All right. It's Friday, day 13 of #LeibnizHomeOffice, I have a nice cup of tea and Brahms in my earphones, and could it be that last week I mentioned archbishops eaten by mice? And then didn't tell you anything more about them?

That isn't an archbishop, it's St. Gertrude of Nivelles; but it turns out there were surprising numbers of people, of several different categories, (allegedly) eaten by mice.

Of course the starting point is a Leibniz letter. I recently talked about how Leibniz forbade his longtime assistant, Eckhart, from using material from Leibniz's Guelph history for his (Eckhart's) academic publications.

Now Eckhart pointed out that as a professor at that fine institution of higher learning, the University of Helmstedt, he was obliged - by solemn oath, no less - to regularly publish "specimens" of his learned work. Here is a snippet from Leibniz's answer.

"You have a wide-open field for your programmes and other specimens, all of Ancient History, Greek, Roman, sacred and profane, and all recent history is open to you. You once expressed the intent to write on the origins of errors and fables in history ...

... and with that you could fill many a programme before you exhausted the subject. The "devorati a muribus" and others of the sort will furnish your specimens."
Devorati a muribus = people eaten by mice.

Where to start on this? Libraries are wonderful, and generations of scholarship in the humanities have done amazing things. Has someone, perhaps, even written a monograph about stories of people eaten by mice?
Well, no...

... as it turns out, someone wrote two monographs. But I only needed the one about the Middle Ages.
(Of course it would have to be titled "Of Mice and Men". How could anyone have resisted the temptation?)

Mr. Beckman, according to his foreword, had spent at least fifteen years of his life working on the subject in his spare time. I don't know what his regular job was, I don't know what kind of person he was otherwise, but I salute that.

The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek doesn't have this book, but inter-library loans are also wonderful. (All of this happened pre-Corona, and I'm the kind of packrat who copies and scans any book they mean to cite.)

So, most of the work had been done for me. All I had to do was go through all the sources listed by Beckman, and find the ones Leibniz had access to. Well now!
(CN: I'm going to paraphrase a few of these, and they contain graphic violence and body horror.)

There it is in Thietmar of Merseburg, as edited by Leibniz/Eckhart. "A certain knight, having forcibly seized the possessions of [the church of] St. Clement ... in a single day was attacked in his bedchamber by ineffable mice; after first trying to fend them off with a cudgel ...

... he drew his sword to fight them, but achieving nothing, at his own demand was locked into a box, and suspended by a rope; but when the scourge without had abated, and he was to be set free, the others found him within gnawed to death."

According to Beckman, this is the oldest documented version of such a story in medieval Latin Europe. He theorizes it comes from the story of the Persian Martyrs in Cassiodorus, which might have been available at Corvey.

Regardless of where it came from, it has many elements common to later versions. Usually the victim is a person of elevated social standing, a noble, a cleric, occasionally even a king. Almost always, they have committed some sacrilegious wrong.

The attack of the mice is explicitly (as here: it was "ira Domini", the Lord's wrath) or implicitly attributed to divine punishment. It is miraculous. Besides the fact that mice don't, in fact, eat people, the mice in the stories can do other things regular mice can't.

In many versions, the victims fight back and/or attempt to flee or hide, but always in vain. In one story, the mice gnaw through walls to reach their quarry. In Thietmar, they seem to spontaneously generate inside the sealed box.

Often, the victim withdraws to a ship or island, and the mice immediately swim there. Mice can't swim (unlike rats), and the stories sometimes explicitly note this.

Thietmar was not the only source known to Leibniz and Eckhart. The "Cronecken der sassen" attributed to Conrad Bothe (which I tweeted about awhile ago for its nifty woodcuts) has a version clearly derived from Thietmar, right down to the church of St. Clement.

Several things they worked with have perhaps the best-known version of the story, the one involving Archbishop Hatto of Mainz. Here it is in a little anonymous source from ca. 1410 which Leibniz called "Compilatio chronologica".

And in the 15th-century chronicle of Dietrich Engelhus, with a few additional legends about Hatto thrown in. All of these snippets are from Leibniz/Eckhart's major edition of medieval sources, "Scriptores rerum Brunsvicensium".

Also in the Franciscan chronicle now usually known as "Flores temporum", first published by Eckhart in 1723, though from a copy that Leibniz had had made.

Hatto's crime, in the fuller tellings of this version, was twofold. First, during a year of great famine, when the poor of his territory were starving and begged him for food, he lured a great number of them into a barn or hall, locked the doors, and burned it to the ground.

Vaguely reminiscent of "herd immunity" strategies for dealing with a pandemic, obviously. Sacrifice a bunch of the more vulnerable people so the rest can get by. The near-immediate response of the Lord's wrath makes it clear what the medieval chroniclers thought of this.

But, as if there was any need to make matters WORSE, the stories also accuse Hatto of tempting the Lord directly. Apparently he was in the habit of swearing "If I speak not the truth, let mice devour me." So, inevitably...

This combines two very frequent recurring story motifs: the evildoer who speaks their own sentence, and the powerful person who tempts divine retribution through gratuitous words of hubris. Capaneus shouts that not even Zeus can stop him from being first over the walls, and...

Now there were actually two distinct archbishops of Mainz named Hatto, one who died in 913, the other in 970. Here's Hatto II from Hartmann Schedel's Chronicle of the World, one of the most famous achievements of popular historiography in the late 15th century.

You will not be surprised that there are no contemporary sources for either of these Hattos incinerating his own subjects, or being eaten by rodents.

These days, most of us would deal with these mice stories as legend or myth, told to make sense of the world in metaphysical or ethical terms rather than to document "facts".

In disciplinary terms, one would expect to find literary scholars or folklorists dealing with them, more probably than historians. Which brings me back to Leibniz: Why was he suggesting Eckhart, a Professor of History, should write about them?

One very real possibility is that the suggestion was a more or less subtle put-down: belittling Eckhart's scholarship by suggesting an absurd or ridiculous topic. Certainly, the idea doesn't seem to have gone over very well with Eckhart.

In his answering letter, he doesn't bring it up directly, but he does mention mice, which can hardly be a coincidence. "My Stemma Leutharianum I will gladly turn over to the mice."

Quick reminder: The "Stemma Leutharianum" was Eckhart's rather imaginative genealogy of the origins of the Habsburgs. Leibniz had heavily implied that he didn't want Eckhart to publish it. https://twitter.com/thstockinger/status/1245061073276936194

The mice in Eckhart's letter belong to a different, but also common trope in Early Modern scholarship: vermin eating manuscripts as a metaphor for oblivion. Often it was "tineae ac blattae", moths and roaches, but it could also be worms or mice.

Antiquarians liked to portray themselves as herocially wresting the knowledge of the Ancients from the jaws (or mandibles) of the "tineae ac blattae" or the mice. Eckhart seems to have felt that Leibniz's gag order was throwing his scholarship to the vermin.

Overall, the tone of these letters, while polite on the surface, strikes me as being (to use a distinctly anachronistic term) rather passive-aggressive. These two men had been working together for a decade or so, with Leibniz sometimes the employer, sometimes the patron ...

... and they still needed each other, but I get the distinct feeling that this was not a relationship marked by trust or affection on either side. And that neither side was blameless in its having developed to that point.

But is there more? After all, Leibniz says it was Eckhart's own intention to write "de origine errorum et fabularum". And there is evidence that this was indeed a point of interest to both of them.

There is a letter from Eckhart, many years before these ones, at a time when he was compiling dates from medieval sources for Leibniz, where he mentions Hatto and complains that, regarding his death, the sources "plane ineptiunt", are spouting complete nonsense.

Which might be merely about the year of death, which Eckhart would have needed to establish, but it might also refer to fanciful versions of the cause and circumstances of the archbishop's demise. So it does seem as if Leibniz wasn't simply pulling the issue out of his hat.

More generally, Leibniz brought up fables often in his writings on the theory and practice of historiography. Usually, it was either to decry them or to praise his own achievements or those of contemporaries in chasing them out.

That's him in ca. 1696 on the recent progress of historical scholarship. Note the comparison with natural philosophy, set up as an epistemological standard to which historians should aspire, even though their craft appears "least susceptible" to attaining such rigor.

It would be easy to inundate you with hymns to progress by Leibniz or those close to him. What interests me more right now is the other part of the passage, where he actually goes into reasons for why past historians spread fables.

It might be out of flattery towards their benefactors, or out of lack of judgement, or simply for the amusement of their audiences. These reflections tie in with an entire literature on "fides historica", truthfulness or credibility in history, reaching back to the 16th century.

Works on "ars historica" might include entire catalogues of the virtues which led historians to tell the truth, or the vices which tempted them to falsehood. (Moral and epistemic judgement were usually closely connected.)

In the late 17th century, historical Pyrrhonism had exacerbated these debates. (Pyrrhonism is extreme scepticism, extending as far as claims that nothing at all can be known with certainty about the past.)

How much influence the Pyrrhonist debates had on the development of historical methods is somewhat disputed. One thing that is certain is that Leibniz took an interest; several of the most noted contemporary authors on "fides historica" were correspondents of his.

Including two professors with the most German of names, Eisenhart and Bierling.

The detail on them and the entire "fides historica" literature is in Markus Völkel's book "Pyrrhonismus historicus" (1987). Fortunately for you all, it's sitting in my office, what feels like a continent away right now.

My point here is that despite Eckhart's obvious pique at the suggestion, Leibniz may well have been actually interested not only in debunking specific "errors and fables" (the Latin word for debunking is "explodere", which I find rather fine!), ...

... but also in an epistemological, methodological, and (to use another anachronism) proto-psychological investigation of where they come from, how they arise and spread. I find this rather interesting, as it's a topic that has attracted me well before I worked on Leibniz.

I haven't previously plugged my own stuff in these threads, and I promise not to do it often, but ... here. These are pretty tiny things, hardly full-scale articles, and they only barely scratch the surface.

(Yes, Thomas Wallnig and I were aware before we submitted that piece that in an author/short-title style, it would be cited as "Stockinger/Wallnig, 'Historische Irrtümer'". And we went and did it anyway.)

The central idea here would be that any system of knowledge production, whether viewed from an epistemic or a praxeological point of view, has its own specific potentials for "error" built in; both in the sense of immanent risk (what is likely to happen), ...

... and in the sense of what is viewed as "error", the negative counter-image of the "truth" for which the knowledge production strives. In other words, "error" isn't just random and thus only worth avoiding; what errors a system fears and what errors it generates...

... are points that can say a lot about the entirety of the system, I believe. I'm not explaining this very well, I'm afraid.

Also you came here (if any of you came here) for archbishops eaten by mice, and I stopped talking about them a while ago, so you're presumably either very bored by now, or have already left. So I'll call it a night...

As always, #StayAtHome if you can. Protect yourselves and others and #BeKind.

P.S. An EXTREMELY awesome historian of Early Modern learning liked one of the tweets in this thread and I am (internally) squeeing very hard right now, while at the same time feeling deep embarrassment to be seen by people who seriously know about this stuff.