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This study, a model for future work in “new historicism,” uses psychoanalytical principles to obtain from first-hand documents some indications about how sexuality and religion were experienced in everyday life in 16th-century Germany. The author focuses on Augsburg, a site of concentrated conflict in the
Reformation and its aftermath. Loosely affiliated with the research of Carlo Ginzberg and Natalie Z. Davis, the nine collected articles form a “mosaic” history that bears resemblance to what Freud did with Moses and the question of monotheism. In his late phase, Freud questioned the veracity of any impulse to write authoritative history, and in doing so he yielded, in “Moses and Monotheism,” a masterwork made of reflective fragments, each facet illuminating the points where obscurity gives birth to the imagination of how the body was lived before the advent of the Enlightenment. Freud pulls himself and his reader into an errant course of analysis that establishes the origins of religion on the grounds of outrageous wit (the “Egyptian” Moses), the confusion of his own aging, peripatetic body with his topic (Freud's wandering westward after expulsion from Vienna at the hands of the Nazis, just as his hero disappeared into the desert), and a drive to shatter the received truth of any historical or religious “tradition” (which he calls our “incomplete and blurred” memories of the past).
A founder of a new historicism long before its name, Freud, as Michel de Certeau argues, “spins” a tale that analyzes the ideology of history-writing. Freud's counterexemplary history turns on the need to fill lacunae of the past for the sake of keeping mute a basic premise: that the historian constructs a fable of another period in order not to address issues in the present. The present becomes an absence that can be skirted only through appeal to the past, a realm into which what cannot be named gets translated. The unspoken contract with the past usually betrays a disciplinary tabo