Today's city is Paderborn, and as during my last visit here, which was several years ago, what touched me most about this city is the small statue representing Friedrich von Spee (1591-1635). A Jesuit, he lived and taught here for a while, at the local unversity. Spee was famous for two things during his time - the Thirty Years War - and after: his poetry, and the Cautio Criminalis, the book he wrote about and against the twitch trials. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, it's easy to consider the burning of witches a horrible crime today, when we don't believe in them. But Spee lived in a time when everybody did. (And as likely as not believed they existed himself.) A time, moreover, where thanks to the most devastating international war to rage anywhere till WWI people easily induced to look for scapegoats and compassion was in ever rarer demand. A time of religious war, where the "you're either for us or against us" attitude was almost dogma, and any criticism could easily get you prison (at the least) yourself. Still, he wrote, and for once, a book really made a difference for the better. Not everywhere, of course, and not at once, but towns such as Mainz abolished witch burnings because of the Cautio Criminalis.

I haven't posted a poem through all of April, but I'd like to post one of Spee's today, and an excerpt from the Cautio. He wasn't the best writer of his epoch, either in poetry or in prose. But he was a writer whom all epochs should remember. One of our later poets, Heinrich Heine, once wrote "where they burn books, they soon burn humans", something that often gets quoted as eerily prescient in regards to the Holocaust. But Spee showed the reverse is also true: where they write books, they sometimes save people from burning.

So, a passage from the Cautio Criminalis, regarding the use of torture in criminal investigations. One might say this has contemporary relevance.

( German version (the original is in Latin) )

( English version )


And a spring poem of Spee's, which was, centuries later, made into a song by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (as "Altdeutsches Frühlingslied" , op. 86 no. 6 (1847)" if there are any Mendelssohn fans reading this). Ortography changed to present-day German:

( Der trübe Winter ist vorbei... )

Lastly, a picture of the man himself is here.