Internet social-media algorithms deluge today’s users with unreliable and sometimes contradictory information. This small but dense book offers some unusual perspectives about similarly unreliable and contradictory oral information five centuries ago in the small, prosperous, and autonomous Swiss city of St. Gallen, home of one of Latin Christendom’s most famous abbeys. Roth’s source, the “Commentaries” of linen maker Johannes Rüdinger (1501–1556), contains about 2,000 miscellaneous entries, more than 70 percent of them from 349 local informants during the decade after the city adopted the Reformation in 1529 (37). The existence of this private miscellany—alongside several local chroniclers and diarists, some Catholic and others now unknown—remained hidden for two centuries (26–34).
Rüdinger’s collection is extremely unusual in two important ways. First, he anticipated Foucault’s “disappearance of the author” by four centuries, saying almost nothing about his household, his business, and his rare and short travels, and treating his growing political career...