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A Brief Note on Time and Place

Mojca Kumerdej’s novel The Harvest of Chronos is set in the year 1600 during the Catholic Counter-Reformation in the territory of what is today the Republic of Slovenia – an intersection of history and geo­graphy that may require some context for twenty-first-century readers.

Exactly five hundred years ago (almost to the day, as I write this) and eighty-three years before the novel begins, the German monk and theology professor Martin Luther, according to a famous but disputed legend, nailed his Ninety-five Theses on the door of a church in the Saxon town of Wittenberg, in northern Germany. The Theses laid out his objections to certain practices of the Roman Catholic Church, and their publication is generally considered the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, which over the following decades developed from a movement to reform the Catholic Church to the establishment of a number of breakaway churches with differing structures, practices, and doctrines.

Luther had published his Theses primarily to protest the Catholic practice of selling indulgences, that is, the idea that you could purchase a reduction in the time you or a loved one would have to spend in purgatory before being admitted to heaven. But other practices were equally abhorrent to Luther and his followers. Lutherans insisted on the importance of taking Holy Communion ‘in both kinds’, that is, with all communicants being given both bread and wine, as the body and blood of Christ. In the Catholic Church, however, the Lord’s Supper was offered to lay believers only ‘in one kind’: while the clergy took both wine and bread, the laity were only permitted to receive the bread, which was placed by the priest on the communicant’s tongue. But most importantly, Protestants rejected the idea of papal authority and, by extension, the authority of priests in general; they believed in the priesthood of all believers and elevated the Bible as the primary if not sole basis for doctrine and personal faith. Consequently, the translation of the Bible into the vernacular languages and the promotion of universal literacy were central priorities. At the same time, the emphasis on the individual’s direct access to God meant a rejection of the role of the Virgin Mary and the saints as intercessors.

But the Protestants were also divided among themselves. Besides the Lutherans, the other major Protestant group were the followers of the Geneva-based theologian John Calvin, who most famously put forward the controversial doctrine of predestination, the belief that God has preordained some people for eternal life and others for eternal damnation. There were other sects as well, such as the Anabaptists and the Flacians (whose founder, Matthias Flacius, was a Croat from Istria, born Matija Vlačić), as well as smaller, more radical groups, some of which appear in the novel as Leapers, Founders, and Ecstatics.

By the middle of the sixteenth century, Lutheranism had gained a strong foothold among the nobility and burghers in the Habsburg domain known as Inner Austria, in the south-eastern corner of the Holy Roman Empire. Squeezed between the Venetian Republic on the west and Hungary and the still-expanding Ottoman Empire on the east, Inner Austria comprised the Duchies of Carinthia, Styria, and Carniola, as well as the Princely County of Gorizia, the City of Trieste, and a large part of the Istrian Peninsula. Roughly a third of this territory was inhabited by speakers of the South Slavic language that today we call Slovene.

The main proponent of Lutheranism among Slovene speakers was Primož Trubar (1508–1586), who served as a Catholic priest in Carniola and Styria until 1548, when he was expelled from the region because of his Lutheran views. He fled to Germany, where he began publishing books in Slovene, most importantly, his Catechism, with explanations of the basic Lutheran doctrines as well as hymns and a litany for worship, and the Abecedarium, an ‘ABC book’ for learning to read and write. Published in Tübingen in 1550, these were the first books ever to be printed in Slovene. Although Trubar also produced translations of the New Testament, it was his younger colleague, Jurij Dalmatin (c. 1547–1589), who translated the entire Bible into Slovene, which was printed in Wittenberg in 1583. Meanwhile, the Slovene Protestant preacher Adam Bohorič (c. 1520–1598) wrote the first grammar for the language (1584) and devised the alphabet used by Trubar and Dalmatin (the Bohorič script was eventually replaced in the mid-nineteenth century by the modern Slovene alphabet).

While it is impossible to overstate the importance of the Protestant Reformers’ role in the formation of the Slovene literary language, no less important was their contribution to the creation of the Slovene national identity. It is no accident that Trubar begins his Catechism with the words: ‘For all Slovenes I ask grace, peace, mercy and the true knowledge of God through Jesus Christ.’ His appeal to ‘all Slovenes’ – vsem Slovencem – is breathtaking: it is as if he is naming a people and thereby envisioning a nation, even if that nation would not be realized as political fact until hundreds of years later. While it would be wrong to view Mojca Kumerdej’s novel as engaged in the formation of a national mythos – her concerns are much broader than this – the anxiety of an inchoate populace that, for good or for ill, is striving to define and assert its identity is a significant element in the matrix of power she describes.

The novel unfolds against the background of a new stage in the Catholic response to Protestantism in Inner Austria, when after decades of reluctant compromise with the powerful Lutheran elites in the noble and burgher classes (the Provincial Estates) – a compromise marked by agreements such as the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the Pacification of Bruck (1578), which assured the feudal gentry and the towns the right to choose their own religion – the Catholic Church launched a ruthless crackdown, burning Protestant books, forcing conversions, and expelling anyone who refused to swear allegiance to the Church. These efforts were undertaken with the full support of the Prince of Inner Austria, Archduke Ferdinand II (1578–1637), a fervent Catholic whose later actions to impose his religion, first as King of Bohemia and then as Holy Roman Emperor, would eventually trigger the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), one of the longest and deadliest wars in European history. In the end, Protestantism was completely eradicated in the Slovene lands, with the exception of the Trans-Mura (Prekmurje) region, then in Hungary but now the north-eastern corner of Slovenia, where a significant part of the population has remained Lutheran.

The social and philosophical conflicts Kumerdej portrays – between competing religions, folk beliefs (including the belief in witches and sorcery), scientific rationalism, humanism, scepticism, and mysticism – are underlaid with political questions about power, violence, patriarchy, misogyny, xenophobia, and populism. Who is in control? Who is manipulating whom? Who determines what is good and what is evil? And then there is the question of time itself, the harvest that is reaped (or raped?) by Chronos: are we moving forward or are we spinning in a void on the edge of the universe? For ultimately, this is a novel where centuries collide and collapse into each other, and behind the veil of the past we see our own century flickering, but whether as hope, doom, or simply illusion, it is impossible to say.

— Rawley Grau

Ljubljana, October 2017