Because I'm an utter fool for extraneous period and character detail, and yet have some desire to see the story convey something deeper than painstaking accounts of laundry procedure or Character 27b's intimate backstory, I provide notes to accompany many of the story pages in Family Man. These can be read or ignored at will without damaging the story itself. Enjoy! 0-19 / 20-29 / 30-39 / 40-49 / 50-59 / 60-69 / 70-79 / 80-89 / 90-100 / 100-110 CHAPTER ONE Page 0: Rousseau wrote "Emile, or, Education" in 1761, seven years before the events of this story, and both the book and its author were swiftly kicked out of France, being Rousseau was rather cynical about modern society and its constraints, and harbored an admiration for the state of Nature, which was admittedly harsh but kept man nicely undiluted. Rousseau is rather important to this story, although most of the characters have never heard of him, least of all the ones who agree with him. I should read more of his books, probably. He was a nasty little man with a wonderful mind. And as for the Roman proverb, re-popularized by Thomas Hobbes (who held views almost opposite to Rousseau's), well, it's a nice counterpoint to the rationalist orgy above. And you know. Wolves. Page 6-7:And this is just the old workroom. These are Avner's favorites, not the ones he's made, fixed, or selling. The fact that this is normally the quietest room in the house says something about the Levy family. Furniture in that era tended towards the very simple when it came to the working and merchant classes---most of the decorations on the Levy furniture were done by the Levy father himself, as a means to test out various gold leaf patterns, wood tools, and so on. Page 8-9:The University of Göttingen (nowadays, more properly called Georg-August-Universität) was only thirty years old, but was already one of the most vibrant universities in Germany. Like other universities, its two main departments were Law and Theology. Guess which one Luther was in. Johann is in business; putting two kids through university is tough on the family salary even with patronage and scholarships. So he's a furniture trading merchant, an apprenticeship he wangled through his father's business. Since he's still a young buck in the biz, he gets to make all the trade trips, so a chance to visit home is rare and appreciated.
Page 13: Mom's name is Veronika. She is, or at least has been, a Pietist, which is less strict than being a Puritan, but still demands a lot of rigor. More on her later. The demands of children have softened her grip, a little. But that's not saying much. The odds are that there have been other children in the Levy family that didn't make it past a few months old, and the age gap between the boys and Liesl probably confirms that there were a few misses before the last kid took. However, this was all completely normal for the time, and somebody of Veronika's spiritual and physical constitution would've muscled through without too much drama. Other women weren't quite so lucky. Page 20: What's amazing is that they actually have enough room upstairs for three bedchambers. Liesl's nursery is about the size of a closet, though, and during the winter she sleeps with her parents. While the boys were both away, their room was rented out. It's been repatriated since Luther came home - another hit to the family income. Meanwhile, Johann's morning tune is a passage from Bach's Goldberg Variations. Page 21: In the room are two crucifixes, a few token clocks and watches, one print of a In the 18th century, wall decor was pretty restrained and serious paintings were only for the rich, but almost everybody could afford the cheap prints sold by street vendors, with themes ranging from religious to literary to classical to bawdy. All of the books, with the exception of one or two devotionals and a couple of Bibles, are Luther's student texts. Books were still very expensive despite printing technology, and large libraries were scarce outside of a few universities and the homes of the rich and eccentric. Students often had to choose between owning texts and eating hot food. Luckily Luther had a patroness to help out. Up on the neglected hat shelf are some of the circulated pamphlets from philosophical and theological circles at the time. The 18th century was a pretty good time for zine culture.
Page 26-27: Patronage was the best, but often most agonizing, way of getting through your education. Patrons could demand a lot of mindless boot-licking in exchange for minimal funding, much less full support. Or, conversely, you could be adopted almost as a member of the family. Either way, you were walking a wobbly line in which high performance and loyalty was demanded of you, regardless of how tired, hungry, or distracted you were. If you were without family connections, patrons were often your only means to get through your education and acquire a decent position in the Lutheran church (the only truly legitimate career for a theologian outside of a few very limited professorships). Absent that backing, you were looking at a lifetime of poverty and obscurity in a backwater parish. Patrons could be professors, your family's employers, the local prince, a high-ranking cleric, or, in Luther's case, a female Baron ("Baronin" - a "Baroness" is the wife of a Baron). Luther was the star pupil at the local Latin (grammar) school, and so came up for the honor by way of Pastor Altmann's recommendation to the Baronin of Konstanz. Page 30: Tutoring for the children of aristocrats and upper bourgeois - often your (potential) patron - was generally considered to be hell on earth. You lived in a bizarre class limbo, treated as something of a lowly house servant, yet expected to teach the children everything about being upper class, from etiquette to fencing to French grammar. One major slip-up and your prospects were toast...do a good job, and you could be a made man. In the meantime, the money was poor, the emotional stress astronomic, and the work totally dispiriting. It induced suicidal urges in more than a few cash-strapped scholars of the day. You can still see this awful system in place in the Stendhal novel The Red and the Black. Page 31: Dad's outfit is sooooo 1750. Johann, meanwhile, is wearing a lovely contemporary silk overcoat. Somebody in the family has to have style. As for dad, like most craftsmen of the time, Avner works in the same house as he lives - this meant that most days were spent wearing the period equivalent of a bathrobe and Most people owned only a very few outfit elements suited for outerwear - generally made of wool or printed cotton in a practical palette - which would last them for ages and be washed very infrequently. In contrast, you could own dozens of basic chemises or under-gowns, which would be cycled through until utterly unwearable, then hauled out two or three times a year and subjected to the enormous, never-ending group torture session known as The Great Wash. Mention wash day to Liesl, and she will probably start crying outright. Page 32: There are reasons both personal and cultural why he ran off with a Christian girl. Culturally, the Jewish community in general was in a state of upheaval around this time, with a lot of reformers trying to integrate more into the local culture and join the longstanding Jewish intellectual tradition to the larger goals of the Enlightenment. So there was plenty of room for confusion, conflict, and unhappiness, above and beyond the usual flak. Avner's family didn't cotton to it all, and with no local progressives to latch onto, marrying goy was an alternative. As for why Veronika would marry him... Page 33:I was going to have a whole scene with the girl who helps out in the house that was basically an excuse for me to talk about household candle-making, which involved giant pots of fat and very little fun. I commissioned Anne to find me a dog, with the stipulation it be a mutt. She found this nice critter, who is probably a mix of breeds that have no excuse to exist in 18th century Germany. I don't care, he's cute. They got Hugo to chase the rats that generally infest chicken-yards, but he's much better at bothering the chickens. Page 34: There was rain recently, or else Luther wouldn't even think about walking in the alley groove. Bad things went there. Luther's town is a dense old medieval village on a mid-sized east/west trade route. It's encircled by a couple of disintegrating patchwork stone walls, so carriages and such can't get in or out at night, but on foot you can do it without much trouble. Page 34-5:This is a pretty remarkable place for a town of this caliber, and is one of the few things the outer world knows the town for. The shop functions as a bookstore as well as a for-charge lending library - Frau Vogel lets Luther rent the obscure books he orders, with the lending fee going towards an eventual purchase. Very eventual. The Vogels have been running this place for ages - maybe there was a seminary in town back in the day. Herr Vogel passed away a few years ago, and Frau Vogel is a childless widow who nonetheless keeps it running. There are a lots of religious texts in here, obviously. You have to ask for the trashy stuff under the counter. Ever seen 18th century porn? Yeah, it's weird.
Page 35:Yes, Bite Me! readers, that's Lucien. The visual translation between drawing styles was fun to figure out. As for the other aspects of his Lucien-ness, well, it's up to you to piece together. Page 36: Luther was basically up for his PhD back at Gottingen. By that point you were occasionally delivering lectures of your own material. Lucien's career isn't that odd - there was money to be had in tutoring undergraduates for specific courses and subjects, both through colleges and privately. Couple that with some teaching at the local schoolhouses, taking official lecture notes, and other intellectual piece-work, and you could squeak by. Very tangentially, St.Yves is in Bretagne, the Northwestern sticky-out bit of France, and the part with the closest cultural connection to Britain, which maybe explains a lot about Lucien. Saint Yves is the patron saint of lawyers. Page 37: Saint Augustine of "Confessions" (best known for saying "Oh Lord, giv See, Luther is capable of being something other than cranky! Still sarcastic, though. Page 38:Luther's mom has reason to narrow her eyes at French things. If a thing could be made, acquired, style, or iterated in a French way, from France, it was trendy, and probably morally dissipated. Familienwald roughly means "Forest of the Family", which is an unusual town name, but not outright weird. The Quartier Latin (Latin Quarter) is the old University district in Paris, adjacent to the South side of Seine. Full of roving students and intellectuals, and as a result chock-a-block with booksellers. If you go there today, the walkways along the river are lined with blue book carts selling everything from reproduction movie posters to rare first editions of novels. Page 39: Family genealogies were a big thing, and you could make some cash off of compiling them for rich folk. Not particularly enthralling work, though, and you had to have nice handwriting. As for the "local prince": The Holy Roman Empire (jokingly referred to as "Neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire" by clever history teachers the world over) could count over a half dozen individual Germanic states as members, not to mention several non-members that it regularly went to war with. Most people lived within the domain of a local noble or a penny-ante royal, essentially a governor with a pedigree, who ran his or her tidy chunk of territory with some nominal obedience to the next rank up on the chain. This prince or duke or what-have-you would As for the details of this particular location, I've intentionally kept Luther's home town vague. The fact that he went to Göttingen suggests Saxony. "refused a lecture post" - this part of academia hasn't changed, really. Finding and keeping a decently-paid professorial position involved equal amounts of backstabbing and sucking up. And in an era devoid of speedy communication, figuring out who might hire you in another town and getting there in time was tricky. Page 40: The free tables were a mainstay of Universities at this time. Scholarship students would be awarded a place at cafeteria tables specifically designated "free of charge" for one or two meals a day. The food was not fantastic (think "spam, spam, spam on spam"), but it would keep you alive on the cheap. The Rector was the rough equivalent of the college president: in charge of PR, overseer of all the committees and bodies within the school, chair of the Senate, head of the disciplinary Court of Justice, and so on. Page 41: it's not a working clock. Alas. Page 42: As mentioned before, Medicine was one of the major disciplines, along with Law and Theology. You could theoretically switch, but then, nobody cared too strongly how long you stuck around - students would drift in and out, a large number never making it through a particular degree. Hans Ruder is probably one of those Super Seniors you see lying around the quad playing hacky sack and hitting on pre-freshmen. They're likely not drinking water (not even Liesl). Water at the time was often unsanitary and foul-tasting, so in many places you would have "small beer", a very diluted, mooshy ale made from the second or third take on a single batch of brewer's mash. This wasn't looked on with any particular horror, even by religious folk, because alcohol content rarely hit 3% - it made normal ale look like jet fuel in comparison, and it was especially pushed on children and servants. It was particularly popular in colonial America. John Adams pretty much lived off the stuff. Page 44: Yeah, Lucien's not being particularly canonical, here - even Milton at least makes Page 45: And then after the ANCHOR escapement, this guy named Graham figured out how to jigger it so that the constantly changing temperature of the pendulum itself wouldn't throw the clock off-rhythm (by hollowing out the bob and filling it with liquid mercury), and then this guy Harrison refined it still further in 1761 and if Luther and Johann hear this lecture one more time they will scream. Page 46: Little bits of the main shop, here, closed up for the night. The only other room on the ground floor, besides the study, is the kitchen and its pantry in the back of the house. Only the better-off or non-merchant types could boast a fully residential house with a separate parlor and dining room. Page 48: That pocketwatch on the right side of the table? Totally has a compass attached to the glass lid. The iPhone of its day. Lucien is saying "Good night, Colleague." Because he's a complete dweeb. Page 49: And Luther is saying "Good night, companion." Because he's a complete dweeb. Page 50: Buildings referenced from some great medieval houses that are still standing in Central Germany. Bless you, Flickr. Bless you. Page 53: To be honest, the whimsically-inclined daughter of a converted Jewish clockmaker and an ex-bourgeois Pietist living in a small trade village in 18th century Germany probably doesn't have dazzling prospects in her future. Luther can angst all he wants, but his sister has it worse. Being a girl in just about any era of the past? No good. Page 54: It's surprisingly hard to find good reference for carriages - or at least for the sorts of carriages used by normal people rather than crazed Hungarian princes. In the end I just conceded to destiny, found my So if you're an 18th century carriage enthusiast and can tell exactly where I screwed up - don't judge me too harshly, and send your hatemail to Tim Burton. The horse gear, on the other hand, is from an actual source. So I feel good about that. Lastly, "Tausend Dank" = "A thousand thanks." Page 55: Luther just made a very bad Spanish pun. I apologize on his behalf. Page 59-63: no notes here. I don't think the horrors of 18th century childbirth and miscarriage need to be gone into with much detail.
Page 64: That would be a book of Publius Ovidius Naso, aka Ovid, the Roman poet best known for the Metamorphoses, a big, bright, crazy compendium of poems retelling classical myths, all featuring, well, metamorphoses. Go read the one about Actaeon and Diana and come back with your book report. CHAPTER TWO Page 67: The dialogue in brackets is spoken in Carpathian Romany, which is mostly used in Eastern Europe. "Romani" (or Rom) is the generalized name for the majority of Western Gypsies. Laws regarding the treatment of the Romani during this time were harsh. In the France of 1764, you were forbidden both nomadism and permanent residence, which brief analysis shows to mean "being a Gypsy in France". The sentence for adult males found in violation of this lovely Catch-22 was 3 years in the galleys; for Elsewhere, communities were simply encouraged to round up the "Bohemians" and open fire on them. The 18th century in Germany saw numerous attempts to eradicate Gypsy society entirely, either by socially dissolving it or by killing its constituents; Charles VI and Frederick William I both gave carte-blanche orders to the citizenry to exterminate any gypsy who came into sight. In short, if you were in a Gypsy caravan (kumpania) and weren't interested in spending your winter on the Russian steppe, you were going to have a tough time finding somewhere to stay, and the rare territory with a lax attitude would be a valuable commodity. Things haven't changed much. The Gypsy communities that survived the Holocaust are now generally facing a future of settlement, either by force of law or the increasing difficulty of a transient lifestyle. Read the excellent book "Bury Me Standing" by journalist Isabel Fonseca for more. Page 69: The skyline is a take on the Bavarian town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, a popular tourist destination for its well-preserved medieval architecture. Apparently there weren't any sufficiently important military targets nearby for my grandfather's plane to drop bombs on during WWII. Page 70: And most of this courtyard is from somewhere in the UK, although I've hacked up the architecture sufficiently so that I can no longer figure out exactly where. Maybe it's better that way.
Page 71: I didn't try to get too creative with this one, because Gothic architecture is terrifying (you should see the file at its original size). This is pretty much St. Lambert's Church, in the Westphalian city of Münster, built in the 14th century. The primary alteration is in the steeple; the original is delicately honey-combed, and also features three permanently-attached iron cages from which the defeated corpses of the leaders of the Anabaptist rebellion were suspended and exposed to the elements in 1535. They were apparently all in favor of polygamy and the renunciation of private property, so they didn't have much of a running start. Page 72: And again with the stealing, although this time the source is the John Rylands Library. Despite appearances, it's not actually Gothic, it's neo-Gothic. The library, now part of the University of Manchester, was commissioned in the 19th century by a rich widow who preferred to leave lasting cultural legacies instead of eating bon-bons and going to the races wearing ostrich-feather hats. The irony of taking a secular British Victorian library modeled on Gothic religious architecture and retrofitting it to be a German Gothic cathedral repurposed as a secular Enlightenment library is not lost on me. Incidentally, this is the first (and possibly only) fully digital page of the comic. I owe a special thanks to Jenn Manley Lee for helping me find, reconstruct, and then generate the tile pattern on the floor. Go read her comic, she knows what she's doing. Page 73: Hail Luther, full of grace. Like that big globe Lucien's leaning on? It has the constellations on it! Page 75: Book mold is brutal, nasty stuff. You can make it go dormant by keeping books temperature and moisture-controlled, and there are some modern chemicals to help that process along, but there really isn't a "cure" even today, and certainly not one that worked consistently in the 18th century. You do what do you can, quarantine the survivors, and hope for the best. Luther is stepping on an early 16th-century edition of the works of Rome's foremost bucolic poet and author of the Aeneid, Publius Vergilius Maro (or, Virgil. To his pals). A lot of portraits of Virgil from after his death make him look like Legolas; don't believe 'em. The man had a nose and jawline for the ages. He's tucked in with Dante for cross-reference with the Divine Comedy. Dante has Virgil act as a tourguide to the author's stand-in, the Pilgrim, for the first two books of the Comedy. Virgil, at the behest of Dante's angel girlfriend and the Virgin Mary, gets a day off to take the Pilgrim on a world-class tour of Hell and the lower-rent areas of Purgatory. Virgil is only damned by virtue of, oh rats, having been born before Christianity got off He's particularly well-qualified for the tourguide job, because the Aeneid also features a trip to an eternal underworld with a curiously strong focus on contemporary Italian politics. The Aeneid generally makes me twitch, because it was commissioned by Emperor Augustus, and as such features a delightful cameo in which Aeneas, our ancient Etruscan hero, learns that, wow, there's going to be these dudes? In Rome's glorious future? Called the CAESARS? And this one particular one of them? Augustus? Totally a bad-ass! Propaganda by way of Homeric fanfic, in short. Virgil requested that the Aeneid (unfinished, mind you), be destroyed upon his death, but no dice; undergraduates are reading it to this very day. Poor bastards. Page 76: "La Vita Nuova" ("The New Life") was Dante's first major work, collecting his In case you're feeling creeped out, don't worry; this was "courtly love", a very cerebral and semi-religious exercise which didn't really involve, say, actual conversation or physical contact. The Pre-Raphaelite painters just LOVED this material. This was a very edgy work, because it wasn't written in Latin, still the chosen format even four hundred years later in Luther's time. Okay, I'll shut up about Dante now. "that fruit merchant in Znaim" - yeah, again, books were pricey and hard to come by, and often your best bet for affordably acquiring them was to scavenge, beg, flatter, or woo some rich merchant or faltering noble into bequeathing their library to you. Lucien's job has a healthy dose of morbidity to it. Page 77: I'm never going to stop finding this funny. For the record; Luther's the period equivalent of 5'8". Lucien's around 6'2". Ariana's right around 6'0". Haaaaaa! And, well, I say "period equivalent" because nutrition in the 18th century wasn't quite so polished as it is today; we've almost all gotten a bit taller since then. Page 78: Being a librarian, as an official, fulltime job, was still rather unusual around this time. Generally it was a part-time office occupied by a faculty member, or one filled by several people in turn. Needless to say, having a young woman do that job would be even odder. Access to the library was relatively restricted (definitely not open to the public), more valuable volumes were frequently chained to their shelves, organizational systems were proprietary, and so on. Heck, the first encyclopedia was barely getting warmed up. In short, it was the Wild West for information technology workers. Page 79: Remember those journals sitting on the hat shelf in the boys' room back in Luther's hometown? No? Theological 'zines? the "'62 circulatory" is one of those, collecting a bunch of grad student essays from that year at Heidelberg or some such. Ariana's a completist collector. Page 80: The sacristy is sort of God's own cross between a green room and a supply closet, where materials for worship are stored, and where the vestments are put on, and taken off for services. The sacristy is generally either behind or to either side of the main altar, and most of them have these big, wide, flat sets of drawers in which you can lay out a whole robe, wrinkle-free. In short, a great place to turn into a cataloguing room. And from Ariana's slip-up, you can learn that the altar now doubles as a reference desk! I know some reference librarians, I have to earn points with them somehow. Page 81: And the dirt will out! More on what Luther did to totally screw up his academic career, coming soon. Lucien's job is sort of Head Procurer. His trips out of town involve both building the library's collection, and finding potential University employees. No craigslist back then. Page 82: The old Groucho Marx deal - "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member." A university is an institution with a lot of very neurotic humans inside and very little tangible output, so it's impossible to attend one or work for one without at some point losing respect for the institution, yourself, or both. The sign reads "Bibliothekscatalog" (Library Catalogue). No idea if that word existed at the time, but Germans are good at making up words, so let's give it a free pass, hey? At any rate, it's locked, as it generally is, and people can leave their books on the shelf. Ariana's holding still more Virgil. Page 84: Not that big an office for the era, really. No more than a twelve-foot ceiling, and the waiting room Luther was standing in is pretty much an outsized closet. The painting above his head in the second panel has an actual source that I now completely forget; he's some Dutch astronomer or something. The painting in the office I made up, but it's probably some Magna Carta type scenario. Schools inherit weird paintings. Page 85: The bust is the great philosopher Aristotle, whose early ideas on scientific method kept a stranglehold over Western thought for a bit longer than was strictly flattering. The telescope thing is, actually, not a telescope, but a spyglass (think Horatio Hornblower instead of Galileo). The skull is real and yes, you did see a gun in that last page. Meanwhile, I totally forgot the panelling on the desk. Doh. As for Rector Nolte, he likes to get right to the point. Page 86: The Jews and Their Lies, written in 1543, is Martin Luther's most shameful legacy, and without a doubt one of the most hateful documents ever to enter history. It's still the source of a fair amount of anguish and repudiation in the contemporary Lutheran church, particularly in the continued wake of the Holocaust. In earlier life, Luther was a bit more benevolently disposed towards the Jewish However, when the Jews did not convert in mass numbers upon hearing of his proposed reforms to the church, his frustration joined forces with a creeping bitterness and paranoia and produced an attitude more along the lines of "kill them all" than "suffer them to come unto me." Sadly, several municipalities took the hint. Luckily the text proved a little too crazy-eyed for the 17th and 18th century public, and you wouldn't have found any recent mass printings in our Luther's time. Who knows where his mom got her copy, but she doesn't let these things get in her way. Page 88: "Sei's drum!" roughly translates to a breezily uttered "Anyway!" I can't figure out what the hell it literally means, though. Help a girl out, German speakers! Anyway! Baruch or Benedictus de Spinoza was a 17th century philosopher, whose works include the Ethics and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. He came from the Portugese-Jewish community in Amsterdam. The Inquisition had served to exterminate or drive underground much of the Jewish population in Portugal, so many families jumped ship to the more tolerant North lands (although with no little guilt for those left behind). As a young man, Spinoza was considered one of the up-and-coming theology students of his community. At the ripe old age of 23, he was goaded into confessing his lack of faith and was excommunicated from the community, something he accepted with a rather cool, passive ease (a lifelong trait which appears to have driven many people absolutely bats). He took up optical lens-grinding to pay the bills, "converted" to Catholicism (not that it saved him from being called, paradoxically, "the atheist Jew" for the rest of his career) and spent his spare time producing absolutely radical, nearly mathematical philosophical texts that still caused ire a century after his early death in 1677. I'm not a Spinoza expert - his work is notoriously tricky, and I am but a Lit major, but here are some central points of what he proposed: 1) There is only one substance in the whole universe, and it is infinite and eternal. 2) That substance can be called God, or Nature (Deus sive Natura). 3) Everything in existence is simply that substance working in a particular way (mode). 4) The mind is an aspect of the body. 5) Our senses are inadequate sources of information. 6) There is no free will, because everything responds in the only possible way it can given the sequence of events, but we can have an understanding of our actions. 8) Everything wants to keep existing, and will act solely for that purpose, although the actions won't necessarily be the right ones. 9) Overcoming passions and achieving a rational detachment from daily life is the best state of mind for truly acting for your best long-term benefit, which 10) will ultimately benefit all of society, since self-benefit is best achieved by reaching harmony with others. 11) God cannot love a person (because God is the universe, not a separate, conscious being), but a person can love God by trying to understand the world around them through reason. Not exactly a bag of warm fuzzies, and certainly not in line with any of the major By Luther's time, thinking like this, or at least a little like this, was gaining steam. Traditional state religion and monarchy by divine right were being increasingly jabbed at by people like Voltaire and Rousseau, who, unlike the famously non-confrontational Spinoza, were actually interested in making waves. (Spinoza's personal seal was a thorny rose - Spinoza means "thorn", wonderfully enough - garnished with the Latin word for "Caution.") In our own time, Spinoza continues to attract his fans, especially people in neuroscience and advanced physics (Einstein loved him). And cartoonists, apparently. The IEP has a much better run-down on Spinoza than I can provide, and includes a great bibliography. Go over there if you want to know more. At any rate, for Luther (a kid with Jewish background, no less) to write a theology dissertation on Spinoza and conclude with "Spinoza is right", not to mention blowing off his faculty advisor to do so, is tantamount to committing career suicide in a profession where you're expected to go into the clergy, even if you just want to be an academic. By which tangent I'll note that, yes, Rector Nolte is probably ordained. Page 89: Ha! Robes! Academic robes had gone out of daily use in most Universities by this time, although a few persist in requiring it even today. But for formal events they would be hauled out. The black base, the roba, was originally taken from the time when students were almost all in religious orders, and black is still the norm, unless like me you went to Wesleyan University and had to wear blinding scarlet at graduation. At various times and places stripes, hoods, stoles, special lining, the cut of the sleeves, Luther has rakishly left his hood at home. He probably had it washed in anticipation, and the dye in the lining ran, or it was still damp, or he left it under the bed, or something. Because I enjoy drawing stoles, I randomly decided that Göttingen theology department uniform would require stoles. You get to do this when you make a comic. Page 90: the little banners hanging beneath each faculty member have the Göttingen seal on them. Heaven help the poor woman who had to embroider them on. I couldn't find out if they actually used this seal at the time, but what the heck. Page 91: Those hands are all Steve Lieber. Steve's a mensch. Page 92: BZZZZZZZZTwrong. Page 93: Colleges typically had their own internal justice system, and it was ominously called the Court of Justice. Charges could range anywhere from your typical “drunk and disorderly” college behavior, to very serious offenses like the one being leveled at Luther here. Religious delinquency (an actual charge) was not taken lightly; all universities were, in effect, state-funded Christian universities, and you only got to stick around if you (a) met a particular standard of social behavior or (b) brought in lots of money. A famous lecturer could get away with some eccentricities, but a pissant grad student like Luther would do better to color inside the lines.
Page 94: A somewhere different version of this complex and courtyard exists somewhere in England (no apple orchard, though). The architecture is fairly contemporary to Luther’s time; new construction always means a University is doing pretty decently for itself. The bronze statue in the middle, being sketched by an admirer, is a copy of a much-copied classical statue. It's Artemis, virginal goddess of the Hunt, hauling her bow around and petting the head of a wee stag. I'm pathologically fond of Greek mythology, so buckle down for a lot more of this nonsense as I wedge it into the story through any means possible. Page 95: And now, for a rant on formal French gardens: my arch-nemesis. If you’ve ever taken a course on the Enlightenment, you will probably have written a two-paragraph essay on how the meticulously maintained parterre topiaries and geometrical patterns of the classical garden reflect the optimism of the era and the belief that man was drawing ever closer to touching upon Pure Reason and subjugating Mad Dame France was the epicenter for this tidy brand of gardening (although they got the idea from the Italians) and if you go there today there’s still plenty of it about. The statues here are marble. On the left is a standard statue of Apollo, the god of reason and order and enlightenment and file folders and well-tuned string instruments and six-pack abdominals - and, incidentally, the twin brother of Artemis. On the right are the twins (there may be a theme here) Castor and Polydeuces, aka the Dioscuri. Brothers to Helen of Troy, they were hatched from the same batch of eggs that resulted when Zeus (in the form of a presumably very sexy swan) mated with Leda. In some traditions, Pollux was born immortal; Castor, mortal.This drove them totally crazy, so they struck a deal with Zeus where they time-shared their immortality, keeping an apartment in Olympus and a condo in Hades. Nice work if you can get it. Page 96: Reader-type folks have brought up the interesting point that “infection” might not have been understood in the same way we At any rate, evacuations, quarantines, and other countermeasures during the various plagues also demonstrated that people understood disease could be contracted from others - and it was already in use as an emotional metaphor. In Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, written early in the 17th century, Prospero watches his daughter Miranda go absolutely googly over Prince Ferdinand, and mutters: “Poor worm, thou art infected!” And of course there was plenty of syphilis going around to cement “infection” as popular metaphor. So Luther’s actually cleaning it up, here. This is my very long winded way of saying: haha, suck it, readers! I was right! Page 97: Sixteen was not an unusual age to start University, if you were a bright boy looking to go into a law, medicine, clergy, or academia in any serious way. Nolte’s exaggerating when he says that they’re “halfway to the Urals”. The distance Page 98: As Nolte suggests, the University served a number of purposes for the State - a role that was rapidly changing as commerce, meritocracy, and ease of distributing writing transformed a formerly quasi-religious and very nepotistic institution into something much more closely resembling the secular research universities of today. The University was becoming a factory for professionals as well as a focus for attention and prestige itself. University employees were suddenly being asked to be less "personal" in approaching their research, but also more publicly engaging. This still drives plenty of academics nuts, as they're tugged between the poles of being a charismatic teacher, and being a good objective scholar. The Prince appears to be more interested in the nuts and bolts than in having flambuoyant professors to brag about. You can guess which end of the spectrum Nolte thinks is more fun. Page 99: Really that date should be in Roman numerals, but this is an underground student publication, so I can pretend they're just being edgy. Anyway, voila, the sacristy/catalog room! Since it might not come up: Ariana is good at her job, because she innovates. She has something approaching a card catalog growing in the old vestment drawers. The first record of a formal card catalog isn’t until a government card catalog in 1789 in France; manuscript information was written on the backs of playing cards, which were then hole-punched and bunched together on a string. The information was taken in part because the foundering government could then identify the fancy books and sell them off to recoup revenue. Classy. The chair by the fire is actually a musician’s chair, which you can visit in the European Decorated Arts section of the Art Institute of Chicago. Page 100: Remember that book? Of course you remember that book! Go remind yourself, it's probably important. Luther’s essay there - this is not his dissertation - roughly translates to “Revelation and the Skeptical Mind”. And it’s in German instead of Latin, even! Can’t you just hear his advisor’s teeth grinding? Page 101: I really wanted there to be an tubular wick lamp in this scene, because a girl does get tired of drawing candles, but it turns out they, well, didn’t really exist yet. For like another 150 years. Dammit! Page 102: Oh boy, exciting academic hierarchy intrigue! At a normally operating school, the Rector would be picked from the pool of professors by the assembled faculty, and he would serve for a short term. Even this show of democracy was generally unnecessary, and the title would just pass around the table. When your term was over, you’d hand over all the traditional symbols of office (the university seal, the accounting books which would have been audited to make you hadn't "misplaced" any funds, etc). This was a rather enormous responsibility. It entailed tons of obligations and pressure, coming not only from the campus, but in town (every University having a deep economic impact in its region), and at court. At a newly founded institution the local ruler might well appoint the Rector directly to make sure things didn’t crash and burn. At any rate, for Nolte to have been Rector for the last twenty years makes him sort of the Fidel Castro of the 18th century German research university: whatever you think about his style of governance, he clearly has some kind of crazy person stamina. More notes in ten pages! |
scandalously anti-establishment. He bounced around for awhile and had a nervous breakdown or two before sneaking back in 1767. 
famous woodcut portrait of Luther's namesake 
bunny slippers. 
e me chastity...but not yet"). A 4th century cornerstone of Western Christianity, adored by Catholics and Protestants alike, and still a good read. 
often oversee the funding of the local university, coordinate with the high-end clergy, and generally try to keep the metaphorical trains running on time.
Lucifer rebel out of jealousy for the coming Christ. Romanticism and its big ole focus on sexy, brooding, tragic individualist heroes didn't exist yet, but Lucien probably met Percy Shelley when he was a teenager and caused it all. 
DVD of Sleepy Hollow, and did some freeze-frame flim-flammery on the opening scenes where Martin Landau gets his head sliced off. 
everybody else, 3 years of confinement in a poor house. Multiple offenses terminated in a life sentence.
the ground, so for the most part he's an upstanding guy, patiently teaching the squirming mortal Pilgrim all of Hell's ups and downs (mostly downs, natch), bitching out some of the region's nastier inhabitants, and going pale at the screams of his fellow inmates. I totally had a crush on him. 
writings from around 1283 to 1293. It's a collection of poetry and short essays, mostly devoted to Dante's longtime crush object, a girl named Beatrice - from the moment Dante spies her as a nine year-old from his balcony, to her marriage to an appropriate fellow, to well after her death at an early age. 
community, espousing the hopeful belief that the reason so many Jews remained so implacably Jewish was that the shamefully debauched Catholic church could hardly bring itself to salvation, much less anybody else. 
Unfortunately he didn't limit his inquiries to Judaic schools of thought, and before long was rubbing elbows with rationalists and taking Latin lessons from notorious characters. 
religions. The whole "God...or Nature!" bit ruffled some feathers, but while he came close to getting skinned a few times, he was also an active acquaintance of many of the intellectual lights of the time. Some of them nervously scratched off his return address on the envelopes to avoid losing their funding.
mortarboards, and the like could all indicate that you were an officer of the University, a graduate of a certain school, a degree-holder in an particular topic (at least one source suggests that the current official color for library science faculty is "lemon") and so on. Surprisingly, America is the most fiendishly absorbed with the subject; Europe just doesn't care anymore. We thirst for fake ancient tradition, apparently. 
Nature. If you could keep the shrubs in check, truly, you were mere steps from being master of your own destiny! 
medically understand it today. By the 18th century there had already been a fair amount of suspicion that small organisms could enter the body system and cause disease; in the mid-17th century, Dutch microscopy pioneer Antony von Leeuwenhoek did a fabulous experiment where he put some dental plaque under the lens and witnessed a lot of very excited bacteria (shown at right). Oh, and by the way, he had Baruch Spinoza's lenswork recommended to him by a friend.
between the University of Familienwald and the Western Urals is about the same as it is from LA to Chicago. But still: this is not the cafe district in Berlin. This is well into the modern day Czech Republic, straddling Bohemia and Moravia. While the majority of the University’s inhabitants are Germans, the general population would be largely ethnic Slavs. Luther’s going to have a tricky time buying milk in town without a phrase book.
