The only thing that separated Adam and Oswald was time. They were not contemporaries at all.
Oswald was born around 1376, at least seventy years after Adam’s death, when the monophonic art of the
trouvères was long since superseded. He died in 1445, by which time the Meistersinger were already
well established (and, in Western Europe, monophonic song was hardly practiced any longer as a literate
art). Oswald himself cannot be classified as a guild musician, though. Both his social class and his
subject matter preclude that, and his poetic and musical style was remote from that prescribed by the
Tabulaturen.
Persistence, like Oswald’s, in old ways is often represented by historians as anachronism—in this
case, as a pocket of “the Middle Ages” surviving like a fossil into “the Renaissance,” or as resolute
“conservatism,” resistance to change. What is anachronistic, however, is the modern linear view of
history that produces such an evaluation, and the implicit isolation of artistic practices or styles from the
historical conditions that enabled them.
Feudal society and “castle culture” retained their currency longer in Germany than they did in France.
The rise of towns and, consequently, of urbanized mores happened later there. The institution of serfdom,
for example, the sine qua non of feudal economy, which bound the lower classes of society to the land and
retarded urbanization, made a sort of eastward migration over the course of time covered by this chapter:
from the Romance countries (France, Italy, Spain) to Germany, and finally (during the fifteenth century) to
the Slavic countries. (Essentially “feudal” conditions persisted in Russia until the Emancipation Act of
1861; were Russia not culturally cut off from the West during its long period of Mongol occupation, it
would probably have developed an art of courtly song last of all, and kept it latest.) The growth of towns
and the beginnings of a mercantile (money-based) economy came later to Germany than they did to France
and arrived along with the Meistersinger—or rather, obviously, the art of the Meistersinger guild was
made possible by the growth of the urban and mercantile society that supported it and to which it gave
expression.
To regard an Oswald von Wolkenstein or a Hans Sachs as an artistic anachronism, then, is to regard
their societies as historical anachronisms. And one has to ask by what premises—indeed, by what right—
and from what vantage point one can make such a judgment. When things become truly anachronistic, they
disappear (as did the Meistersinger guild when it officially disbanded in 1774). As long as they thrive,
they are ipso facto—by that very fact—relevant to their time, and it is the historian’s job to understand
how. Judging cultures by the standards of other cultures (most often, by the standards of one’s own
culture) is called ethnocentrism, and it has been the source of many fallacious historical verdicts, to say
nothing of ethnic, religious, or racial intolerance.
Another premise that can lead to the illusory notion of historical anachronism is the premise that
history is teleological—that it has a purpose or an end (telos in Greek). This kind of thinking leads to
determinism: the explanation of events in terms of inevitable movement toward the perceived goal, and
the assignment of value to phenomena (or to artifacts, like works of art) depending on their nearness to it.
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
An argument like the one made here, which seeks to account for the circumstances of art history (here, its
nonsynchronicity) by appealing to factors deemed external to “art itself,” is often mistaken for a
determinist argument. (In this case, some balance of historical, social, and economic determinisms would
appear to be invoked.) That is a misnomer, engendered by the confusion of causes or purposes with
enabling conditions. To say that certain conditions made a development—say, the art of the Meistersinger
—possible is not the same as predicting the nature of that development from a knowledge of those