Pray and Work
Will Slattery
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When setting out to find a topic for this year’s Advent Calendar/Media Club essay series I noticed that the 3 most aesthetically rewarding games I’ve played over the past half-decade—Disco Elysium (a post-Soviet, Marxist humanist cRPG about an alcoholic disaster of a police detective), NORCO (a point-and-click cyberpunk Southern Gothic bayou-noir fever-dream “search for a missing brother” visual novel—incidentally also recently discoursed and Advent’d by Ander a few days ago here on Essay Daily), and Pentiment (a narrative adventure game involving interlinked alpine murder mysteries in Reformation-era Bavaria) —share a set of common features: intricately detailed settings & a protagonist-detective (professional or ad-hoc) investigating the contours of those settings. This piece is set to complete our annual Advent series (a daily-posting conceit in imitation of a liturgical calendar) on Christmas Day (a central Christian holiday) so it seems only fitting to dive into the pages of Pentiment, a remarkable game with unparalleled poly-vocal poly-textual poly-textural poly-typographic depictions of the relationship between religion and daily human life.In its most basic sense Pentiment is the story of Andreas Maler, a 16th Century journeyman limner & painter from Nuremberg who finds himself trudging through a series of contracts at a scriptorium (a monastic workshop where priestly scribes copy and decorate manuscripts; by the time of Pentiment the scriptorium is nearing obsoletion and facing replacement by secular urban workshops) in the double Abbey of Kiersau, home to a set of Benedictine monks and Benedictine nuns in adjoining cloistered buildings. The abbey houses both the scriptorium and a small relic site for pilgrims, and it sits atop a high hill adjoining the town of Tassing, an isolated but important mountain pass stopover town in the Bavarian Alps.
Andreas is a temporary visitor to Kiersau and Tassing, and in several ways his life in rural Bavaria kind of sucks. He needs to finish a masterwork to move upwards in his artists' guild, but he gets very little time to work on his own projects in the scriptorium. As a site of production, the monastic scriptorium is dark, cold, isolated, under-resourced, backwards, a dying economic model & a thoroughly strange place for a modern, educated, urban artist like Andreas to end up. Everybody else who works in the scriptorium is a priest with Benedictine garb & the deliberately unflattering clerical haircut we call the tonsure. 2 of these priests are kindly but age-hobbled; 1 of them is a young Burgundian seething with omnidirectional resentment at the prospect of spending the next 40 years of his life hunched over an easel, drawing margin decorations in one of the continent’s last scriptoriums (imagine, for modern comparison, a young man from the Bay Area whose family sought to get him an internship but instead locked him into a lifelong contract designing rotary phones). Elsewhere in the abbey the abbot is a dick, and the head of the priory is a dick. It is 1518 A.D., one year after Martin Luther begins circulating his 95 Theses, and so all the clergy and the educated strata of Bavaria are mired in contentious theological debates that Andreas struggles to sidestep. To continue moving up in his guild Andreas also needs to acquire a good Christian wife and produce a good Christian child. His family has already arranged a marriage to solve the first of these, and the uncertainty that shrouds his fiancée and future marriage is a constant source of stress. The townsfolk and peasants who live near the abbey are sometimes friendly, sometimes not, and each down to the last faces or participates in the dramatic, violent social upheavals that will later be known as the Protestant Reformation and the German Peasants’ War.
Poor Andreas!
The scribes at work.
In that bigger sense Pentiment is many, many things: a fictive documentary about late-medieval and early-modern manuscript production; a series of micro-portraits of grief and loss; a tableaux of priestly personality types; a nun-heavy sex comedy; a collection of manual-labor-themed point-and-click mini-games; a debate over the metaphysical nature of the Eucharist; a set of small-town Bavarian romances; a snapshot of the formation of a new European middle class which will eventually wreck feudal systems and transform them into a new political order; a psychological profile of an anchoress who bars herself up alone in a room to spend the whole of her life apart from the world contemplating the divine; a revenge tale about the demise of a baron rapist; an archaeology of Roman settlement in southern Germany; a lament for the suffering of the peasanty; an ode to peasant revolts; an anecdote about a near-blind nun who can tell her neighbor-artists apart by the scents their preferred pigments and paints leave behind when smeared on their hands and clothes; a chronicle of a clandestine gay affair between monks; and an investigation into a small town's sense of public memory.
Pentiment affords so many rich and diverse readings because of the density and specificity of textural details about 16th Century Bavarian Catholic life it provides. The game's visual style and user interface recall the manuscripts and woodblock printings of the late medieval and early modern eras (consider for reference the late 15th Century Nuremberg Chronicle, not coincidentally also the location of Andreas' hometown). Reproducing the style, the coloration, the line work, the position and spacing between text and image, etc of the period's major works in the game's interface allows us to feel embodied in that world of text and image in a way that reproduces some degree of what a real-life Andreas would have felt.
Andreas' in-progress masterwork.
The Fifth Day of Creation in the Nuremberg Chronicle.
In lieu of voice acting Pentiment offers a system of typographical characterization. Each time a character speaks you hear the onomatopoetic scritch-scratch of a writing instrument and see the letters of their reply fill in left-to-right one by one. Every character uses an individually modified version of a different typeface which reflects both their social standing, their educational background, and their relationship with the written words of this world. Shop-keeps and craftsmen use a simple, quick, efficient scribe script. Farmers and day-laborers dash off text that sometimes features phonetic spellings or hasty re-corrections. The learned clergy, steeped in centuries of manualist-scholastic tradition, favor a slow, dense, spacious Gothic blackletter font whose level of ornament is sometimes difficult to read. Educated city-dwellers like Andreas, influenced by the new learning of the Renaissance, use a sleek, precise script with elegant i and j dots. All this script play isn't just novelty. It's an essential representation of the relationship between each character and the intellectual forces of their world. Each time they speak they re-inscribe on the page the superstructures of education, theological tradition, and social position that locate, categorize, and specify them in their world. For a more detailed account of the creation of these typefaces, take a look at the creators' account here.
The major script types.
Monastic gothic script.
Andreas' Renaissance-influenced humanist script.
The most stunning moment of typographical characterization in the game comes when you first meet Claus Drucker, the town's modern, warm, reform-minded-but-not-radical printer and pamphleteer. His text renders through a different, very fast process--you see a row of inverted characters and a flash of dark squares and then his statement appears all at once rather than letter-by-letter, mimicking the physical process of mechanical type stamping ink down on a page.
Pentiment's gameplay zone is a 2d plane framed by the user interface as a text (with zoom-out marginalia, of course) and it uses this frame to provide instructive-but-not-didactic contexts on the game's deep historical content:
Sometimes this plane reproduces historical sources, as when Claus comments on the 12 Articles of the Peasants, a list of theological, political, and economic demands circulated during the German Peasants' War which Andreas will eventually find himself swept up in:
Andreas' interior states are given textual and painterly representation in the same manuscript plane. From time to time he drifts off to a Memory Palace/Court of the Mind, where he meets personifications of the various virtues of his age in figures recognizable to his cultural and intellectual background: Prester John (a mythic Christian king associated with bravery and heroism), Dante's Beatrice (emblematic of Christian grace, kindness, and charity), Socrates (philosophic wisdom and higher learning), and St. Grobian (a fictive folk saint of the coarse, the vulgar, the rapscallions, the thieves, and the fools of the world). From time to time these figures sound off in his head, offering advice or reproach, representing the push and pull of different influences from all the images, texts, and traditions colliding at the specific historic coordinates of one Andreas Maler.
Holding court.
Grobian and his ship of fools.
The court at work in Andreas' mind.
Sometimes the manuscript plane becomes a shared mental or cultural space. Sister Illuminata, one of the librarians at the abbey, wants to confiscate and burn a certain heretical text that has been banned for years by at least 3 different bishops. Andreas has the chance to plead with her on the book's behalf, and the conversation expands to one in which Illuminata and Andreas discourse the role of women in Catholic tradition and the legitimacy of ecclesiastical authority over texts. Illuminata's positions don't parse neatly into modern equivalents (she gives a moving account of the plight of women in the patriarchal feudal system and rejects the historic tendency to demonize women as seducers, as weak, as prostitutes, as the source of sin--but she also sincerely and enthusiastically supports the authority of the bishops to ban and burn books). As they talk Andreas and Illuminata slide in-and-out of the manuscript planes of the exemplar texts they discuss.
A scene from the Aeneid
Andreas and Illuminata enter the text.
Illuminata on the role of women in Catholic life.
Illuminata is no fan of chivalric romances.
Illuminata and a willful Andreas.
No tolerance for heresy.
A small but marvelous sequence of shared cultural space involves Brother Sebhat, a priest visiting from Ethiopia who is drawn with different proportion, shading, and outline than everyone else in the game.
This is because Sebhat is drawn according to the artistic traditions of Ethiopian manuscript art rather than the Western traditions Andreas participates in. (For a more detailed account of the stylistic differences please consult this excellent article by art historian Blair Apgar).
Sebhat teaches and comforts the people of Tassing by preaching of two miracles: the multiplication of the loaves and fishes to feed many thousands & the raising of Lazarus from the dead. These are familiar stories to the people of Bavaria--they represent in plain, literal, undeniable terms Christ's victory over hunger and Christ's victory over death. As Sebhat preaches, the Bavarian Christians find themselves stepping into a visual story at once both familiar and different, as the miracles are rendered in an Ethiopian manuscript style:
Brother Sebhat preaches of Christ multiplying loaves and fishes.
Brother Sebhat preaches of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead.
The abbey is a repository of learning, and a site for the production and reproduction of beautiful and sacred texts. It is also, in the context of the pre-modern feudal Bavarian economy, the literal landlord to most of the town. The clergy as a class, in addition to having the privilege of compelling certain rents, tithes, and forms of labor from the townsfolk, are ensconced in symbiotic political and economic relations with the armed nobility who use brute, physical force to maintain social order. When Andreas isn't diving into the pages of illuminated manuscripts in the library or scriptorium he has more immediate tasks at hand: namely, solving time-sensitive murder mysteries whose repercussions will affect the entire social order of Tassing and Kiersau. Pentiment constructs an interesting and essential counterpart to all the lofty intellectual and textual history we see above. It uses the same detective-investigating-historical-conditions conceit and the manuscript plane of game space to illustrate the quotidian economic realities of life and labor for the villagers and peasants down the hill who support the abbey's way of life.
Life in Tassing and Kiersau runs along the rhythms of the Divine Office, a set of structured prayers (lauds, matins, vespers, etc) said at specific points in the day. The Divine Office isn't quite a clock, but it determines what times of day are used for what tasks in both the abbey and the town. The structure of the day and the passage of time in Pentiment are illustrated with a revolving wheel showing the sections of the Divine office.
The Canonical Hours
In order to solve his murder-mysteries Andreas has to use his limited free time to investigate clues and speak with possible witnesses and suspects. This usually takes the form of tagging along while a villager either completes their daily labor or eats their daily lunch in order to pepper them with questions and hopefully get useful answers and clues. Andreas participates in the daily toil of the village alongside the workers while chatting with them and at mealtime he shares in whatever sustenance they have to offer. Both the process of work and the lunches themselves are rendered in the 2d manuscript plane in ways that highlight the textures of daily life with the same depth and richness that the manuscript plane uses to depict intellectual and spiritual life via illuminated texts. Working with the blacksmith is loud, fast, energetic, busy, buoyant, propulsive, a proto-industry; working with the women to spin thread is slower, more communal but strictly gender-divided (Andreas, as an unmarried man, must stand outside the room of weaving maidens and work in tandem while chatting through a window), a space to share gossip and news, but it also requires immense dexterity. If you visit the wealthy semi-feudal semi-bourgeois miller he invites you to go hunting with him (game hunting in the time period is a rare right, usually reserved for the most elite, forbidden by law to the peasants) and up in the mountains he unspools a set of loathsome, rapacious monologues that make it clear why the other townsfolk hate him. The lunch sequences require you to click through various foods that show what the daily bread of that character's particular class might be. All of these serve to ground the game's intellectual and theological content and remind us that the systems that produce manuscripts, theology, time for clerics to contemplate the divine, etc, are dependent on the daily labor of countless working people.
A modest lunch of bread, cheese, and almonds.
Working together to spin thread.
Andreas struggles with spinning.
The motto of the Benedictine orders (to which the nuns and monks of Kiersau belong) is "ora et labora", in English, pray and work. This seems a fitting note to end on, given that prayer and work in 16th Century Bavaria are what Pentiment so excellently explores. The traditions and rhythms of the abbey govern life in Tassing, but Tassing is not without change. The game takes place over several decades and no matter how you resolve the mysteries by the very end, past the Peasants' War and deep into the Reformation, time will mark itself not by the Divine Office but, for better or worse, by a new mechanical clock:
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An Advent Coda: thank you all, dear writers and dear readers, for writing and reading our annual Advent Calendar. This is the final piece for this year, but we plan to continue our Media Club series into the next year. Feel free to find Will or Ander or both over to the right and send an email if you'd like to pitch us a piece. Happy holidays and Merry Christmas from Will, Ander, and all of Essay Daily!
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Will Slattery helps curate things here at Essay Daily. He tweets on very rare occasion (wjaslattery) and posts sundry personal content on Instragram (wjasity) rather frequently.
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