Note 714 — Chapter XVII · (continued 2)

Cp. N. Paulus, ibid., p. 40; Kroker, pp. 156, 158, 262. Kroker says (p. 158), “Luther probably made use of a colloquial word for phallus, or something similar.” Luther is complaining of the excesses to which the Catholics gave themselves up on pilgrimages, and which the Pope constantly indulged in. One MS. there cited omits the passage altogether. The Table-Talk of Mathesius (p. 141) contains the following speech of Luther’s in 1540 under the title “Exemplum verecundiae Lutheri”: “Rochlicensis princeps. Is interrogabat ‘Qui vocatur verum [sic] de domina vestra natante cum equite per aquas? Non volo autem obscoenum audire sed verum.’ Ich mein, das heisst: die × ausgeschwembt”. For the liberty which Aurifaber permits himself in the matter of toning down and weakening the original text of the Table-Talk, cp., for instance, the remarks in the Preface to the Cordatus Collection. What the latter gives in all its crudity (see the twenty-four passages there quoted by Wrampelmeyer) Aurifaber either does not reproduce at all or does so in an inoffensive form, or accompanied with such expressions as “to speak decently,” etc. Cordatus knew and acknowledged that it was an “audax facinus” to write down all he heard, but his opinion was that “pudorem vincebat utilitas”; Luther, who was watching his work, never gave him to understand by so much as one word that it did not meet with his approval.