed at the excitement caused by his contribution to our dinner, as Fabri joined us.  “By the muses, is that quail?  Who hunts at this table?”

We all laughed, for, of course, no one was allowed to hunt except the nobility.  To be caught hunting, even on common grounds, carried severe penalties.  A peasant could lose a hand for such an offense.

“They are left from the Abbot’s table,” Michael said.  “Count von Bühlingen gave them to him, but he had a surplus, and I happened to be passing the door as the dinner was breaking up.  The Abbot just waved his hand and ordered the cook’s girl to gather the remains for me.”

He dropped his voice.  “I slipped her some, too, for she had to pluck them all.”

“Little quail.  How tiny its breast,” Zell said.  “One life for hardly more than a bite.”

“But you’ll still eat it,” I said.

“She wants me to help her learn how old she is,” Michael said.  “She thinks me a great scholar because I know my age exactly.”

Fabri was the only one to have eaten quail before, for he lived with Ulrich Zasius.  “Who?”

“The scullery maid.  She wants to know how old she is.”

“How old is she?” I said, trying to count just how many quail would be my fair share.

“I couldn’t tell.  She knows only that she was born on Quasimodo in the year the moles ate the beets.”

I laughed, and, I think, so did the others.  But Michael looked pained.

“That’s how the poor tell time,” Fabri said, his tone gentle.  “She can’t read.  No one in her family can read.  They don’t have a calendar.  Perhaps they don’t know any big events happening in the world, like a battle or a coronation.  Each village is a little isolated island of time.  They know what year the moles ate the beets.”

“But not exactly,” Michael said.  “For she asked her mother, and she even asked the village priest.  But he moved to that village after the year in which the moles ate the beets.  So he didn’t know.”

Zell motioned to the Hog Snout proprietor for another pitcher of ale.  “Aren’t there baptismal records?”

“The church was struck by lightning and burned.”

“What year was that?” Fabri said.

Michael sighed.  “No one knows.”

I laughed again.  Again, the young monk looked pained.  “It’s a simple thing to want to know your age,” he said, rather crossly.

“Time is the purview of the educated and the urban,” I said.  “In a rural village, they know only the seasons and the church feasts.  They don’t have any way to know the date.”

“Neither do we,” Fabri said, putting some quail onto Michael’s bread, and I saw then that the young monk had not been eating.  Fabri went on.  “Zasius had a letter from a friend in Rome.  The Council has finally convened, and one of the items to be discussed is a reform of the calendar.”

“What do you mean?” Michael said.

“The calendar is off from the movement of the heavens and the length of days.  The council has asked various learned men to submit their proposals for correcting it.  Apparently there’s a medical doctor named Copernicus, who might be able to heal the calendar.”

“What do you mean?” Michael said again.

“The equinoxes are off by ten days,” Fabri said.  “So the longest day is not really the longest day.  By our reckoning now, the shortest day is December 11 and the longest June 11.  The error grows a little greater each year.”

Michael at last began to eat.  “How can that be fixed?”

“Perhaps a gap in time.  Some days–ten, I guess–will be skipped.”

“What?” Michael said.  “Shall the heavens stand still?  Shall they stick like gears in a great machine and then break loose, with a massive shudder, and jump forward?”

“The heavens are moving just fine,” I said.  “It’s our reckoning that’s in error.”

Fabri nodded.  “But this Copernicus says that it is premature to discuss correcting the calendar until the length of the tropical year can be ascertained.”

“So,” Zell said, leaning back as if his appetite were finally appeased, “does this mean that a movable feast day, Easter, may have been wrong?”

“Yes,” Fabri said.  “But that is not to be noised abroad to the people.”

“Then Quasimodo,” Michael said, “the day of her birth, the Sunday after Easter, was not really Quasimodo.  Whatever year it was.”  He sighed.

“But does it matter?” I said.  “If we don’t even know when Christ was resurrected, perhaps it is a small thing if a maid does not know the year of her birth.”

But he looked even more cross and said only, “Some scholars we are!”

Detail, Pieter Aertsen, A Cook, 16th century

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They Call the New Land America

“Look at this,” Fabri said, his robes swirling with his excitement, as he joined Michael and me at our usual table at the Hog’s Snout.  “Look what Zasius just received.  I saw it at the Frankfurt fair, but did not get a chance to study it.”

It was not a large book, but only a booklet of approximately 40 pages.  Cosmographiæ introductio…Quatuor Americi Vespucii Navigationes.  Introduction to Cosmography and an Account of the Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci.

“It’s the work of a Martin Waldsee-Müller,” Fabri said, as he handed me the book.  “Zasius knows him.  He attended the university here in Freiburg.  Then he was in Basel for a while, working on an edition of Ptolemy.  Now he’s at Sankt Diedolt, which they call in French, St. Die, near Strasbourg.”

“Quarta orbis pars,” Michael read.  “A fourth continent.”

“Yes,” Fabri said.  “And he proposes to call it ‘America,’ the feminine form of Amerigo, for he says that Europe and Asia are named for women.  Though Amerigo himself only calls it ‘mundus novus,’ the New World.”

from the German translation of the 1st letter of Columbus

“But what of Columbus?” Michael asked.  “I read his letter of the first voyage, and I think they should name the land for him.”

But Fabri was too involved in the new acquisition to worry about Columbus.  “See,” he said, “the book is made to accompany a huge map of twelve sections engraved on wood.  It is said to cover 36 square feet.”

“Does Zasius have this map?”  I asked, for I determined to see it.

“No,” Fabri said.  “Though, of course, he wants one.  But he does have this.”  The document Fabri pulled from his satchel was only one page, about 10 by 15 inches.

“What is it?”  Michael asked.

“It’s a gore map,” I said.  “See these strips are intended to be pasted on a sphere to create a globe.”

Martin Behaim “Earth Apple”

“That’s right,” Fabri said.  “Waldsee-Müller also printed these, to bring his map to the general public.”

“It wouldn’t be very large,” I said.  “Nothing like Behaim’s earth apple.”

“No,” Fabri said, “but more accurate.”

“Look,” Michael said.  “It has America.” He grinned.  “Let’s put it together.”

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Of the four surviving copies of Waldsee-Müller’s gore map, one resides in the University of Minnesota’s James Ford Bell Library.  The only known copy of his giant wall map is at the Library of Congress. 

Capito acknowledges The Cosmographiæ introductio of Martin Waldseemüller in facsimile, followed by the Four voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, with their translation into English.   Many thanks to Herr Google for digitizing this book.

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The Weird Woman

We were drunken.  I admit it.  Not falling down or even singing.  But we were drunk enough to make an unwise choice.

We were celebrating, but sad.  Hubmaier was leaving, moving to the University of Ingolstadt to finish his degree under Eck.  And I had been named professor of theology extraordinarius, a position that entitled me to a half salary of 25 florins a year.

So we dined at the Quill Tavern, an establishment as superior to the Hog Snout as Pegasus is to a nag.  There we feasted on doves and bacon, white bread, and fruits.  And we had a bottle of dark red French wine.  We all partook except the young monk Michael, who scrupulously obeyed the university’s ban on alcohol.  The rest of us were not so scrupulous.

Then Fabri, who had won a case in court and been paid well by the benefactor, ordered some Feldliner (new) wine.  Then, the proprietor of the tavern, seeing Fabri’s good robe and our looseness with money, brought us a couple pints of mead.

We walked Michael to his house and left him there.  Then someone–I know not which one–said, “Let’s go to the tanners’ quarter.”

The tanners lived downstream from the main city in an inferior suburb call the Neuberg.  But it was not the tanners that we wished to visit, but a house of cards and other vice located between the almshouse and the lazaret, where those with contagious diseases were imprisoned.

No one answered, but as one man, we turned in that direction.  We took a back way through a copse, that we not be met on the main thoroughfare by university acquaintances.  In the midst of this wood, she suddenly blocked our way.  We had one lamp, which Zell raised.

She wore a black cloak and hood with a red sash.  Not a crone, she had smooth skin and eyes jet black.  Alluring she might have been, had she not raised her shoulders and curled her back with a hiss like a cat.

“What are these?  Four pretty boys, slipping stealthily without noise?”

We stopped.  After a moment, Fabri said, “Begone!”

“You begone, smithy’s son.  The Black Hoffman leaves for NONE!”  She cackled the last word and pointed at Fabri so suddenly that we all jumped back.

Without a word, each man wondered how she knew that Fabri’s father was a smith.

After a moment, Zell said, “We only wish to pass.”

“From the future to the past, you shall see your fate at last.”

“Our fate?” Hubmaier said.  “You want to tell our fortunes then?”

“We have no wish to traffic in the black arts,” I said.

“The Hoffman blesses with her sight, those who sneak about at night.”

“Let’s just go back,” Zell said.

She turned toward him and walked closely round him, sniffing the air. When she moved, the faint tinkling of bells or charms could be heard beneath her cloak.

“YOU will cross the river first; then tow HIM for his great thirst.”  Whirling round, she pointed her finger at me.  I was to be the one with the great thirst.

Then she walked over to Hubmaier and, to his credit, he stood his ground when a lesser man might have cringed, for she stroked the budge trim of his robe and her voice became tender, mournful.  “Like a hare, they run you down. . .

“And YOU!” she suddenly whirled and pointed at Fabri with a hiss, “You will be the hound!”

“Four pretty boys, two love,” she pointed at Zell and I.

“Two hate,” she pointed at Fabri and Hub.

“The Hoffman leaves you to your FATE.”  And with that, she simply stepped into the darkness and was gone.

We stood in silence for a long time.  My heart was racing until I could scarce draw breath and shivers ran like mice up my arms and neck.  Then someone–I know not which one–turned back toward town.

We have discussed this endlessly but find no answers to the riddles.  What will Zell cross before me and then aid me to cross?  Will Hubmaier be hounded by Fabri?  Why?

Fabri says she was a crazy gypsy, and that it means nothing.  Hubmaier fears he has been cursed by a witch.  And I know not what great thirst may await me.

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