Gemahelbüchlein

Forgive me for switching this question around.

You might think it's male-centric--I know how it sounds--

but I'm evasive about my personal information.

Germany right before the Reformation

has been called "the most pious of all time."

My late husband sure played his part--and you guessed it, in rhyme.

See, while the amount of 15th century literature is truly prodigious,

priests wrote basically everything religious.

(The printing press has mostly to do with Latin for liturgy

I'm talking about High German texts people can, you know...read?)

But my late husband Hans was in no way a priest

not in minor orders and never at university.

So you can imagine the Kugeln it took

to buy a printing press SOLELY to print his own books.

(Also the money. Lots of money.)

Most were poems in various degrees of "really dirty,"

But his very first text, which was also in rhyme,

was basically unprecedented at the time.

It's a guide to confession: the sacrament, yes!

Shouldn't it just be priests teaching us how to confess?

The poem was good and accurate enough for

a REPRINT by someone else! And wait, there's more!

The Life of Adam and Eve was wildly popular.

The low quality of German versions came onto my husband's Doppler.

The barber-surgeon-poet-playwright-printer was enticed.

He translated it from Latin to German TWICE!

I've explained how Christianity was a bedrock of his life

So you get the importance of what he did when his FIRST wife

died. To a quiet monastery he made a hefty donation;

to become a monk there he made an application

but was rejected by the Nürnberg Rat.

But like Hamilton, he was not throwing away his shot.

He applied again, and to the most prestigious cloister retired

as a lay brother, not a full-blown friar.

...And that's how he met me.

Our actual first encounter is a mystery

but soon enough it led to a kiss. You see,

he actually, entirely quit the convent.

And directly to St. Sebald's porch we went

to exchange vows and proclaim the banns.

Again, you might think this has more to do with Hans

but consider, given his happy life in a monastery,

outside it he would need to be just as happy.

His writing is sexist

No, really sexist

No, anti-Semitic and REALLY sexist

but a stalker? For that, no evidence exists.

How could he be just as happy if I

were grouchy, shunned sex, or even would rather die?

Besides, I got the better end of the deal

After his death, apparently in fifteen-thirteen.

From two years later there's a legitimate source:

a contract I signed and the city enforced.

Women technically couldn't represent themselves in court

and the time after their spouse's death was quite short

to transfer the family business to a male.

But the contract is legal, and records a sale.

It might have been because "Hans Folz" was so well known

or because I am awesome and totally own.

~~

Hans Folz's poems are all in rhyming couplets with little attention to rhythm, syllable stress, word order, or 100% rhyming.

I am deeply grieved to hear of the death of your husbands, and offer you my deepest sympathy.^1 Though we are separated on matters of religion, I wish you solace in yours.

I met my husband when I was young, though not as young as you. My father was an industrialist, with a number of men in his employ at his foundry and ironworks, which afforded my mother, my sisters, and I the leisure to attend to domestic concerns - though I do not wish to give the impression that we were ladies of leisure, for we all gave the strictest attention to improving our home and sewing for the poor, and our mother ensured that we learnt to mend clothing, darn stockings, cook, bake, boil, and preserve.^2 After I made my debut into the society of our little town, I did not lack for invitations to parties in neighbouring homes, and it was at one of these that I met my future husband. The hostess, a great friend of my mother, made a particular point of introducing us before the dancing began, and we were so pleased with each other that he engaged me for three sets during the evening.

The next day he came to pay a call on my family at home during the afternoon, and spoke with my father for an hour about the manufacture of buttons, which is his family's concern. As his station in life matched ours, his manners were refined, and his churchgoing regular, my parents allowed him to begin to pay court to me in earnest. In two months we were engaged, and in six more we were married!^3 With my dowry and a gift from his father, he purchased a house in a suburb of London, relatively near the button factory; it was a very pleasant town, with good society and fresh air, and we have been quite happy.

My sisters, on the other hand, were not so fortunate. My older sister fell in love with the younger son of an earl, a connection my parents encouraged much as they had mine, and the two married within three months of their meeting - far too quickly for any of us to discern his true character and find that he was a great dissembler, fonder of gambling and drinking than any of us realized. It is too painful to my sensibilities to go into the details of the humiliations he heaped upon my sister as he used up her dowry and forced her to go to our parents and friends for loans of further sums, but in the end she ruined herself and he, with his paternal connections who had ever turned a blind eye to his excesses, was able to achieve a divorce entirely in his own favor.^4 My father has not allowed either of his other daughters to see her since; she is maintained upon a slim allowance from her former husband, bolstered by occasional gifts from our parents, when our mother prevails upon our father to give her more.

My younger sister has not married, and as she is thirty-two, she is unlikely to do so - though I wish that she may, for she entirely deserves to know happiness and independence!^5 She remains at home with our parents, and while they are good, moral people, it must bring her pain to see the love in their partnership that she has not been able to achieve. I have invited her to my home for visits of a few months every now and again, particularly when my confinements^6 advanced and someone else to look after the children was needed, but my husband does not wish me to have her to live with us permanently, as he thinks it will make the house too crowded; it has been agreed that when I am a widow, she may come and reside with me so that we may both have companionship.

---

1. See The Correct Guide to Letter Writing (1889)

2. During the "golden age of domesticity," it was an important show of virtue for middle class women to be able to prepare food and sew even if their circumstances meant that they could entrust such things to servants; it was also important for mothers to play an active role in their children's education. See this previous answer

3. See What would a typical engagement period be for Victorian or Edwardian time periods?

4. See Family law in the Victorian era

5. See the previous link, and Was it common for a 19th Century British woman to be as active an industrialist and businesswoman as Anne Lister? "Independence" is of course relative - a Victorian wife was in no way financially independent, but she was in charge of domestic matters and usually had a lot of say in the way the household worked

6. "Confinement" being a euphemism for childbirth; see During the time of corsets and tight waisted dresses for women what would they wear during pregnancy?

My deepest and sincerest sympathies for your losses. As your days spin out, I hope you find peace in knowing you fulfilled the highest calling offered to those of us of the fairer sex - you were a helpmeet and mother.

You asked if I loved my husband. My dearest companion in loss, it pains me to share I was denied the opportunity to call my beloved husband by the cruel fates. I loved him with a deepness I had never known before and never felt again. But alas, I was denied the opportunity to fulfill my heart's yearning of being his wife.

When we first met, I was hesitant. He seemed cold and uninteresting. It was not until his passing that I realized how well suited we were. Shortly after receiving my father's blessings for my hand in marriage Alexander set sail to study the universities of Europe in hope of setting up such structures here in the United States. Within sight of the Irish shore, in the late spring of 1822, he was cast into the sea and lost to me forever. I wrote in my journal shortly after I received the news that, at night, "I lie down in sorrow and awake in heaviness, and go mourning all day long." Days passed into weeks and then months. I did not leave my father's home.

Many months later, a letter reached me. Alexander's dear parents asked me to tutor their youngest children. He, you see, had been their tutor. They had lost not only a beloved brother, but their teacher and mentor. I packed hastily and made for their home that very week. One glance at the sweet face of Alexander's youngest brother and I was overcome. I retreated to his parent's attic and there I remained for days, finding a momentary bliss among my beloved's papers.

There, I discovered the man I thought I knew was so well was better suited to be my husband than I could have known. You see, my friend in loss, unlike you, I never felt the love for God that you obviously feel. While all of my schoolmates were dropping to their knees in glorious supplication to a higher power, I heard only the confusion of my own thoughts. My father, a preacher, told me we carried Eve's sin and my fate after death would be determined by the penance I paid for that sin. I did not accept that. I could not.

I found in Alexander's notes that he felt that same. He, too, struggled with the silence. He felt torn, as if he was living in a delirium, between the obligations of faith he felt he was supposed to feel and want and his love for math and sciences. In his very last notation, upon giving up his journal writing for teaching and lecturing, he wrote that his spiritual life was a "blank."

In the midst of my grief, sitting there on the attic floor, I understand what I was meant to do. I could not serve God. He did not speak to me. There was no place for me in his house. I could, though, create a way for young women to serve. We could serve by teaching. The classroom could be our pulpit. The primer, our holy book. On my last night before leaving my beloved's parents' home, I wrote, "Essay on the Education of Female Teachers." I wrote:

Women, whatever are her relations in life, is necessarily the guardian of the nursery, the compassion of childhood, and the constant model of imitation. It is her hand that first stamps impressions on the immortal spirit, that must remain forever.>

I will never marry. I will not have children of mine. The classrooms of America will become my nursery. It is the love for my Alexander that will inspire me to do this work. I would have loved him as deeply as you loved your beloved.