LITMIR.BIZ

       Martin Luther

      Science Photo Library, London

      Only God, he declared, and not papal authority, could forgive sin; the selling of indulgences by which divine forgiveness could supposedly be guaranteed in return for the payment of cash was a corrupt and cruel deception. Luther called for reform rather than revolution. “If the Pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter’s church should go to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh and bones of his sheep,” he declared in one of his theses. Yet the whole of Christendom, not just the Catholic Church, threatened to go to ashes: Political dissatisfaction and growing national feeling in the Netherlands, Germany, and much of northern Europe had prepared the ground for a conflict that would tear the continent apart, leaving it split irrevocably between Catholics and Protestants.

      Johannes Gutenberg’s first presses produced massive runs of printed papal indulgences, but they also turned out seemingly unlimited editions of non-Latin Bibles on which the faithful could rely. Alongside them were other religious texts, mystical books, and lives of the saints, many of them written in the day-to-day language of the people, breaking forever the Catholic Church’s monopoly on Holy Writ. The anxieties of kings, emperors, and the Church itself could do nothing to hold back the rapid spread of movable type.

      Printed tracts showered from the new presses like sparks, lighting a thousand fires of heresy – fires that were fed among the German princes and nationalists in the Low Countries by resentment of the emperor’s power. There was already bitterness over the harsh taxes with which Charles tried to claw back the massive debts he had incurred. Despite the treasure that was starting to flow into his coffers from the New World, he relied largely on the merchants of the Netherlands to finance his wars: For every hundred florins in gold and silver that fell into Charles’s lap from the New World, four hundred were squeezed from the taxpayers of the Netherlands. The Venetian ambassador Antonio Soriano described the Low Countries as “the treasures of the King of Spain, his mines, his Indies which have sustained all the Emperor’s enterprises.” Others, more crudely, saw them as a cow to be milked to exhaustion.

      The merchants’ pockets were not bottomless, though, and their goodwill was easily exhausted. Every new demand for tax was met by angry resistance, which often mingled with religious dissent and spilled over into fighting on the streets of towns in the Netherlands.

      In ’s Hertogenbosch, angry crowds rampaged through the narrow streets while Gerard was at school; but the discontent was more often sullen and unspoken. The town had been home to the artist Hieronymus van Aken, better known today as Hieronymus Bosch.² His wild, tortured depictions of the sufferings of Hell were well known, apparently orthodox enough, and greatly appreciated by the Church authorities – Bosch had painted several altarpieces for the Cathedral of St. Jan in his hometown – but they had a subversive and less conventional secondary meaning.³ Bosch was a reformist, possibly even an out-and-out heretic who saw the Catholic Church as Satan’s embassy on Earth. The evidence is there in Bosch’s works, a telling example of the double-edged, evasive atmosphere of the town where Gerard was growing up.

      Many of the symbols in Bosch’s paintings seem now to be consistent with heretical thinking, and his anger over the corruption and avarice of the Church is even clearer. His massive triptych, The Haywain,⁴ shows a nun cradling the head of a sick or dying beggar in a conventional representation of the Church’s Christian care for the poor. Elsewhere in the same painting, though, other nuns are sweeping the peasants’ crop of hay into their own bags; in another vignette, one of them seems to be making sexual advances toward a musician. The Ship of Fools5 shows a nun and a monk picking over a dish of cherries, a common image of sexual gratification. Seen together, the symbols are unmistakable, but individually they are subtle enough not to offend.

      Bosch led a perilous double life, because he was also a leading member in ’s Hertogenbosch of an orthodox and solemn religious fraternity, the Brotherhood of Our Lady. He was a respected figure in the town, as his father and grandfather had been before him, and even took the city’s name for his own. He married a local woman, owned a house, and died. Little else is known about his life, but that is the point: He had avoided attracting attention.

      The school Gisbert chose for his young charge in ’s Hertogenbosch revealed the private thoughts behind his own daily life. Like Hieronymus Bosch, he had taken care not to provoke the Church authorities, but the hardworking Gisbert de Cremer had been leading something of a double life as well, building his career within the Church while discreetly supporting the agitation for reform. He handed Gerard over to a religious community known for their reformist zeal, the Brethren of the Common Life.

      The Brethren had a long tradition as teachers, but they were not a comfortable institution. For themselves, they had renounced the possession of property and embraced a life of simple obedience; their rule was self-denying and ascetic, and they expected the boys in their care to abide by it as well. One famous former pupil gave a glimpse of the harsh life the pupils could expect: The humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had written his own biting satires on Church corruption, In Praise of Folly and Colloquia, spoke of beatings and bullying at the school by overzealous teachers who wanted to direct their young charges toward the priesthood. His own youthful love of learning had been thrashed out of him for a time by their merciless severity, he said; his time at the school was nothing more than two years lost from his life. “Their chief care, should they see any youth of unusually high spirit and quick disposition ... is to break his spirit and humble him by blows, threats, scoldings, and other devices,” he told a friend.⁶