CHAPTER TWO 67-79 / 80-89 / 90-100 / 100-110 / 110-120
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. Page 103: This was around the time where “research” had become an integral part of the academic world (along with “publish or perish” and a few other axioms). Previously, published work in strictly academic circles had been more about sheer displays of learning, or about clever problem-solving, than about adding to a constructive network of interlinked pieces of knowledge. You can see how this might have begun to weed out the foot-draggers and sinecure-seekers in the faculties of Europe.
Page 113: My favorite example of the bizarre censorship practices of early modern academia is this: there were, indeed, varying lists naming every book banned by Church and/or College. The lists became more and more comprehensive as time went by, and in some cases became more and more in demand…as people used them as a sort of Zagat’s Guide for finding out what books might make a good, scandalous read. In one instance, and in what can only be characterized as the inevitable conclusion to any system embracing censorship, the list itself was banned. Fabulous. 114: This is the only part of the library for which I don’t have my own reference photographs - the John Rylands Library on Deansgate Street in Manchester is for some reason nervous about allowing the public access to a precipitously high gallery (which you can only reach through climbing an achingly steep, dark, and narrow stone spiral staircase) poised one full storey over their historic reading room. Go figure. 115. The refectory was always an active center of college life. Not much has changed in college cafeterias; this one is based on a famous Christchurch dining hall at Oxford, which some of you might recognize (in altered and CGI-expanded form) from the Harry Potter films. 116. In academic papers, it’s always tempting to either wuss out and write something totally obvious - I once wrote a paper to the effect of “Plato, he sure knew how to arrive at a logical conclusion based on his own premises!” - or to just swing for the left field fence and cram your bizarre convictions about Life, The Universe, And Everything into a seven page lit essay for an elective class you’re taking pass/fail. Luther fell victim to both temptations at different points in his academic career. 117: Stay tuned for the Rector’s Mansion! Most schools have an official residence for their head of state, and it tends to serve a double-purpose as the site of upscale fundraisers and official receptions. Whether the president or rector decides to actually LIVE there is another matter entirely. 118. If you have professor parents or were close to any of your own professors in college, you probably have a pretty clear idea of what bitchy little girls faculty members can be. That delicious looking dish right there consists of sausage and some fried onions, although it’s entirely possible they’re noodles, too. In their current condition it would take a full autopsy by a trained medical professional to determine the difference. 119. Tenure: if you achieve sufficient seniority in a department, you’re granted the magical state of tenure, at which point you can no longer be fired for anything but extreme reasons. It’s a desirable state, one in which you no longer need to chase after temporary positions or panic about publishing enough papers. It is as close to safe as you can be in the academic profession, and thus people will do a lot of intense things to get there. Like hitting on Ariana. Somebody wondered why Ariana isn’t using a candle snuffer in the interstitial scene, 120. Lucien: god’s own drama queen. He could probably inject an air of poetic doom into ordering a stack of pancakes. “Laid on the table” - the sacrificial table, that is. Like, you know. Aslan. Or Aztecs. 121. STUDYING MONTAGE! Suggested soundtrack: “Eye of the Tiger”. The lecture hall has an interesting history and many variants, although today there’s a Luther has a morning class, poor thing. I suppose every new lecturer must dread finding out they’ve been assigned an 8:30am slot, and sit there, gripping their coffee, frantically re-reading their course plan, and hoping to God somebody bothers to show up. More notes in ten pages! |
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.
follows its own track entirely - Mark, Matthew, and Luke all share material, although with different systems of ordering (which is why they’re the Synoptic or “same-seeing” Gospels). Matthew and Luke also contain non-Mark material derived from a hypothetical and controversial 
serving as the model for the Familienwald library.
subsequently martyred by hungry lions. The Early Church was really a grand old time for a few centuries there.
here, since even smoke from a beeswax candle (which these are) can filth up a stone pillar something awful. To which I say: really, guys? A snuffer?
great deal of consistency the world over. You can tell this one is pretty contemporary by the fact that the floor is raked, rather than flat, by the presence of the writing desks (note-taking was somewhat patchier in pre-modern times), and the fact that Luther is standing at a relatively simple lectern, rather than sitting in an elaborate, carved throne or a balcony of the sort you’d find in a monastery. 