Matheus [sic] Miller's Memoir. A Merchant's Life in the Seventeenth Century.

Thomas Max Safley, Matheus [sic] Miller's Memoir. A Merchant's Life in the Seventeenth Century

(Early Modern History: Society and Culture.) London: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. ix + 226 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-312-22646-2.

The obscure businessman Matheus Miller (1625-1685) left a remarkably extended but long-forgotten account of his life. Safley brilliantly deploys the memoir as a bi-focal lens, both to ferret out the individuality of a quintessentially bourgeois merchant, yet also to reflect on shifting demography, fluctuating economy, hardening confessional rivalry, and social stratification in Augsburg as it shrank from the once-glittering Renaissance center to a bourgeois backwater. Although Augsburg had declined since 1580, various calamities early (1622-1635) in the Thirty Years War caused Augsburg's population to fall by 75%, its industrial production by 85%, its capital holdings by 90%. After 1650, growth resumed slowly; recovery came only around 1670.

Miller's life is like a parenthesis embracing this disastrous decline and shaky rehabilitation. Peculiarly enough, Miller goes against the era's trend: although Augsburg's economic and political hierarchy hardened into strata that would endure into the 1800s, Miller's fortunes and status rose. "His entire life testifies to social mobility in a world that will have none of it." (95). Attentive to this and other oddly baroque counterpoints, Safley moves skilfully back and forth between the minutiae of Miller's memoir to the broader sweep of history. He attends both to factual detail unearthed from archives as well as to explication of modern historiography's interpretive trends, in a way that is Germanic in the most complimentary sense. While Safley seems to know what everyone and their neighbors were doing in mid-seventeenth century Augsburg, he also draws out how these human episodes reflect or contrast with larger sociological and economic realities of the age. His skill in holding a reader's interest is the more impressive as the age itself was one of stagnation, yet Safley draws us into this unlovely landscape with a gift for vivid historical narrative.

In the City Archive of Augsburg, Safley discovered Miller's 85-page journal. An extended account of his youth precedes three sections, each recapitulating the same chronological sequence, but differing by theme: family affairs, public officeholding, the wider social milieu. Safley demonstrates how Miller's principles of organization, argument, and humanistic themes resemble Leon Batista Alberti's Libri della Famiglia. This extraordinary coincidence reveals the similar mentalities of two self-made mercantile men. The time and circumstances of Miller's writing are unclear, but point to a single period of composition toward the end of Miller's life. The Tagebuch is morally didactic, and consistently self-justifying Miller had gotten off to a shaky start in life, but by tenacity built a small fortune and became a solid, but not eminent, public figure in church and civic life. Safley illuminates Miller's bourgeois ethos of work, friendship, social and religious propriety, which are all the more interesting as Safl ey makes clear the emotional tensions, religious crises, social and family struggles that lay behind Miller's carefully constructed facade.

Safley's chapters follow Miller's own disposition of the materials, with an additional chapter on Miller's religious development. With an uncanny ability to flesh out Miller's memoir by his unearthing of corroborative data, Safley relates the data to the larger interpretive questions at issue for historians. Thus, in chronicling Miller's three marriages, thirteen children, forty-one godchildren from every social sector, and many other proteges, Safley shows that Miller modifies some current theories of early modern patriarchy inasmuch as exemplarity, not authority, informed his self-understanding. As Safley analyzes Miller's public officeholding and social network, he explores the connections between private relationships and civic morality. And in the concluding chapter on religiosity, Safley compares current theories about confessionalization (i.e., hardening of divisions between Catholics and Protestants) with Miller's extensive references to God, prayer, ecclesiastical matters, family trials and resignati on to Providence; interestingly, Safley discerns a muted crisis of faith in Miller and a kind of inner detachment from official Lutheran spirituality. In this way, Safley repeatedly finds Miller's individuality an exception to historiographical paradigms of patriarchy, civic office-holding, religious confessionalization, and so forth. "Matheus seemed to reconcile . . . Renaissance humanism with . . . Lutheran orthodoxy." In this "crafted self," Safley eloquently describes "a series of tensions" that "reveal his individuality, his complexity."

Tellingly, in a prayer for his son, Miller enumerates virtues which are almost identical with those recommended in a treatise written a century later, "On Bourgeois Virtues." So while Miller's individuality emerges, the values in terms of which he judged himself became emblematic of the entrenched bourgeois world of early modernity in Germany. Safley's work is learned, concise, sophisticated, and genuinely engaging.