"Permit me to cite certain facts in evidence.
"Margarete Rusch was never the property of any man, but a dozen men or more were obedient to her whim and pleasure. The allegedly so confining rules of her order— claustration, exercises, rule of silence — gave her leisure and enabled her to concentrate her thoughts, undisturbed by the bustle of everyday life. True, she brought two girls into the world — a painful business at the time — but child care never chained Fat Gret to any four walls. No paterfamilias imposed his law on her. No patriarchal thumb held her down. She was no domestic harridan with a bunch of keys jangling at her waist. She was free to exercise her physical and mental powers by cooking, by ordaining menus conducive to the pleasure of the flesh, by contributing, not many, I admit, but all the same a few democratic bright spots to the male-dominated, oligarchic, power-oriented political life of her day. Permit
me to remind you of the 'Statuta Karnkowiana,' which without Fat Gret's influence would hardly have granted rights to the guilds.
"In short, my advice accomplished all that. For if I hadn't saved the girl by sheltering her in the convent, she would never have grown up to be our Fat Gret. And as for this heavenly bridegroom the nuns were betrothed to, please believe me that the convents of the sixteenth century were free from High Gothic mysticism. Ecstasy was a thing of the past. Very little of the girls' passion went to the Son of God. Flagellation, barefooted asceticism, hysterical Saint Vitus's dancing — all completely out of fashion. No Dorothea of Mon-taus demanding to be immured and die to the flesh. Motivated by earthly considerations, the nuns of Saint Bridget's knew how to increase their wealth and make use of their power. True, there were nuns' quarrels and nunnish infighting. But as long as Abbess Margarete Rusch was at the head of the convent, the nuns formed a women's association that looked upon and practiced sisterly solidarity as the highest virtue. United, they were strong. The Dominicans kept their peace, though the whole town stank with their gossip about Fat Gret and her sinful goings-on."
To this harangue Prosecutor Sieglinde Huntscha replied promptly and with striking figures of speech. The Flounder, she contended, was trying to ingratiate himself with his claim to have promoted solidarity among women, though she admitted it could do with some promoting. He had brought forward a model, and what a pretty picture he had painted of that model. But if the truth be known, Margarete Rusch was nothing but a political opportunist. By advising the girl's father to put her in a convent, he, the Flounder, had been responsible for the cooking nun's misuse of her freedom. To call a spade a spade, she had simply prostituted herself the whole time. Take her dealings with Ferber. How can you call this nun's lecherous escapades a mark of emancipation? On the contrary, Abbess Margaret's alleged freedom was almost identical with the petit-bourgeois liberalism of a middle-class housewife who signs on as a call girl to make a little extra pocket money. In a pinch the sexual behavior of this nun could be characterized as protorevolutionary, although
it was strictly self- and body-related, and therefore not transferable to other women and their narrow, dependent lives. At no expense to himself, he, the Flounder, after serving the male cause exclusively for three and a half millennia, was trying to publicize himself as a friend of womankind. But Mother Rusch wouldn't do as a model. How did nuns' farts contribute to feminine consciousness raising? And the misuse of the vagina as a chalice in the Christian ceremony of the Lord's Supper could only be regarded as an example of male perversion. "In sum, what execrable taste! And this I say as an atheist, not because I'm afraid of offending anyone's religious sensibilities."
In conclusion, the prosecutor suggested that a time limit be imposed on the accused Flounder. "We cannot afford to let our Tribunal, whose proceedings millions of oppressed women are following with hope and expectation, be misused for purposes of patriarchal propaganda."
The court-appointed defense counsel opposed this measure on formal juridical grounds. And a majority of the associate judges were unwilling to anticipate the verdict. The associate judge Ulla Witzlaff, ordinarily rather slow and often behindhand in her reactions, was positively outspoken: "Give him a fair chance. Can it be in our interest to take over the notorious practices of male class justice?"
And so — over the prosecutor's objection — all four of the affidavits that the Flounder through his counsel had commissioned from recognized historians were read.
The first affidavit characterized the activity of the medieval witches as a desperate attempt at female emancipation. A statistical evaluation of the fifteenth-century witch trials showed a surprisingly high percentage of nuns among witches burned at the stake, namely, 32.7 percent, whereas by the sixteenth century the percentage had fallen to 8 percent. The meager data available for the fourteenth century did not lend themselves to statistical treatment.
The second affidavit showed why conventual witchcraft had diminished in the century of the Reformation. An increase in the number of lay witches was symptomatic of the distress prevailing among uncloistered women, especially those of the artisan class. In convents, which on the surface
had preserved their fidelity to the Catholic Church, the Reformation seems to have been a force for emancipation, since it opened the eyes of the nuns to earthly matters and fostered a new type of vigorous, hard-working, shrewd, and enlightened nun. Numerous lay women, on the other hand, could escape only into religious mania or eccentric witchcraft. A list of sources followed.
The third affidavit took up the political influence of the convents in the Middle Ages, under such headings as "The Convent Kitchen as Power Center," "The Convents and Their Kitchens as the Scene of Peace Negotiations," "Conspiracies and Debauches." The convent, it stated, had proved its worth as an institution where at least at times the woman's shortfall could be made good.
The fourth affidavit dealt with the broadening of the nunnish horizon since the discovery of the New World by Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and others. In particular, it confirmed the Flounder's contention that Abbess Margarete Rusch had in 1549 married her elder daughter, Hedwig, for trophopolitical reasons to a Portuguese merchant, who later established a trading post on the Malabar Coast of India. This merchant had solemnly undertaken to supply his mother-in-law twice annually with shipments of spices — pepper, cloves, ginger, cardamom. The author of the affidavit had no doubt that Fat Gret was in correspondence with the New World and that Portuguese merchantmen frequented the port of Danzig from the mid-sixteenth century on.
Then the Flounder spoke again. Modestly, barely exploiting the success of the affidavits, he spoke of his small part in emancipating and raising the consciousness of the young novice, then kitchen nun, and later abbess Margarete Rusch. He brushed in a picture of Fat Gret, exaggerating the comic aspect. Frivolous anecdotes alternated with grotesque episodes: how when Preacher Hegge incited the populace to smash images, she forced him to eat every crumb of a Saint Nicholas she had made of puff pastry stuffed with sausages; how when patrician Ferber's pecker hung its head, she made it stand up straight by piling silver guldens and Brabant talers into paradigmatically vertical towers; how after burning down the Oliva Monastery she fried pancakes for the
poor over the monastic embers; how Fat Gret plucked geese while riding into the camp of King Stephen Batory on the back of a sow. And more tales, which made the public laugh, for after a short interruption — caused by the Advisory Council, which wanted to dissolve itself — the public had been readmitted.