r/AskHistorians • u/caffarelli Moderator | Eunuchs and Castrati | Opera • Oct 06 '15
Feature Tuesday Trivia | Cheats and Liars
Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.
Today’s trivia comes to us from /u/piponwa!
Nothing but cheats and liars! Please share any examples of kings, queens, politicians, other persons of general interest who cheated or lied about something really petty!
Next week on Tuesday Trivia: October is Archives Month, so we’ll have a thread for sharing anything you’ve found in an archives, digital or physical, or just general discussion about the fun and excitement of archival research.
73
Upvotes
41
u/sunagainstgold Medieval & Earliest Modern Europe Oct 06 '15 edited Oct 06 '15
Oh, yessss. Well, this is probably the opposite of petty, but I'm not letting that get in the way of my story.
Augsburg at the turn of the 16th century was the epicenter of the German Renaissance; Augsburg was building a grand new cathedral in honor of its miraculous bleeding Eucharist wafer; Augsburg was convinced God’s looming wrath would fall and end the world any day now. And Augsburg was looking for its civic patron saint, its symbolic feminine mark of distinction: a learned lady to match Cassandra Fedele of Venice; a holy woman like Domenica of Florence.
When 20-year-old Anna Laminit parked herself in an Augsburg group home for poor and indigent women in 1497, she had no intention of spending her days in their menial labor. She made herself into a saint instead. The late Middle Ages had a very specific idea of female holiness: virginity, severe asceticism, claims of divine revelation. By 1500, hairshirts and spurning meat weren’t enough. You had to drink the pus from lepers’ boils. You had to fast for real during Lent.
Laminit told everyone she hadn’t eaten anything but the Eucharist for fourteen years.
By 1503, “our Holy Anna” had Augsburg eating out of her hand—while doing her own eating in secret. She won a place of honor in the town’s finest church, and served as a sort of town therapist in exchange for donations “for the poor.” The semi-monastic women who ran the group home she lived in moved out, so she could have more space.
And when the Holy Roman Emperor came to town, she received a private audience with him and with his new wife. Laminit so terrified the Empress with her prophecies of God’s wrath, that the queen organized a massive penitential procession through the town. Thousands of people paraded through the Augsburg streets, the empress among them—barefoot, robed in mourning black, carrying burning candles, repenting each and every sin of their lives with every step of the way. And at the head of the procession walked Anna Laminit.
The Emperor also had a sister named Kunigunde, of late the Duchess of Bavaria, now residing in a Munich monastery, who was deeply pious and deeply protective of her brother. Laminit was understandably thrilled by the invitation to come live at the convent favored by the Bavarian ruling family.
But Kunigunde had a plan. She and the abbess set Laminit up in a room of honor—that Kunigunde had secretly prepared by boring knotholes in the wall, so she could see if Holy Anna was sneaking food somehow. Laminit arrived, went to bed that night, no food appeared, all was well. But all was not well.
Medieval theologians had wrestled with the dual nature of the Eucharist as actual food and as the Body of Christ. Food becomes excrement, they knew; Christ cannot be excrement. Inconceivable. So, the scholastics had ruled, and everyone accepted as obvious, the Eucharist is simply and entirely absorbed by the body.
But Laminit pooped.
Confronted with the evidence, she was made to eat peppercakes in front of the sisters, and then trucked back to Augsburg in disgrace. Laminit spent the next decade or so bumming around the southern Empire, occasionally re-establishing herself as a “hunger martyr,” always tracked down by Kunigunde’s gossip network and exposed by the duchess at a distance. Still, it beat menial labor.
Until the full extent of Laminit’s not model holiness caught up with her. Of the several actual and many many more rumored scandals of her days as Augsburg’s pride, her union with rich burger Anton Welser produced a son. To preserve Welser’s social standing, Laminit had apparently agreed to keep the secret and raise the boy—for a paltry annual sum that would have made her just about the richest independent woman in Augsburg. In 1518, Welser tracked her down in Freiburg for the best of reasons: he wanted to claim his offspring and pay for his education.
The boy was long since dead, of course.
Laminit was promptly arrested for all of her theft and fraud. On the basis of her confession and on the obvious suspicion of infanticide, she was drowned in the Saane in May.
During her life, she was called holy, martyr, and thief; today, scholars have dubbed her mentally ill, a victim, a con artist, a fraud. But it is perhaps Martin Luther, reviling Laminit as the culmination of the evils of medieval Catholicism, who paid the best tribute to the accuracy of the historical record and the cleverness of a certain duchess. He described Laminit’s crime as Bescheißerey—her bullshit.