Chapter 33
Quedlinburg
November-December 1636
“I don’t care. I don’t think it’s fair,” Annalise Richter huffed, which was about as upset as she ever sounded.
“It’s the way it is, Anni,” Osanna Merkur protested. “She’s boxed in. If the abbess can live with it, then you can live with it.”
“But it’s especially not fair this year, with the celebration.”
The year 1636 was the 700th anniversary of the founding of Reichsstift Quedlinburg, of which Duchess Dorothea Sophia of Saxe-Altenburg was abbess. Or, more technically, since the Stift had been converted to a Lutheran institution a century earlier, she was head of it and the ladies were not nuns but Stiftsdamen, who could resign and get married if they ever decided to. Some of them did. But most people still called it the abbey, and called its head the abbess.
“An abbey, but no nuns,” Anna Thorold chanted, “No nuns. Not even before the Reformation. No nuns. ‘Secular canonesses,’ they were called. They did not belong to any religious order. Unmarried daughters of the higher nobility, gathered together to live a godly and scholarly life. It says so,” she pointed to the second page of the pamphlet, “right here.”
“Spares,” Osanna said. “Don’t parrot the party line. They were spares and surpluses, the ones their families couldn’t marry off.”
“I think they should have let her stay in the House of Lords,” Annalise continued, unmoved by the distractions. “She was until the CPE turned into the USE. That was November . . . um . . . three years ago, now. We covered it in current events. I was a junior in high school, I guess. In Grantville we were the NUS then. I can keep track of when we turned into the SoTF, because it was almost a year before Grandma’s husband was killed. April 1634, and then someone assassinated Henry the next March. And I graduated from high school in June 1635, and came to college here that fall. By then, the abbess wasn’t allowed to be in the parliament any more.”
“She can’t. Because Quedlinburg isn’t independent any more. It’s not an Imperial Abbey directly subject to the Holy Roman Emperor. It’s a part of one of the USE provinces. We’re in Brunswick now. Have you ever heard of what the up-timers call gerrymandering? It’s as gerrymandered a border as anyone has ever seen, down here where the SoTF, Magdeburg Province, and Brunswick come together.”
Annalise jerked her head up. “They deliberately put her somewhere else because she’s a woman?”
Osanna threw up her hands in exasperation. “It’s not because she’s a woman. It’s because she’s a Crown Loyalist and they didn’t want her in one of the Fourth of July Party strongholds, probably. You don’t pay enough attention, Annalise. Papa says that was simply smart of them, because . . . ”
When Osanna started quoting her father, it was clear that Papa always had a lot to say and the content of his discourse relied heavily on CoC pamphlets.
“I don’t think they should have taken away her being in Parliament. She’s intelligent. I guess they did it to the other women’s abbeys too, then? Herford? How many more are there, whose abbesses used to have seats on the clerical bench in the old Reichstag before the Ring of Fire?”
“Ja, it happened to the other women’s Stifte, but also to the Lutheran prince-bishops and Stifte that had men as their heads: Halberstadt, Bremen, Verden, Paderborn. The bishops and administrators and churches still own their property, like the abbey does here, but they don’t run the territories any more. They’re not governments.” She jumped up and stamped her foot. “Be reasonable, Annalise. The abbess could always renounce her title and run as a commoner, like Wettin did.”
“No, she can’t. She’d lose her job. That’s what is not fair about it.” Annalise brandished a cover sheet for one of the newly printed publicity pamphlets for Mrs. Nelson’s winter music program. “It says so right here. Back when nobody was even dreaming about the USE, seven hundred years ago, the founders of this place put a requirement in their documents that the women who were nuns here back then and are Damen here now have to belong to the German high nobility. Hochadel. If she renounces her title to run for the House of Commons, then she can’t be abbess any more. She’s been abbess practically forever, since the year after I was born.”
“Anni,” Osanna asked, “do you keep track of everything in the world according to how it affects you and your family?”
“Yes. Pretty much. Doesn’t everybody?” Annalise folded another pamphlet. “I still don’t think it’s fair. The abbess is very, very, smart and there ought to be a way she could still go to Magdeburg and tell the people in the government what they need to hear. So the government ought to fix it. Abolish the abbey’s charter and give it a different one, or something.”
The argument spilled over from pamphlet-folding time into program-rehearsal time.
“Annalise, dear, that’s not how it works,” Iona Nelson said patiently. “Didn’t your civics class in Grantville explain about the separation of church and state?”
“The teacher told us how it worked up-time, and some about how it works now in the SoTF, but ran out of semester before he got to explaining how it works in the other provinces. He did say that it’s not all the same. I still think . . . ”
“Please stop thinking.” Iona threw herself back, slapped her forehead, and said, “No, I didn’t say that. I can’t have said that. I would never tell a student to stop thinking. Of course not! Get a grip on yourself, Iona Nelson!”
“But Mrs. Nelson . . . ”
“Annalise,” she said. “The constitution of the USE does not authorize the government to go out and mess with the charters of these old, established, institutions in the sense of suddenly requiring them to admit commoners as members of the Stifte. It lays out conditions for political participation but that kind of enforced social revolution, given that it also has implications for church/state relationships, is not in it. If the USE keeps to the American model of government, it may never be. The congress of the United States of America did not go around telling the Catholic church that it had to ordain women or . . . or . . . or . . .
“Let me start over again. As of this specific day in the year 1636, the abbess thinks she’s pushed the founding documents about as far as they will go by admitting daughters of the lower nobility and commoners to the school and college on an equal basis with those of the higher nobility. She’s making changes here that she couldn’t make if she resigned. She feels like she has a moral obligation to stay and make them.”
“Can’t she change the documents?”
“No. Nor can the members of the Stift as a whole. They are what they are; not a constitution with a built-in process for amendment if something goes obsolete.”
* * *
“Now let us say something nice about Saint Mathilda, widow of King Henry the Fowler,” Osanna chanted. She had been run through the opening sequence for this year’s program once too often this afternoon. “Yea, let’s have a big and glorious celebration and all ignore the fact that Saint Mathilda would probably say that the abbess was pushing the envelope by letting ‘these commoners’—like me, you will note—into her sacred precincts. Let’s all go ‘whee’ for the great 700th anniversary celebration. I bow to your tomb, most exalted Saint Matilda; that of your husband; that of your son; that of your mass of relatives. This place is full of graves and I’m glad I’m not superstitious about ghosts.” She bowed, pretending to doff a fancy hat. “Pause for applause.”
“Osanna,” Iona Nelson said in a pained voice. “Please. Just. Stop. It.”
* * *
Osanna was not in a mood to stop. When they got back to their rooms after the evening rehearsal, she was still on a rant. “I don’t see the abbess’ precious changes coming fast. Think of this afternoon. Did you see any of the daughters of the high nobility here at the school helping Mrs. Nelson fold pamphlets? No, they were having their afternoon snack in the lounge. Do most of the Stiftsdamen pay any attention to the commoner students? No, it’s the noble girls.”
“It’s your turn to be reasonable,” Annalise said. “Sabina Lechner is a commoner, but she wasn’t folding pamphlets. Bethany Leek is an up-timer, but she was not folding pamphlets. We’re both on a kind of program that Mrs. Nelson calls work-study. So is Anna, and there are only so many hours of the day to go around. We can’t practice our manners when we’re working. Mr. Leek is rich. Sabina’s father is a commoner, but he’s paying the full tuition in cash, so she is up in the lounge.
“As for the ladies not paying attention to us . . . ” She thought for a minute. “For one thing, the noble girls are their nieces and cousins, so part of it’s natural. The rest of it . . . Maybe there’s some prejudice. Okay, you’re right, sure there’s prejudice and a lot of it. But I think it goes back more to those blasted founding documents. They’re looking to recruit a next generation for the Stift, to keep it going, and the girls from the high nobility are the only ones who can join it. We’re not eligible, so why should they care about us except when they’re teaching us Greek or Hebrew or whatever they specialize in? Which they can specialize in, because even though women weren’t allowed to attend universities before the RoF, these ladies lived here and could learn pretty much anything they wanted.
“If you ask me, it’s one more reason that somebody needs to do something about fixing the documents.”
* * *
“Mrs. Nelson,” Annalise said.
“What?”
“It says here that it used to be that the abbess was subject only to the Holy Roman Emperor for secular things and to the Pope for spiritual things. That has to have been before the Reformation. Who has she been subject to for spiritual things since the Reformation? It can’t be the pope any more, can it?”
“I honestly don’t have the slightest idea.”
“The pamphlet says that during the Middle Ages, the bishops of Halberstadt were angry because the abbey was exempt from their jurisdiction because women were supposed to be subject to men in spiritual things. Is it subject to the bishop of Halberstadt now? Who is the bishop of Halberstadt now? Emperor Gustavus, since he took it over? What province is Halberstadt in?”
“That I know,” Osanna said. “Halberstadt is in Magdeburg Province. I think the not-a-prince-bishop-any-more is the guy who Emperor Gustavus made the administrator of Westphalia Province for the USE. I think that appointment was a consolation prize for not getting to run Bremen and Verden and Halberstadt any more. I think that whoever held those had to be Hochadel too, one of those ‘you’re either in the higher nobility or you’re not eligible’ clauses, like for the abbess. I don’t think they could promote some pastor named Johann Schmidt to be prince-archbishop of Bremen and then call it a day. Their cathedrals had foundations with ‘secular canons’ to match the canonesses here. I’m not even sure if the administrator even had to be ordained. I think that he probably hired poverty-stricken university graduates with theology degrees to do the work for him.”
“Osanna,” Iona suggested. “Please stop thinking and look it up.” She suggested that they ask the pastor at St. Servatius when they had time, went up to her room, and poured herself a generous glass of wine.