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Title: Magdalena and Balthasar : An Intimate Portrait of Life in 16th Century Europe Revealed in the Letters of a Nuremberg Husband and Wife by Steven Ozment ISBN: 0-300-04378-3 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: July, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (3 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A useful glimpse
Comment: Despite reviewer DP Mellon's prejudicial, intolerant and bias rant on Dr. Ozment's book, I found it to be a useful glimpse into the daily life of a 16th century couple. I am writing a historical novel set during these times, and such personalized, intimate and first hand translated source material is critical to the accuracy of my novel.
Ozment's book gives us a look at how people really lived, what they said, what they thought, and what they wore, and therefore for this reason the book is indeed historically significant. You can interprete data and statistical patterns up the yahoo, but when you want to find out what people really did in a certain time, read their letters. This book is a "slice of life," not intended to represent the interests, trends or political ideals of the larger generation to which it belongs, but to focus on a particular 16th century couple at a particular time in life.
Just as any painter knows, you must limit your subject in a "portrait" to the most important person or persons you are trying to represent, and capture their true nature by selecting those details to focus on that are most representative of the subject. I believe that Dr. Ozment has done a fine job of doing just that. I will agree with Mellon that I would have liked to have seen more actual excerpts of the letters, only because I found them fascinating.
As an aside, I don't believe that the couple portrayed here are any less ordinary to their times than the middle-class of today is to theirs, as Mellon claims in his review. This couple is middle-class, politically connected, and want for little, so that means they are not ordinary? To whom? They also lost their only child, fought with their relatives, hated their jobs, worried about money, and got sick on a regular basis while trying to sift quack cures from the real thing. Sounds pretty ordinary to me. They were members of a growing merchant class at this time, and they lived how they lived. Trying to make them stand for something other than what they are, as Mellon seems to want Ozment to do, would be an exercise in futility.
That Dr. Ozment chose this particular couple to write a book about seems less to do with their "conformity to modern white middle class notions of what the marriage relationship should be" than to the fact that they wrote letters to one another that survived intact into the 20th century, which could therefore be translated and commented upon. And I enjoyed the material, though I am neither white, nor experimenting with marriage (I think after 9 years it ceases to be an experiment), nor childless and in pursuit of the almighty dollar (though Mellon seems to assume these are the only types of people who would buy into Ozment's premise of the role of the family in 16th century Germany).
In conclusion, if you want to know how a 16th century merchant couple in Germany lived, this is a good place to start.
Rating: 1
Summary: The Yuppies of Nuremberg
Comment: Steven Ozment's Magdalena and Balthasar, originally published during the unprecedented materialistic frenzy of the mid 1980s, addresses only the narrow social concerns of a youthful American white middle class hell bent on having it all. This class-or more correctly, subclass-which in its heyday became derisively known as young urban professionals or Yuppies, espoused the obviously contradictory goals of making money hand-over-fist while simultaneously attempting to maintain a household and some semblance of a family structure. The contradiction arose from the necessity of having both husband and wife pursue monetarily rewarding careers outside the home. But these childless couples, known also as Dinks (double income, no kids), wanted it all, that is, a mom, a dad, a kid, a dog, a hearth, a home, and copious quantities of cash and goods. Thus a complete rearrangement, or complete confusion, of "traditional" family roles resulted. Ultimately, the formerly fixed roles of husband and wife were transformed into interchangeable, if not superfluous, roles for the sake of material success.
Ozment's book is a typical byproduct of the idée fixe that dominated the minds of educated white middle class Americans in the closing decades of the last century. While proclaiming itself to be an "intimate portrait of life in the 16th century," its primary purpose is to justify the American marriage experiment of the late 1980s by appealing to the historical example of Balthasar and Magdalena Paumgartner of Nuremberg. Although Ozment's history may have been important to a specific and somewhat elite audience in the 1980s-an audience that was struggling with the validity of its marriage theories and was desperately seeking any validation of its experiments-his history now smacks of mere opportunism and pandering. Which is only to say that a timely history is not necessarily a timeless history.
Moving beyond the social milieu of its author and the socio-political forces that distorted his thinking, how does Balthasar and Magdalena stand up to analysis as history? No matter how detailed or superficial the analysis, the history fails on all counts.
At about the one-third point of the book the attentive reader begins to experience a vague sense of déjà vu. One moment the narrative seems to be repeating the material presented in the letters of Magdalena and Balthasar, and the next moment the letters seem to be repeating the material presented in the narrative by Steven Ozment. On closer examination, not only is material being repeated for no apparent reason, but the strong inference arises that the book has been cut to pieces and then haphazardly pasted together again. Indeed, analyzing the narrative portions separately creates the overwhelming impression that the work originally began and ended as a straight narrative history that drew heavily upon quotations from the source letters. The letters between Magdalena and Balthasar, not to mention the scattered artwork, seem to have been added as an afterthought. This interlarding of the narrative with the same epistolary examples cited in the narrative causes a profound and tormenting redundancy to pervade the entire work. The reader grows increasingly disgruntled when he begins to realize that he is reading a 100 page book disguised as a 200 page book.
Some mention must be made of Ozment's failure to prove his thesis, which generally holds that marriage and family relations in 16th century Europe were not substantially different from those in late 20th century America, and specifically that Balthasar and Magdalena Paumgartner of Nuremberg were "ordinary" people whose "intimate" letters reveal lessons of historical importance.
Concerning the general thesis, it need only be said that Ozment's historical couple has been deliberately selected for their ostensible conformity to modern white middle class notions of what the marriage relationship should be. That is, Balthasar and Magdalena have been dredged up from the sea of time not because their story is of historical importance and therefore worthy of preservation for future generations, but rather because their story seems to validate the theories and experiments of the present generation. Of course Ozment sees his history as flying in the face of contemporary thinking, in that it refutes the idea that there is something novel about the "warm, private, egalitarian modern family." His position is that the transition from "patriarchy to partnership" began long before the 20th century. Thus, Ozment succeeds in chastising his peers for their "post modern" conceit yet does not deviate from the party line. This unfortunate mismatch of past fact and present faith is the usual result when historians seek to justify the ways of man to history.
It is painfully obvious that this husband and wife are far from "ordinary." Although not members of the nobility, they are nevertheless solid Nuremberg middle class, politically well connected and never wanting for material things. Even within the tightly controlled selection of letters Ozment allows his reader to peruse, it is not hard to see a historical couple trying frantically to amass great wealth, keep a household, raise a child and make the move to a country estate. This husband and wife team, these "partners" in unbridled materialism, plainly want it all. Under any analysis, Balthasar and Magdalena are statistical and historical anomalies and are not at all typical of ordinary 16th century people or marriages. On the other hand, their perpetual boredom, their obsession with food, health cures and bodily functions, their superficial intimacy and perfunctory declarations of religious faith, their complete lack of charity, and above all else their dogged pursuit of money make them the prototype for young urban professionals. Ozment, in his fervent desire to justify the socio-political experiments of his own century by an appeal to historical precedent, has inadvertently turned Balthasar and Magdalena into the Yuppies of Nuremberg.
Rating: 4
Summary: Fascinating, but not enough letters!
Comment: Editor Ozment presents letters between a Nuremberg merchant and his wife. These letters are very interesting in that they tell about everyday life in the 16th century. Professor Ozment's commentary on the letters is helpful; however, the book would have been better served if a greater number of the letters had been included. Although some 87 letters between Magdalena and Balthazar are exant, the editor includes fewer than 20 in their entirety. Also, the entire volume is fewer than 200 pages so the book could have been longer. These minor objections aside, Magdalena and Balthazar is a fascinating read!
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