The Book of Vagabonds and Beggars is not Luther's own composition but an anonymous pamphlet, the Liber Vagatorum, which had circulated in southern Germany since the first decade of the sixteenth century under the signature of one who called himself Expertus in Truffis, "experienced in tricks." The tract catalogues the varieties of professional beggars on the roads of the Empire and exposes the devices by which they extracted alms from the credulous. In 1528 Luther issued the text in Wittenberg with a preface of his own, under the title Von der falschen Betler Büberei, the knavery of false beggars. He wrote that he had himself been cheated by such tramps and liars more often than he cared to admit, and that the book deserved reprinting so that ordinary people, and especially magistrates, might see how the devil governs the world through fraud and idleness.
The book proper has three parts. The first describes some twenty-eight types of beggar, each with its cant name and its trick: the Lossners who claimed to have escaped Turkish captivity, the Klenckners who sat at church doors with feigned wounds, the Dobissers who dressed as mendicant friars, the Grantners who held soap in their mouths to foam as if in epileptic seizure, the Kammesierers who begged as wandering scholars, and women who presented themselves as converted Jewesses or as newly delivered mothers. For each type the author adds a terse verdict on whether alms should be given. The second part gathers miscellaneous notes on beggars' habits and habitual lies. The third is a glossary of Rotwelsch, the thieves' cant, the earliest substantial record of that argot in print. Luther's preface frames all this pastorally and civically. He argues that every town and village should know its own poor and support them, and should give nothing to wandering strangers without letters and seals attesting their need, since indiscriminate charity feeds knaves while the deserving poor are left to want. He also claims that the beggars' language derives from the Jews because so many Hebrew words occur in it, a judgment that belongs to the harsher currents of his later writing.
The work matters because it shows Luther's theology of vocation touching the ground. His rejection of begging as a holy estate, already implicit in his attacks on the mendicant orders and in the common-chest ordinances of the early 1520s, here becomes practical counsel about who is lying at the gate. It is also an irreplaceable document of early modern social history, of how the Reformation's redefinition of charity sorted the poor into the worthy and the unworthy, with consequences that reach into modern welfare thinking.
Who should read this: historians of poor relief, students of Luther's social thought, and anyone interested in how the Reformation reshaped Christian charity in practice. It is not devotional reading, offers no spiritual counsel, and will disappoint readers looking for Luther the preacher of grace rather than Luther the suspicious burgher.
The Book of Vagabonds and Beggars
ed. Martin Luther
Length About 9,000 words, under an hour.
Should I read this?
An anonymous catalogue of the tricks of professional beggars, with a glossary of thieves' cant, which Luther reissued with a preface urging towns to care for their own honest poor and to stop feeding frauds. A curious little window on the sixteenth-century underworld and on Reformation thinking about poor relief, more than a book of devotion.
How it proceeds
Independent intensities, 0–5 — what the work is made of, not how good it is.
The Book of Vagabonds and Beggars is not Luther's own composition but an anonymous pamphlet, the Liber Vagatorum, which had circulated in southern Germany since the first decade of the sixteenth century under the signature of one who called himself Expertus in Truffis, "experienced in tricks." The tract catalogues the varieties of professional beggars on the roads of the Empire and exposes the devices by which they extracted alms from the credulous. In 1528 Luther issued the text in Wittenberg with a preface of his own, under the title Von der falschen Betler Büberei, the knavery of false beggars. He wrote that he had himself been cheated by such tramps and liars more often than he cared to admit, and that the book deserved reprinting so that ordinary people, and especially magistrates, might see how the devil governs the world through fraud and idleness.
The book proper has three parts. The first describes some twenty-eight types of beggar, each with its cant name and its trick: the Lossners who claimed to have escaped Turkish captivity, the Klenckners who sat at church doors with feigned wounds, the Dobissers who dressed as mendicant friars, the Grantners who held soap in their mouths to foam as if in epileptic seizure, the Kammesierers who begged as wandering scholars, and women who presented themselves as converted Jewesses or as newly delivered mothers. For each type the author adds a terse verdict on whether alms should be given. The second part gathers miscellaneous notes on beggars' habits and habitual lies. The third is a glossary of Rotwelsch, the thieves' cant, the earliest substantial record of that argot in print. Luther's preface frames all this pastorally and civically. He argues that every town and village should know its own poor and support them, and should give nothing to wandering strangers without letters and seals attesting their need, since indiscriminate charity feeds knaves while the deserving poor are left to want. He also claims that the beggars' language derives from the Jews because so many Hebrew words occur in it, a judgment that belongs to the harsher currents of his later writing.
The work matters because it shows Luther's theology of vocation touching the ground. His rejection of begging as a holy estate, already implicit in his attacks on the mendicant orders and in the common-chest ordinances of the early 1520s, here becomes practical counsel about who is lying at the gate. It is also an irreplaceable document of early modern social history, of how the Reformation's redefinition of charity sorted the poor into the worthy and the unworthy, with consequences that reach into modern welfare thinking.
Who should read this: historians of poor relief, students of Luther's social thought, and anyone interested in how the Reformation reshaped Christian charity in practice. It is not devotional reading, offers no spiritual counsel, and will disappoint readers looking for Luther the preacher of grace rather than Luther the suspicious burgher.
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