Bishop of Münster

#On His Station

"The office is on file. The man who held it has been mislaid."

The Bishop of Münster held his see in 1678, which the Synod later numbered A.S. −32 when it adopted its calendar at the Concordat of Strasbourg in A.S. 90. Beyond that, the Ledger can certify very little about his tenure. His name does not survive in any file I am licensed to open. His age, family, consecration, death and successor are equally absent. I possess an office and two recorded acts, both belonging to the Year of Letters. Thinner biographies have gone out under my seal, though never with my knowledge.

The office needs a sentence of explanation, because the Bureau has since given it a superior it never had. In 1678 the formal Synod lay a hundred and twenty-two years ahead, and the Bureaus with it. The Church was a scatter of dioceses held together by liturgy, precedent and the Holy See of Vienna, whose writ ran farther on parchment than on roads. A bishop in Münster answered to Vienna in theory and to his cathedral chapter in practice. Within his own walls he could preach, prohibit, convene, examine and burn. Those were the instruments in his cabinet when the post arrived from Amsterdam. He used two of them, and the order in which he used them is the only portrait I can draw.

#On the Letter from Amsterdam

"Forty bishops opened the same envelope. Each believed it had been written to him."

The letter that reached Münster was one copy of an edition written out by hand. Pieter van Hoorn conceived the scheme in the winter of 1677. In March 1678 he, Gerrit Lemstra and Jan de Waal, the Amsterdam triad, set fourteen copyists to work, and within three months the same document had entered forty cities. Each copy carried a table of every relic of Saint Aldebrand the scholars could find: two hundred and forty-three objects, including forty-one femurs, nineteen skulls and twelve hands. Cologne alone claimed seventeen of the femurs. Beneath the table sat one courteous paragraph. Appended to it was a request that the holding clergy explain how their bone could be the only one.

None of those figures belongs to Münster. They are the totals for the whole correspondence. No number in the table can be assigned to Münster's own cases, and I will not supply one.

The threat lay in the distribution. A book has one address and can be seized at the printer's. Van Hoorn's table had forty addresses and the same face at every one of them. Whatever the Bishop did with his copy, thirty-nine others carried on with their errands. A bad answer given in Münster would be heard only in Münster, and the question would go on being asked everywhere else.

#On the Burning

"He answered a table with a torch. The table was not present."

The Bishop carried Van Hoorn's letter into the cathedral square at Münster and burned it in public. In the words the record preserves, he condemned its scholarship as "an affront to the Almighty." Neither the day nor the month is recorded. The only limits on the date are those the post imposes. The ash has been inventoried accurately, which is to say as nothing.

I have authorised burnings, and I know what one is for. A fire is a closing argument, and it presumes the case has been heard. The Church has burned books whose arguments it had already answered, so that the faithful could watch the answer made visible. The Bishop of Münster burned an argument he had not answered, in front of the people who were owed the answer.

His congregation noticed. The record states it in a sentence I find professionally humiliating: they observed that burning the letter did not reduce the number of femurs. I have nothing further on the crowd and want nothing further. The pews delivered their verdict in arithmetic, at a tribunal the Bishop had convened himself.

Consider what he had to hand: a cathedral, a chapter, a pulpit, an archive and whatever relics his see kept. He owned every instrument a diocese possessed for examining a claim, and he chose the only one that leaves no record of an examination. One letter was destroyed and thirty-nine stayed in circulation. In Münster the question now had a witness list, and it included everyone who had stood in the square.

#On the Census He Commissioned

"Later, he counted. Then he shut the count away."

Here the Bishop becomes interesting, and here the file grows thin. At some later date, which the record does not give, the man who had burned Amsterdam's arithmetic commissioned a relic census of his own. Its results were sealed.

That is the entire entry. The Ledger has no commission date, scope, enumerators, totals or findings. It has no wording of the seal, no keeper of the box and no account of anyone opening it. Clerks who bring me a theory about what the Bishop found all receive the same reply: a sealed result is a withheld result. It proves that an answer existed and that someone with authority preferred it unread. It proves nothing about what the answer said.

Even so, the commission is itself a deed, and deeds can be read. Nobody pays men to measure a question he considers settled by fire. After the pyre, in his own chancery and at his own cost, the Bishop took up the very instrument he had condemned in the square. Whether he expected the count to vindicate Münster or to shame it, the file does not say.

What the seal conceals, I will not say either. It could cover agreement with Amsterdam, a vindication too awkward to publish after the fire, or simply a botched count. Every honest archivist distinguishes between an answer that is unavailable and an answer suppressed for a known reason. The Bishop's census is the first kind. Anyone who claims to know which of the three possibilities is true has either opened a box the Ledger has never opened or opened no box at all.

#On His Use to the Bureau

"Every diocese answered Amsterdam. Only Münster answered it twice."

Set him beside his neighbours. Trier argued that the multiplication of Aldebrand's bones was itself a miracle. That answer was foolish, but it was paid in the questioner's own currency of ink. Cologne declared that authentication belongs to faith and falls outside arithmetic, a position the Bureau of Relics later wrote into the Authenticators' Manual. Vienna, under the authority of Archbishop Rupert III, struck the Reliquary of Saint Aldebrand from every inventory its seal could reach. That decree was Vienna's work. The Bishop of Münster neither drafted nor directed it, and no file records his hand in any policy the Bureaus later adopted.

The Bureau's use of him is retrospective, and the interpretation is mine. When I read the Münster entry from the far side of the Concordat, I find the sequence my own office treats as basic hygiene: condemn in the square, examine in the chancery, seal whatever the examination produces. He did not invent that sequence and did not bequeath it. He performed it long before anyone printed it on a form, and he performed it in the wrong order. Examination comes before the fire, as every novice who has carried a brazier for the Bureau of Records knows.

The reliquary's vindication at Vienna in A.S. 95, ratified in A.S. 104, owed nothing to Münster's fire. No surviving file shows that it drew anything from Münster's census.

My verdict, entered for the file: the Bishop of Münster mistook a pyre for a reply, and afterwards, to his partial credit, ordered a reply. The order is on record. The reply remains under seal, where it can stay indefinitely without ever being proved wrong.