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Bräker was also infuriated by tales of witches, ghosts, fairies and so forth, "things which never were on land or sea", as he says in his diary for 5 th August 1780. Here again I suspect that he was driven by several motives, not all of them conscious. He believed that an interest in such things led to idleness and vice, he also found such talk unbearably boring, a misuse of the human mind and tongue. He may also have had good reason to dislike some of the tales he heard; many traditional "fairy tales", before they were bowdlerised for children, were quite as nasty as anything you can get on video today. It is possible too that while he shared the distrust of any form of imaginative literature which prevailed in his time, (it was regarded in much the same way that films and TV were when they first became available to the masses), he was by no means immune to their attractions. We know that he often used his imagination to construct castles in the air in place of his dismal prospects in real life, and had a continual struggle to keep his fantasies from getting out of hand.

Belief in the supernatural world of traditional folklore, however, was very hard to eradicate, it was built into the landscape itself. "Every crossroads, highroad and ravine has its ghosts and demons", says Simmler. Anyone who protested against such beliefs was laughed at or denounced as an atheist. Printed literature available to the peasants did little to counteract superstition, it consisted mainly of almanacs, practical advice on health and farming, and pornography, also religious tracts, and ballads, mostly of a sensational nature.

One can hardly read a page of Bräker's autobiographical writing without discovering how much his faith meant to him, but it was a faith that changed over the course of his life, and was sometimes at variance with the faith of his neighbours. It is also a facet of his character which has been subjected to varying interpretations by his editors and critics. His only publicly stated creed dates from his youth, when he reassured his father that he intended to live and die "in the faith of Luther and our countryman Zwingli" [autobiography, chapter 60]. This leaves out both the Pietist influences of his youth and the Enlightenment influences of his later life. Luther's work is the bedrock of many Protestant churches today, but Zwingli is less well known; a short account of his career is given in the notes to that chapter. After Zwingli's death in 1531 his followers signed the "Helvetic Confession", a theological agreement between them and the followers of Jean Calvin, who had brought the Reformation to French-speaking Switzerland. Its terms were more Calvinist than Zwinglian, and since that time the Protestant church in Switzerland has been generally designated as Calvinist, and the same word has been applied to Bräker, or at least to his faith. Bräker, however, never mentions Calvin and I think that to describe him as a Calvinist is somewhat misleading.

I do not feel qualified to say whether the church that Bräker attended was Lutheran, Calvinist or Zwinglian, except to point out that the term he uses for the Communion service is "Abendmahl", which means simply "supper" - as in "Last Supper" - a Zwinglian expression. The long sermons of which he writes, the enforcement of public penance for offences against morality, the public examination of young people on the catechism before allowing them to take Communion, do suggest an element of Calvinism, as does perhaps the stern faith of Bräker's wife, which led her to scold him on his death-bed for being too cheerful. Bräker writes about the morning and evening prayers said in his home, his baptism, catechism and confirmation, his education of his children and his friendships with members of the clergy, but we do not read enough about the theology that lay behind them to be sure about how much force the Helvetic Confession still wielded, two hundred years after its compilation and among a remote and uneducated peasantry. Quite possibly its more Calvinist elements had been quietly sidelined, as happened to the strongly Calvinist "Thirty-nine articles" of the Church of England. It was very important to Swiss Protestants that they should present a united front in negotiations with Catholics, but this was more a political objective than theological.

According to Simmler the typical Toggenburg peasant was cheerful, easy-going and pleasure-loving, hardheaded and sometimes hardhearted as well. "The Toggenburger is more likely to be an unbeliever than a Pietist or devot, more likely to reason and dispute over the divinity and

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