Tornators: In the Mill of History, 2

Benedikt Dreyer, "Meeting of Saints Joachim and Anne at the Golden Gate." Oak with polychromy and gilding. Ca. 1515–20.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In judging the historicity of past events, the best we can hope for is what a Renaissance rhetorician might have called “the probabilitas that reveals itself to reflective reason.”[1]

But our love of a good story tends to prevail: “Inventing, one offends against history; not inventing, one offends against poetry,” the seventeenth-century Transylvanian encyclopedist Johann Alsted observed.[2]

            Around the year 1150, seeking to displace the pagan Abotrites and other Slavic tribes who occupied the land to the east of his realm, Count Adolf II of Schauenberg and Holstein sent messengers to the west and south to invite people to come there. In response, “an innumerable crowd of divers nations”[3] set out with their chattels and families for the country of the Wagrians to take possession of the land Adolf had promised them. On a high peninsula lying between two rivers, where there was “the rampart of an abandoned castle built in former times by Kruto, the enemy of God,”[4] a place called Liubice (“Lovely”) in Polabian, Count Adolf founded a town that he named Lübeck.[5]

            Over the centuries, merging of the Germanic and Slavic populations occurred on many levels in northern Europe. “Not only did Czechs, Poles, Wends and Hungarians learn to lay out their towns and plough their fields in the German manner; their rulers aspired to look, act, marry, live and speak like Germans.”[6]

Unfortunately, the German language rang like the barking of dogs on native ears. Slavs “call every Teuton ‘Niemecz,’ that is to say, dumb” (i.e., unable to speak a Slavic tongue), a contemporary Slav pamphleteer noted. In the margin of a volume of John Wycliffe’s writings, a reader in fourteenth-century Prague scribbled: “Ha, ha, Germans, ha, ha—out, out!’”

            Patterns, later to be familiar, emerge in the Middle Ages: around 1350, Wends were excluded from the grocers’ guild in Lüneburg, and in 1409 the Lüneburg town council ruled that they could no longer be accorded burgher rights. Still, in thirteenth-century records, numerous Lübeck councilmen have Wendish names. Lübeck and its sister cities on the Baltic coast—Kiel, Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund, and Pomeranian towns like Greifswald, Stettin, and Anklam—constitute a league of “Wendish towns” (first mentioned in 1280).[7] As late as the 1970s, the orgulous Danish and Swedish monarchs styled themselves, inter alia, kings of the Wends and the Goths.

“Dreyer,” “Dreher,” “Draier,” “Drayer,” “Dreger,” “Dreier,” “Dreiger,” “Drejer,” and so on, are all equivalents of the English “Turner,” meaning a worker of wood, metal, bone, or ivory on a lathe. The modern German common noun is Dreher. Henry VIII’s chaplain John Palsgrave defines “tourners” as “makers of bolles and dishes.” These were commonly shaped, not only of clay, but of ash or alderwood. This technology survived in Europe as late as World War II. The vernacular name “Dreyer,” evidently first attested to around 1359 in Mecklenburg, east of Lübeck, became common enough in the Middle Ages. There were lots of turners, since everyone needed their products.

            In earliest written records, however, not all of my paternal clan are thus identified. Their humble surname is latinized to the grander “Tornarius” or “Tornator” (and sometimes we find the hybrid Dreierus). In fact, they were mostly no longer lathe workers, but had become furriers, goldsmiths, artists, manufacturers, and merchants, in the vast swathe of Hanseatic space from Münster and Lüneberg to Skåne in Sweden and Reval in the wild East (now Tallinn, the capital of modern Estonia).

             A Henricus Tornator of Lübeck is spoken of in 1296 as the father of the pellifex (furrier) Floreko.[8] In 1298, Floreko sold half of their house, Muhlenstrasse 779; a couple of years later, in 1301, Henricus’s widow, Sweneke, sold the other half. In 1310, another ancestral Dreyer, Wennemarus Tornator, inherited half a granary in Lübeck at An der Trave 809–810A—not far from the seventeenth-century Dreyer family home at An der Trave 282.

            The celebrated painter and wood carver (Bildschnitzer) Benedikt Dreyer was born in Lübeck in the 1480s. Apprenticed in Lüneberg in 1506–7, he is identified as a member (gheselen schaffer) of the Lukasbruderschaft (Saint Luke’s Guild) of painters, sculptors, and glass workers. From the style of his work, he had very likely spent time in Swabia in southern Germany, near Burgundy. He returned to Lübeck around 1515 and died there sometime after 1555.

            One source identifies Benedikt’s mother as Geseke or Greteke Dreyer, the owner of a house at Pferdemarkt no. 5 in Lübeck, and says that he married Taleke, the daughter of a fellow painter, Hinrik van dem Kroghe; another says he married a woman named Gretke; a third, however, identifies Benedikt and Gretke as brother and sister, the children of Hans and Cillye Dreyer. The famous Bildschnitzer seems to have had brothers named Jürgen, also a painter and wood carver, and Hans, both of whom lived in Reval (an old name for Tallinn), the northernmost city in the Hanseatic League.[9] Benedikt may have left three sons, one of whom may have been called Christopher.

His finest works, in the Lübeck Marienkirche, were destroyed by RAF Bomber Command in 1942 when it used Lübeck as a trial target for its incendiary strategy. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Travers Harris, 1st Baronet, GCB, OBE, AFC, etc., a bugler in the 1st Rhodesian Regiment during World War I, known as “Bomber” Harris, but often called “Butcher” Harris in the RAF, judged that its medieval wooden buildings would burn briskly (as they did).

            Johannes Bugenhagen, who in 1530 was the organizer of the Lutheran Church in Lübeck and Pomerania, and who wrote the preface to Johann Dreyer’s Herford Kirchenordnung a few years later (on which see "In the Mill of History," 1), was Benedikt’s almost exact contemporary. Benedikt’s reliefs for the pulpit of the Lübeck Marienkirche were carved under Bugenhagen’s guidance. Their legends are taken from Bugenhagen’s Low German Bible, published in Lübeck in 1534, three months before Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into High German Saxon—“das Ei vor der Henne” (the egg before the chicken), as people said. Northern Germany and Scandinavia were then in the process of rapidly converting to the Reformed Religion. Around this time we find the Swedish Catholic Archbishop Olaus Magnus declaiming against “the despicable Lutheranism newly imported by German merchants.”[10]

Schonenfahrer Dreyers, who traded with what was then the Danish possession called Schonen (Swedish Skåne) at the southern tip of Sweden, would have been among the latter.

            The “bourgeois revolution” was strongly felt in Lübeck, and we should probably not be surprised to find “Benedictus Dreger Kauffmann [merchant]” listed as no. 44 in the Lübecker 100er Ausschuß, the “big council” (großer Rat).

            This Council of 100 was split evenly between patricians—among whom Großkaufleute, prominent merchants, counted—and tradesmen. In the order of precedence in Hansa society, Kaufmann came right after (and sometimes overlapped with) the statuses of knight (Ritter), squire (Junker), and rentier (Rentener). Moreover, a merchant’s son could also be an artist. Thus, for example, Bernt Notke (1440–1509), one of the very greatest artists of the German Renaissance, and perhaps one of Benedikt’s teachers, was the son of a wealthy Pomeranian merchant family. Notke studied in Lübeck, where he was admitted in 1467 to bourgeois status as a “free master” without being required to be a member of the company of painters or of goldsmiths, no doubt thanks to his family connections.

            The upper classes in the Hansa cities formed merchant guilds: in Lübeck, this was the Holy Trinity Company; at Münster, Bremen, Osnabrück, Magdebourg, and Stendal, the Company of Clothiers. At Reval, where Benedikt’s brothers lived, we find mention in the year 1506 of a Hinrik Dreyer dealing in cloth: Tuch.[12]

            A key fact about early modern history—and perhaps all history prior to the latter-day simplification of jeans and T-shirts—is the extraordinary degree to which it involves dressing up. “Society, which the more I think of it astonishes me the more, is founded upon cloth,” Carlyle writes.[13] The Quartermaster of the overweening Order of Teutonic Knights, ranking just under its Grand Commander, was titled the Trapier—which is to say, “the Draper."

[1] Kurt Johannesson, The Renaissance of the Goths in Sixteenth-Century Sweden: Johannes and Olaus Magnus as Politicians and Historians, trans. and ed. James Larson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 243n44.

[2] Johan Heinrich Alsted, Scientiarum omnium encyclopaedia (3rd ed., Lyon, 1649).

[3] So says Helmold, priest of Bosnau in Holstein, in his Chronica Slavorum (ca. 1171).

[4] Kruto is a historical figure, son of Grin, from the Baltic island of Rügen, d. 1093, leader of the Abotrites and other Polabian Slavs against the Germans.

[5] The name may perhaps relate as well to that of Lübbecke, twelve miles north of Herford in Westphalia. Lippe, to which Lübbecke is adjacent, is still today said to have the largest population of persons named “Dreier” of anywhere in Germany.

[6] Len Scales, The Shaping of German Identity: Authority and Crisis, 1245–1414 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); this is the source for the details in this paragraph and the next two: see there 409, 411, 384 (Gottwald), and 427 (Lüneburg) with nn. 205, 209.

[7] Philippe Dollinger, La Hanse, XIIe–XVIIe siècles (Paris: Aubier, 1988), 66–67. The Baltic Slavs were actually the most recent arrivals. “They had moved in from the south-east, and occupied areas left vacant by migrating Germans at various dates from the first to the sixth centuries. . . . All these [Baltic] peoples were linked to each other primarily by the exchange and purchase and transportation of goods and slaves” (Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades [London: Penguin Books, 1997] 27, 43). Note also apropos of ethnic discrimination Swedish treatment of the Lapps, “whom sheriffs and nobles forbade conversion to Christianity—for then one could not oppress them so cruelly and demand such high and illegal taxes,” says the Portuguese diplomat and humanist Damião de Gois (“Deploratio Lappianae gentis” [1540], cited in Johannesson, Renaissance of the Goths, 185).

[8] Henricus Tornator and his son Floreko Pellifex: Hermann Schröder, “Topographische Register,” 10 H.S. 314, 650, archives of the Hansestadt Lübeck. Wennemarus Tornator[e]: ibid., MAR S. 704.

[9] Revaler Regesten, vol. 1: Beziehungen der Städte Deutschlands zu Reval in den Jahren 1500–1807, ed. Roland Seeberg-Elverfeldt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1966), no. 124, 88–89, notes for July 11, 1520, that “nach Aussage des Hinrik Hyntze u. Johann Tolner der Benedictus Dreyer u. Gretke Dreygers (!) Geschw. u. Kinder von Hans Dreyer u. s. Fr. Cillye u. die nächsten Erben ihres † Br. Jurgen Dreyer wären.”

[10] Olaus Magnus, “the despicable Lutheranism newly imported by German merchants”: cited by Johannesson, Renaissance of the Goths, 155.

[11] “Benedictus Dreger Kauffmann”: Günter Korell, Jürgen Wullenwever: Sein sozial-politisches Wirken in Lübeck und der Kampf mit den erstarkenden Mächten Nordeuropas (Weimar, DDR: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1980), app. 2, 127–28, “Der Lübecker 100er Ausschuß,” a list of the members of the Council of 100 Lübeck Bürger chosen on October 22, 1530. Dreger/Dreyer is no. 44. Engels explains: “Die bürgerliche Opposition, die Vorgängerin unsrer heutigen Liberalen, umfaßte die reicheren und mittleren Bürger sowie einen nach den Lokalumständen größeren oder geringeren Teil der Kleinbürger. Ihre Forderungen hielten sich rein auf verfassungsmäßigem Boden. Sie verlangten die Kontrolle über die städtische Verwaltung und einen Anteil an der gesetzgebenden Gewalt, sei es durch die Gemeindeversammlung selbst oder durch eine Gemeindevertretung (großer Rat, Gemeindeausschuß).” Engels, Der deutsche Bauernkrieg, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin, DDR: Dietz, 1960), 7: 336.

[12] Hinrik Dreyer in Reval: Kämmereibuch der Stadt Reval, ed. Reinhard Vogelsang (Cologne: Böhlau, 1976), November 14, 1506.

[13] Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901), 48.

Angelology (Notebook)

The angel Wormwood sounds the Third Trumpet over the Earth (Anon., ca. 1265 –70)

"Jeder Engel ist schrecklich [Each angel is terrible]."

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

Every angel has its chores

farming feeling,

bittersweet fruit, Earth's GPP,

Baal's auto-da-fé, folks'

fiddle-de-dee—

Are they sentient? AI??

Don't think us like them!

Supposed by Stanisław Lem,

they command dreams,

pernicious beings, bad,

like Zeus, in Homer's Iliad:

"He spoke to the Dream, addressed it in winged words:

'Go now, destructive Dream,

to the swift ships of the Achaians,

and when you reach the hut of Atreus's son Agamemnōn. . . .

Bid him to arm the long-haired Achaians for battle . . .'"*

Abaddon

Beelzebub

Bezaliel

Kokabiel

Wormwood

. . . them.

Byzants, Khazars, Kievan Rus’ . . .

that passing guy,

gone the lot, no fuss.

Not even language, mathematics—even music, a sigh . . .

We must believe, believing die.

Tell me again . . . you claim to be . . . ?

Get out of here! You're kidding me!

An angel image from Timurid Bukhara.

"Engel (sagt man) wüßten oft nicht, ob sie unter Lebenden gehn oder Totem [Angels (people say) often don't know whether they're dealing with the living or the dead]."—Rilke, Duino Elegy No. 1

For Lou Andreas-Salomé

*Homer, The Iliad, 2.7–11, trans. Peter Green (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).

GPP = Gross Planetary Product.

Baal: "basically a title meaning ‘lord’ or ‘master’” and the name of the highest god worshipped in Canaan and other Semitic-speaking areas" (M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997], 85, 90–91).

Stanisław Lem = Polish science fiction writer and futurologist (1921–2006).

Lou Andreas-Salomé: ". . . but for the influence of that extraordinary woman, my entire evolution would not have been on the path that led me to discover so many things" (Rainer Maria Rilke and Marie von Thurn und Taxis, Briefwechsel [Zurich, 1951], 2: 655).

In the Mill of History: The Doktor Augustinianus

Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), portrait by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1543

Near Karasberg in southern Namibia on Christmas Eve 2003, a man named Augustinus Dreyer—surely descended, as am I, from Johannes Augustinus Dreyer, aka “Isacq d’Algué” (1689–1759), the forefather of practically all Southern African Dreyers—was arrested, along with his mates Jacobus Muisoor and Josef Grasveld, on a charge of rustling and slaughtering eight sheep and a donkey—meat for the holidays in the back of the Namibian beyond.[1]

Some four hundred and seventy years before this, Bishop Erich of Paderborn offered the bishop of Münster in Westphalia, Friedrich von Wied, 20,000 gulden for his ecclesiastical perquisite, a deal sponsored by the archbishop of Cologne, Hermann von Wied, who explained that Friedrich (his brother) had scant interest in matters spiritual. Bishop Fritzchen prefers working on his lathe (Drechseln). His parishioners call him “the Spindleturner” (der Spillendreher).

Clement VII, Giulio de’ Medici (Machiavelli’s patron—“one of the most unfortunate popes in history,”[2] approved this blatant simony, provided the Münster chapter did too. It did, and Erich was duly invested, borrowing the purchase money from Landgrave Philip of Hesse, a hard-nosed Protestant, who doubtless relished helping the Catholic Church shoot itself in its ecclesiastical foot. The feasting and boozing at Erich’s entry into his new see were so lavish (so reichlich gezecht), however, that the chief celebrant dropped dead, All three Westphalian bishoprics (Münster, Osnabrück, Paderborn) were thus simultaneously left vacant.

This vacuum was just the opening Westphalia’s Protestants needed. The citizens (Bürgerschaft) and city council of Herford, a nearby Hanse city founded in 789 by Charlemagne as Hervorde (“army ford,” the name also of Hereford in the marches of Wales, the capital of Saxon West Mercia), invited a young Lutheran preacher named Johann Dreyer (Dreier, Dreiger), a former monk in a local Augustinian monastery, to draw up a new constitution (Kirchenordnung) for their church.

No one could best this Dreyer in argument (bei Disputationen kein Gegner Dreyer widerstehen könne), they insisted. By letting it be known that he was otherwise planning to leave town soon, Dreyer nudged them into choosing him.

Born around 1500, this Johann Dreyer was the son of Bernhard Dreyer, a city councilor of the Alte Hansestadt and imperial free city of Lemgo in the Lippische Bergland (Lippe Uplands), bordering to the south on the Teutoburger Wald. Lemgo—which had a sizeable Jewish community—was a focus of radical thinking for centuries. Martin Luther’s theses were read from the pulpit there around 1518, and a local Reform movement rapidly developed. It had been a Hanse city since 1324, trading in cloth with Scandinavia via Lübeck.

In 1747, a Lemgo printer brought out a German translation, by a geübten Feder (“experienced Quill-pen,” i.e., writer), of the French deist Henri de Boulainvilliers’ Vie de Mahomed, “the most striking example of the ideological deployment of Islam [against Christian dogma] . . . in the European Early Enlightenment.” Boulainvilliers calls Mohammed “a true prophet and philosopher who, almost single-handedly, brought crashing down the corrupt and rotten empires of the Byzantines and Persians,” saying that “no other religious doctrine would seem to conform so completely to the light of reason as that founded by Mohammed.” This provocation was not just a flash in the pan either. A second edition of the Feder’s translation, Leben des Mahomeds, was published at Lemgo in 1769.[3]

The Lemgo Dreyers belonged to North Germany’s theological elite. Johann’s uncle was Dr. Hermann Dreyer, provincial superior of the Order of Saint Augustine in Saxony and Thuringia, and before that a professor at Rostock University. Hermann and Johann Dreyer were presumably Eremites—members of the Order of the Hermits of Saint Augustine—like Luther, and not, like their great contemporary Desiderius Erasmus, of the less strict order of canons regular. In either case, they were vowed to poverty, chastity, and obedience. “Both groups of Augustinians combined theology with a piety that was mystical without being extreme,” my late friend Richard Marius writes. “Their devotion to Augustine, cynosure of orthodoxy, kept them from wandering into giddy transports that could topple into heresy.”

Young Johann Dreyer would  nevertheless "topple into heresy." In 1528, still only in his twenties, he published a Protestant text in the vernacular, Eine korte underwysunge von deme heylsamen worde Goddes (A Short Exposition of God’s Healing Word). In 1530, he shed his monk’s habit and went to Wittenberg, where he met Martin Luther (1483–1546); Johannes Bugenhagen Pomeranus (1485–1558), Luther’s own confessor; and the famous Protestant theologian Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), called the praeceptor Germaniae (teacher of Germany). On his return to Herford, since he was unable to preach the new doctrine in the Münsterkirche (Bugenhagen regarded Herford as a dangerous place, where Protestants might meet with violence), Johann preached it, to growing crowds, in the cemetery.

On April 7, 1532, am Sonntag Quasimodogeniti, which is to say, the Sunday following Easter Sunday, the new constitution, Ordinantie kerken ampte der erliken Stadt Hervorde dorch D. Johan Dreiger, received a full public reading. Bugenhagen, who had written several such constitutions, including that of Lübeck, supplied a preface to it, praising Johann Dreyer. As chief author of this Dreierschen Kirchenordnung, Dreyer became the first Lutheran minister at Herford and was acclaimed with the title Doktor Augustinianus. He was a rising star in the Protestant hierarchy, which was increasingly a secular as well as a spiritual power—his patron Bugenhagen personally crowned Christian III king of Denmark in Copenhagen in 1537.[4]

However, Dreyer soon found himself in conflict with Luther himself. In Herford there had long been a “Brethren House” of the pietistic Fratres Vitae Communis, or Brethren of the Common Life, committed to the devotio moderna (modern devotion) movement and linked to the Augustinian canons regular. The related Sisters of the Common Life also had a house in Herford. Although the Brethren espoused Lutheranism, the radical Herford city council had moved to secularize their establishments as early as 1525: “The monasteries were to cease as such, their inmates must attend the city churches, partake there of the sacraments, and change their clothing and habits of life. The Brethren and the Sisters in Herford refused to comply, and they appealed to Luther.”[5]

As it happened, Luther had himself attended a school of the Brethren of the Common Life, in Magdeburg in 1497–98, when he was in his early teens, and he evidently remembered them fondly. More important, the Herford Brethren had adopted Luther’s key doctrine of salvation by grace alone. On January 31, 1532, he therefore responded favorably to their appeal,  saying:

I have received your communications and have written about this matter to the senate of your city and asked that your house might be protected and spared the uncertainty which the agitators [clamatores, i.e., Dreyer and those who thought like him] are occasioning you.…Your manner of dress and other laudable practices have not hurt the Gospel; rather these old usages serve, once the Gospel is firmly planted, to keep under control the raging, licentious, and undisciplined spirits which today are bent upon destroying, not building.

Luther thus branded his own partisans in Herford “agitators”—“raging, licentious, and undisciplined spirits . . . bent upon destroying, not building.” According to William Landeen:

Doctor John Dreyer, the Lutheran pastor in the city church, complained bitterly to the prior of the Brethren House over his loss of face and prestige. This led Gerard Wiscamp [the rector], in an unguarded moment, to show Pastor Dreyer Luther’s personal letter of January 31 to the Brethren. Infuriated by Luther’s statements concerning himself and his fellow pastors, Dreyer now began a systematic campaign of slander, vilification, and falsification against the Brethren and the Sisters, which probably did not stop until the Lutheran leader moved to the city of Minden in 1540.

“I am glad, my Gerard, that the racket among you which Satan started, is sleeping,” Luther wrote Wiscamp in October 1532. In 1537, however, the conflict revived, and again Luther intervened. The Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life also found a defender in Anna von Limburg, abbess of Herford. “Two years later the Lutheran pastors seem to have made a special effort to destroy the Brethren and the Sisters, and it was not until 1542 that their houses were finally allowed to remain,” Landeen writes.

Dreyer had unreasonably condemned the Brethren and Sisters as ander Rotten und Sekten, using Luther’s own term for “enthusiasts” (Schwärmer) like Anabaptists and Schwenkfeldians (aliis haeresibus et sectis: “other heresies and sects”—but Rotte also means “rabble”).[6] Denounced as “raging, licentious, and undisciplined” by Luther himself, Dreyer was eventually obliged, it would seem, to step down as Herford’s Pfarrer. A letter Luther is known to have written to him has been lost, and what it conveyed is unknown.

Johann Dreyer died young, around 1544, at Minden—about twelve miles from Lübbecke, just over fifteen from Herford, and about sixteen from his presumed birthplace, Lemgo. It is unknown whether he ever married, or ever lived in Münster, but likely he did both. In his writings “The Judgment of Martin Luther on Monastic Vows” (1521) and “Concerning Married Life” (1522), Luther celebrated marriage as an act of faith and sacred witness, and it became the rule for Reformed clerics. “Clerical marriage . . . was . . . as prominent a part of the Protestant agenda as justification by faith.”[7] Luther married himself and had six children with his wife, a former nun. Bugenhagen, Melanchthon, and other leading reformers also married and had children. So we may surmise that Johann Dreyer had children.

Luther believed in the 1530s that the end of the world was at hand, that the seemingly invincible Turks would soon take Vienna, and that the Muslims would then overrun Italy and western Europe.  Moreover, the papacy was itself demonic. “My fear is, that the papists will unite with the Turks to exterminate us,” Luther said. “Please God, my anticipation come not true, but certain it is, that the desperate creatures will do their best to deliver us over to the Turks.”[8]

Another Johann Dreyer—a son of the Doktor Augustinianus?—would be parson at Lemgo from 1567 to 1604. For over a century and a half, from 1509 to 1681, the city, dubbed a “witches’ nest” (Hexennest), was the scene of numerous witch trials, inspired by such paranoid musings, and this second Pastor Johann Dreyer could scarcely not have been involved.[9] Over two hundred people were judicially murdered at Lemgo as witches in this period. During the Thirty Years’ War, reckoned one of the most terrible in history, Lemgo was attacked in turn by both Catholic and Protestant armies and plague raged. Only half the city’s houses were left intact, and its population declined by two-thirds. The surrounding countryside was ravaged and its peasantry forcibly reduced to soldiers’ slaves, if not murdered. Every soldier needs three peasants, the troops said: one to feed and house him; one for a wife; and one to take his place in Hell.

Who, then, are these remote Westphalian Dreyers to me?

“Ils sont mes parents du fait d’avoir existé,” Marguerite Yourcenar mused about her own Flemish forebears.[10] They are my relatives by the fact of having existed.

The middle name given in 1689 to the future Isacq d’Algué, Johann Augustinus Dreyer (altered to “Augustus” in his will and in the names of many of his descendants in South Africa, but preserved by the Namibian sheep-rustler Augustinus Dreyer) paid homage to this ancestor who had figured in the Reformation, and to the family’s historical connection with the great mendicant order of the Augustinian Hermits.

[1] Republikein (Namibia),

www.republikein.com.na/politik-en-nationale/muisoor-grasveld-en-kie-loop-hul-rieme-styf.41978.php (accessed September 24, 2012; page since discontinued).

[2] Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1999), 471.

[3] Boulainvilliers’ Vie de Mahomed, German trans. Das Leben des Mahomeds mit historischen Anmerkungen über die Mahomedanische Religion und die Gewohnheiten der Muselmänner; nebst einer Stamm-Tafel des Mahomeds und vollkommenem Abriß des Tempels zu Mecca (Lemgo: Meyer, 1747; 2nd ed., 1769), is cited in Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 571–72.

[4] Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 85. Crowning the Danish king had formerly been the prerogative of the Catholic archbishop of Lund.

[5] On the conflict over the Brethren of the Common Life, see William M. Landeen, “Martin Luther and the Devotio Moderna,” in The Dawn of Modern Civilization: Studies in Renaissance, Reformation and Other Topics Presented to Honor Albert Hyma, ed. Kenneth A. Strand, 145–64 (Ann Arbor, MI: Ann Arbor Publishers, 1962, 1964); quotations in the text are drawn from this account. On the Devotio Moderna, see also Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 41ff.

[6] See Robert Stupperich, Das Herforder Fraterhaus und die Devotio moderna: Studien zur Frömmigkeitsgeschichte Westfalens an d. Wende zur Neuzeit (Münster: Aschendorff, 1975), 62.

[7] Steven Ozment, Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 80.

[8] Luther, Tischreden (Table-Talk), trans. William Hazlitt, “Of the Turks,” no. 835.

[9] See Karl Meier, Geschichte der Stadt Lemgo (3rd ed. Lemgo: F. L. Wagener, 1981), 75–76; but Meier has little to say about Dreyer.

[10] Yourcenar, Archives du Nord (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 76.