Discourses on Work and Labour in the German-speaking World during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Discourses on work and labour have been taking place in Europe since Antiquity. In some historical periods, however, such topics were much more intensively discussed than in others. The starting point of this chapter is the assumption that in European history, the period around 1500 was one such high point. Perceptions of the value of work became an issue of public interest, and the meaning of work was increasingly narrowed to gainful employment. Labour discourses found expression in a wide range of sources related to the everyday life of the lower and middling classes such as journeymen's petitions, guild statutes, charity regulations, and urban poor laws, but they also appeared in popular poetry and in a wide range of visual representations of work and workers in the public space, for instance, on the walls of churches. I argue that the social background of intensified discourses included a spate of dynamic socio-economic changes in the sixteenth century, including the transformation of feudal agriculture and the emergence of a largely independent peasantry, increasing social inequality in the rural world, the growth of cities, the spread of mining centres, among other things. In periods of change such as this, discourses on work and labour allowed new social groups to form an identity and define their position in society. It was particularly social groups on the lower rungs of society that developed a work ethic from below and used their inclination to manual labour and their disgust over idleness as a political argument in conflicts with the upper classes and state authorities.