Building for the Ear (from Chaco Canyon to Medieval Vorarlberg) (2/23/25)

An image of Chaco Canyon ruins from 2012

Note: The current blog post is in dialog with Primeau and Witt (2018), and draws on my own wanderings through Vorarlberg during summer 2024 and on Herbert Kaufmann’s Sakrale Kunst und Kulturstätten to understand Vorarlberg church placement.

Primeau and Witt’s study of “Soundscapes in the Past” asks “how people heard in their wider surroundings,” and answer the question in part with GIS measures. Their insight is that landscape matters and consider significant the “location of features within the built environment and performance spaces” (875).  They use the term “soundshed” – akin to watershed – to capture the way in which sound carries or is disrupted by the topographical features of a place.

They center their study on the rich archaeological site at Chaco Canyon, proposing that the Chacoan builders utilized terrain and topography as acoustical elements in their planning. They suggest that “certain features may have been placed at their locations so individuals may have heard events occurring elsewhere” (p. 875). In other words, the Chaco Canyon residents built with an eye (an ear?) toward the soundshed that surrounded them, choosing building locations and orienting openings to best use the acoustical features of a resonant landscape.

Primeau and Witt acknowledge the embodied nature of hearing, but importantly point out that larger elements in the local environment can shape these embodied perceptions. As Tilley (2008) has shown, surfaces, inclinations, textures and other elements can reduce or amplify sound. Given the nature of a canyon environment, echoic and non-echoic surfaces abound, both as elements of the built environment and of the natural surroundings.

The stark nature of Chaco Canyon’s building ruins of mud-brick and stone (shown in Figure 1 in the left-hand column) might historically have been softened by furs and fabrics, and almost certainly had sound-absorbing storage or even people – in other words by surfaces with less resonance than the  present day. The landscape too with its swales and swells, the hills and cliffs, and even the plant life each contribute in positive and negative ways to noise propagation, particularly at distance.

  Four Views of Chaco Canyon, July 2012

Primeau and Witt  believe, with Hamilton and Whitehouse (2006) that there can be an effective and measurable distance for interactions including speaking and shouting. Their newer methodology, however, seeks to establish more objective parameters than merely personal experience. They propose SPreAD: a System for the Prediction of Acoustic Detectability.

They observe that there are various element at play, distance attenuation being only one. Sound source height plays into sound’s ability to carry, as does the atmospheric absorption loss, which varies by temperature and humidity. Nevertheless, they assert that “Like visibility, audibility can be an actively managed aspect of the built environment, and one can question the relationship between sound and site in the landscape.”

For them, the presence of ceremonial sites on higher locations had significance, for it might mean the audibility of a ceremony’s start or end by individuals elsewhere in the Canyon community. Events in one place were meant to be experienced by individuals in another, they argue, and topographical placement support that.

For a medieval monastic historian, their conch shell examples were readily translated into the positioning of churches in Austria’s Vorarlberg. Such churches had a marked preference for locations on the hills that jutted up out of the local landscape; it is the rare church indeed that lacks a view (or that can be visited without a hike or a climb!). The inventory in Kaufmann (n.d.) makes the point effective: in image after image, it is easy to get a photo of the church from down below (as it were), because they are so frequently higher than the surrounding neighborhood. This can be confirmed in person; wear good walking shoes if you want to climb to see the building in person.

The parish church of St Nikolaus in Damuls, for instance, is on a hill; if it were waterside, we’d describe its placement as on a promontory:

  Damuls -- church of St Nikolaus: image July 2024

Already more prominent than the surrounding landscape, the position of the bells for Vorarlberg churches were even further elevated through built bell towers, typically added in the 13th to the 17th centuries. Elevation proves to be even more important than central location; many of the central churches of my study are several blocks away from the heart of the medieval “downtown,” such as it was. Clearly, the acoustical benefits of being high, along with the defensible ones, made these locations prime real-estate from the perspective of church communications. Neighbors near and far could readily hear the ringing of bells for starts or ends of service – along with weather warnings or peals of other sorts (war, arrival, general announcements). This meant that the topographical benefits of height outweighed the inconveniences of a further walk or an uphill climb. Just as at Chaco Canyon, events in one place in medieval Vorarlberg were meant to be experienced by individuals somewhat distant, and, again like Chaco Canyon, the topographical placement of churches and their bells support that.

Primeau and Witt’s study reinforces the idea that sound is not just a byproduct of environment but an actively shaped and managed aspect of spatial experience. Their concept of the “soundshed” and the methodology of SPreAD provide tools for assessing how people in the past may have structured their auditory worlds with intention—whether for ceremony, communication, or social cohesion.

Applying this framework to medieval churches in the Vorarlberg highlights how different cultures have used elevation to project sound across landscapes. These parallels suggest that sound, like sight, was a crucial factor in how such historical spaces were designed and experienced. Soundshed and soundscape design mattered as much to the late medieval church-planner as to the Chacoan builder some three centuries earlier. Both actively sought to manage audibility as an element of their built environment. Building for the ear in this way reminds us that sound was never incidental—it was an integral part of how people of the past shaped and experienced their worlds.

WORKS CITED:
Hamilton, Sue, Ruth Whitehouse, Keri Brown, Pamela Combes, Edward Herring, and Mike Seager Thomas. “Phenomenology in Practice: Towards a Methodology for a ‘Subjective’ Approach.” European Journal of Archaeology 9, no. 1 (2006): 31–71.

Kaufmann, Herbert, ed. Sakrale Kunst und Kulturstätten: Landesausgabe Vorarlberg. Innsbruck: Süd-West-Presseverlag, n.d.

Primeau, Kristy, and David E. Witt.“Soundscapes in the Past: Investigating Sound at the Landscape Level.” Journal of Archaeological Science Reports 19 (2018): 875-885.

Mapping Soundscapes: Applying Stratoudakis and Papadimitriou’s Measures to Memory and Place

A 3-way Venn diagram of Individual, Sound and Environment

Stratoudakis, Constantinos and Kimon Papadimitriou 2007. “A Dynamic Interface for the Audio-Visual Reconstruction of Soundscape, based on the Mapping of its Properties.” Proceedings SMC'07, 4th Sound and Music Computing Conference, 11-13 July 2007, Lefkada, Greece.

Every place, argues Stratoudakis &  Papadimitriou (2007), has its own distinctive sound picture. That is, it had a unique identity, “not only in terms of geography or physical-temporal aspects, but also in its acoustic properties.”

In their map of understanding (Fig. 1), the individual intersects directly with sound through meaning-making and can also listen and/or emit, shaping sound as it exists. Sound likewise interacts with the environment through coloration and direct/reflected sound. Thus, the three worlds interact with sound as one of the mediators of the individual’s relationship to the broader environment. That is, the “inner reality – inner sounds, thoughts, feelings and memory,” as Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou put it, takes in environmental information through sound.

Figure 1: Sound as Meter, derived by Cynthia Cyrus from Stratoudakis and Papadimitriou (2007)

This is an interesting point, since the shape of experience AS memory is heavily dependent on sensory memory. I wrote recently about the memory of a 1614 snowball fight and of the 13th feet of snow of one terrible winter that Sister Anna Wittweilerin attests to in her Tagebuch (absorbed later in the Thalbach Convent Chronicle). (Sister Anna Wittweilerin Looks Up)

As we follow her memory (Thalbach Chronicle, Gath 4 p. 86; Rapp p. 625), we actually superimpose sound details without her naming them. We can imagine the “thwuck” of a snowball thrown and successfully landed on its target; we can hear in our inner soundtrack the laughter of the sisters engaging in a bout of unusually fine fun. I can hear the clucking hens, their day disturbed by the unusual activity, and perhaps a single rooster crow to establish inner territory within the hen-house while the outer world manifests these unusual games and noises. I imagine the trees whispering off to the right of the convent yard in the hillside between them and the parish church as the inevitable winter breeze rolls down the afternoon mountainside. And we know from experience that the broader landscape would be hushed, since snow deadens sound. All of these elements were present in my inner landscape as I read Wittweilerin’s passage, though she uses no sound words at all. Her nouns – snow, snowball, hen-yard – become my soundtrack through an associative linkage of my own inner memories of these things.

My projection of this past environment, in other words, DOES appear to be mediated in part by sound-memory as well as by the convent sister’s narrative. Readers bring their own experiences to the things they are reading; that includes their own experiences of sound-as-mediator.

The second big contribution that Stratoudakis & Papdimitriou make is to model one approach to considering sound. Since “soundscape is an ever-changing version of a given environment [and thus] presents great spatio-temporal variability,” they provide a model for considering changes over time. They ask that we consider sampling positions as well as recording periods. For them, sound (and its attributes), space (geographical coordinates) and time (annual and daily cycles) are the three main elements for describing a soundscape. They suggest a day divided into three hour chunks, and consider a variety of individual parameters. 

They also caution that one should note “places of particular geo-morphological interest.” The gurgling stream, for instance, that is close to Thalbach’s back property in summertime, would shape the soundscape as a kind of acoustical dent (or would it be hill?), a natural feature that would deform the experience of other sounds as its summer-time omnipresence shades and colors the other sounds in its proximity.

Measures from their study that could be particular useful for other projects (like my own) are these:

• Source (bird, frog, car…)
• Area sampled
• Timestamp
• Origin: biological, geological, anthropological
• Meaning: background, foreground

I gave some thought to those measures as I trod through graveyards on my research trip. Birds: check. Crickets: Also check. Stream: Yep. Fountain: noted. Bell peals: Cool, I mean, yep. Cars are, of course, historical anachronisms, but they function too as a reminder that the wagons and carts of former time should be accounted for in a historical re-imagining of the past.

To be fair, Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou’s ultimate interest lies in the mapping and manipulations that computer modeling allows, and it is indeed fascinating stuff. But for me, at this point, the pragmatic elements of parsing the sound-world had more ready applicability, and it is that more humanistic element of their study that I have shared here.  A link to their full study is in the notes below.

TAKE-AWAY
Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou offer a handy model for thinking about sound as measurable yet deeply experiential. While their research is oriented toward computational modeling and A-V replication, its implications extend beyond technical applications. Their framework provides a useful lens for humanistic inquiries, helping us parse how environments, past and present, are aurally constructed and mediated. In particular, their model of a sound-mediated understanding of environment emphasizes the importance of spatial and temporal variability in soundscapes. It also inadvertently underscores the ways in which individual memory and perception shape our understanding of sound. My own reflections on convent narratives and historical re-imaginings highlight how memory itself can function as an imagination-informed soundscape—one in which readers contribute their own inner sonic realities to narratives that seem on the surface to be silent.

In short, whether addressed to the recorded sounds of a contemporary Grecian landscape (them) or to the imagined echoes of historical spaces (me), Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou’s measures offer a method for attending more carefully to the role of sound in shaping experience.

---

WORKS CITED: 

Cyrus, Cynthia J. “Sister Anna Wittweilerin Looks Up” [Blog post]. Silences and Sounds Blog, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com, 19 Feb 2025.

Rapp, Ludwig. Topographisch-historische Beschreibung des Generalvikariates Vorarlberg, Bd. 2. Brixen 1896.

Stratoudakis, Constantinos and Kimon Papadimitriou 2007. “A Dynamic Interface for the Audio-Visual Reconstruction of Soundscape, based on the Mapping of its Properties.” Proceedings SMC'07, 4th Sound and Music Computing Conference, 11-13 July 2007, Lefkada, Greece. Digital copy available here.

Thalbach Chronicle (consulted from manuscript): Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Kloster Thalbach Hs 9, Chronik des Klosters 1336–1629.

Sister Anna Wittweilerin Looks Up

A comet and a winter scene from Bregenz, with the theme: Worry into joy

In the early 17th century, Anna Wittweilerin was a Thalbach sister when, at age 40, she found herself promoted to convent Maisterin in 1619.

She had joined the convent in 1589 at age 10, and was given holy orders in 1592 at age 13. She professed in 1595 on St Ursula’s day. Thus, she was a young and newly-professed sister – age 16 – in 1595 when the convent’s liturgical practices were reformed (Chronicle p. 31, P1360 and Gathering 6 #15, P1464). She served as convent Superior for 22 years, and died at age 62 in 1641. (See Chronicle p. 20 and Gath. 2 fol. 3r). The chronicle points out that she “endured a great deal of hardship,” (Gath 2, fol. 3r), not least of which was the 30-years war.

Wittweilerin’s personal interests add nuance and depth to the convent records, for it is thanks to her diary, much of which was incorporated verbatim or in close paraphrase into the Convent Chronicle, that we have accounts of the weather extremes and of the comet of 1619. She started the diary at age 33 in 1612 and continuing until 1641. For today’s post, we’ll concentrate on events before 1620.

We learn from Wittweilerin’s diary of the year that snow held off until Lent (1612), so that flowers were available on Christmas. The sisters used the extra-long season of greenery to make fresh wreaths for the statue of St Anna. Other years weren’t so lucky; a tree fell due to snow in 1613, and the winter of 1613 to 1614 was one for the record-books.  As the Chronicle tells it, “in the fall it was cold and wetter [than normal], on the 19th of September it began to snow, and the ground never became dry until St. George's Day (April 23) in 1614.”  That’s 31 weeks – 217 days – of muddy or snowy footing on the ground. The snow wound up going all the way up to the shutters of the gatehouse – and the Holunder account, drawing on her diary, says that “In front of the window in the hen garden the snow was 13 feet 7 inches high.”

An outdoors person by heart, she reports that “In Feb 1617 it was so fine and warm that people thought they should go out in the fields.” One can hear the desire to enjoy the unseasonable weather, and the joyful spirit with which she celebrates the various things of the outdoors: trees, fields, flowers. Later that same year, however, she finds the weather more oppressive, “it became so hot that people thought they would burn.” (Holunder 1934). Working in the heat can be enervating at the best of times; heat exhaustion could be a real fear.

Yet it is from Wittweilerin, too, that we have stories of fun. She tells the story of the sisters’ snowball fight (!), when the sisters went out into the still-snowy yard on the Thursday before Pentecost and pelted one another with their hand-crafted zingers (Chronicle, Gath 4 p. 86; Rapp p. 625). She tells as well of their wreath making, and of crop tallies from their work in the fields. The sisters themselves, for example, harvested the wine (that is, the grapes that would become wine).

And, we learn that they indulge in a ready bit of star-gazing:

In the month of December [1618] a comet was seen with a tail in the sky, which had appeared a short time before. We grant that the dear God may graciously turn it away from us, and have mercy on the Christian Church, which is in the greatest danger, as well as the noble house of Austria. [On the pamphlet-wars that this comet inspired, see: Stillman Drake and C.D.O'Malley, The Controversy on the Comets of 1618:Galileo Galilei, Horatio Grassi, Mario Guiducci, Johann Kepler (U Penn Press 1960).]

To her, as to so many of her peers, the stars are still portents; she sees the “rod” – the comet tail – as a potential for God’s punishment. Through prayer and God’s grace, however, this pointed threat can be averted. By her account, the prayers worked, since the next year’s harvest was especially fine, though the political scene did not fare nearly as well. “We praised God that we may proclaim [our wine] with health and enjoy it in peace with one another since things are going very badly in the war. May the lord strengthen Christianity! It is well needed!” (Holunder 1934).

Sister Anna Wittweilerin’s diary and its close parallels in the Convent Chronicle offer a rare and intimate glimpse into the daily rhythms of convent life, framed by the larger forces of nature, faith, and war. Her observations remind us that even within a monastic environment, the world outside remained ever-present—whether through the creeping cold of a relentless winter, the heady promise of an early spring, or the celestial warnings streaking across the sky. She looked up, not only to track the stars but also in hope, finding solace in shared labor, seasonal celebrations, and the enduring rituals of convent life. Though she lived in a time of uncertainty (to which we’ll return in a future post), she answers her own worries with joy. To her, the snow becomes an occasion for play, and the comet an occasion to celebrate the peace of community, in hopes that such peace might ripple ever outwards. To Anna Wittweilerin, looking up is looking into the promise of a world touched by the divine.

WORKS CITED:

“Das alte Frauenkloster zu Thalbach (3. Fortsetzung),” Holunder: Wochen-Beilage für Volkstum, Bildung und Unterhaltung zur Vorarlberger Landes-Zeitung No. 38 (28 Sept 1934), from the series, Nos. 36-43 (8 weekly entries, 8. Sept to 27. Okt 1934). Quotes heavily from Wittweilerin’s diary. https://texte.volare.vorarlberg.at/viewer/fullscreen/Holunder1934/154/

Rapp, Ludwig. Topographisch-historische Beschreibung des Generalvikariates Vorarlberg, Bd. 2.  Brixen 1896.

Stillman Drake and C.D.O'Malley, The Controversy on the Comets of 1618:Galileo Galilei, Horatio Grassi, Mario Guiducci, Johann Kepler (U Penn Press 1960).

Thalbach Chronicle (consulted from manuscript): Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Kloster Thalbach Hs 9, Chronik des Klosters 1336–1629.
 

A NOTE ON NAMING:

I typically use the "-in" suffix that designates females in surnames, following the conventions the sisters themselves used. Thus, her father was Herr Wittweiler, but she is Anna Wittweilerin.

Making magic with old texts – how one scholar uses Transkribus (2/16/25)

A snippet of the Thalbach Chronicle (Bregenz VLA Thalbach Hs 9) and the logo/motto from Transkribus: "Unlock the past with Transkribus"

I’m not a modern-day marvel; digital humanities *seems* cool, but it’s not my training and not my natural modality. I live on a farm, with all the attendant joys of rural internet. (Failed the ping test recently? Us too!) I have read a number of DH articles with interest, and adopted some of the intellectual practices that volume assessment allows for. But at last, the moment has come: it’s time to learn a new tool in order to make my regular work go faster.

There’s this monastic chronicle (Bregenz VLA Thalbach Hs 9), you see, and it’s unedited. That there is, in fact, data from within “my” convent is a wonderful thing, and I’m thrilled to have access. There are two big problems, however. First, it has not been digitized. And second, I don’t read (well, I didn’t read) 18th-century Kurrentschrift. So, here’s what I did.

STEP ONE: GET PHOTOS. With the permission of the archive, I was able to photograph the chronicle. My system relies on the step-basis auto-numbering of photos, and is woefully “brute force” for the more sophisticated user. It is also (I confess it now!) simply a set of photos on my cell phone. No fancy lighting, no high-tech imaging for the ages; these are functional photos for use as a musicologist, not reflecting the book-history elements (which may be interesting but are not my raison d’etre). Before I start, I prepare a written description of the object, with special note of handwriting changes, format changes (from 18 to 24 lines, for example), and so on.

To organize my photos, I start by taking a picture of the description of the MS that I prepared in advance, and of its gathering structure that I prepared on-site. Then I take pictures of the outsides of the MS and of the visually interesting bits that caught my early attention. (These pictures are for slidedecks for any talk I might give – they’re the visual capture of the “coolness” of the item.)

Then, I take a picture of the gathering description for the first gathering, prepared in pencil in the archive. For more complicated gatherings, that includes a gathering structure diagram, but it’s often just a few lines of text. That becomes my photographic “label” for the section. Then, I take sequential pictures of the pages in the gathering. Occasionally I repeat a page if I want to be sure that I captured some particular detail, but mostly I move from first page to last page in the gathering. When I’m done with the gathering, I take a picture of the wooden table as a marker. Why? Because that’s going to leap out at me when I’m looking at all these photos of handwritten pages on my phone!

Now, onto the next gathering, and the next, and the next after that. Each starts with a header photo; each is sequential; each ends with a picture of the wooden table. At the very end, I go back and take pictures of details – with a label card or paper-pad notation first telling what gathering and folio it’s from, and why I thought it important (“detail of the insertion in the right-hand margin showing a different hand”).

Lastly, I go home and back everything up into a file folder. At this point, the sophisticate would probably rename all the photos, but I let the assigned image number stand for the page. YMMV. [That’s the increasingly old-fashioned phrase “Your Mileage May Vary,” if we happen to live in different acronym worlds.]

ORGANIZING IMAGES ON MY HARD DRIVE

With a couple hundred images, managing the inventory can seem daunting, but I’ve developed some habits over the years. I’m a spreadsheet person; spreadsheets make my heart sing. I love me some useful spreadsheets. So, for each of the important manuscripts in my life, I have a translation table: Photo Image number, gathering, folio or page, content, commentary, and then columns of whatever I’m interested in (concordances or chapter number or dates or places or whatever – that’s for the assessment phase).

So with the Chronicle, I now had a mass of mostly indecipherable eighteenth-century text entries carefully organized into a folder and managed via spreadsheet. Now it was time to start reading. Except, I don’t (yet) read Kurrentschrift, so I’ve got a whole mess of gobblety-gook. Enter the wonderful world of technology! I know AI has its issues – not least of which is its ecological impact – but there are tasks for which it is exceptionally well-situated, and it turns out that teaching the novice how to read new scripts is, for me, one of those true talents.

TRANSKRIBUS

I’ve heard of Transkribus (at https://www.transkribus.org/) for years; the idea of an app that can decode various historical scripts is an attractive short-cut for handwriting styles I don’t know, particularly since my focus is the content more than its presentation. I’m an extractivist: I want to know what the chronicle actually says and add those data-points to the story I’m telling. Also, I’m not keen to prepare editions – a chronicle is a side-witness to the music for me, not a central focus of my work. Many of my decisions reflect that perspective. I didn’t seek out a colleague for collaboration, for one thing, nor go to a paleographic institute. Hooray for brute force, right?

I searched out the Transkribus website and read all the (very helpful) guides that were prepared. I even watched two of the introductory videos, though I had to go to town for them to download at playable speeds. And, they have a capacity to try a few sample pages lower down on the page (scroll down to “try it out”). I chose a representative image and uploaded it to see what it did. Magic! From the loops and lines of Kurrentschrift emerged words that were, for the most part, German dialect, and familiar in style and spellings from other texts from the area. Success! I admit that I scooped up the sample reading and dumped it into a document file; I wanted to be sure that whatever I had, I saved.

The next step of learning was a several day project. One of the best things about the Transkribus tool is that it has a lot of subsets that use certain sets of documents as training tools. These models are available to apply to your document(s), and some of them work better than others. I literally made a list of ALL of the models that covered German Kurrentschrift of the 18th century and tested them with two different pages from my chronicle. For each, I did A/B testing: was this model better than that one? I kept notes on which ones did well, and went back to a couple of the models three or four times until I settled in on the one that seemed the most accurate on a first pass. I know that I could train the model for MY project, but I wasn’t interested in that this first time through, in part because I was a complete script-reading newbie, and didn’t want to mis-train the AI.

Once I had a model in hand – and had taken careful notes on its model number and name for scholarly purposes – it was time to start the transcription project. So, I created a free account (which currently gives you 100 pages of transcription free per month), and priced out the subscription model I’d use once we’re in the new fiscal year at my University.

As I planned my project, I realized that organizing the materials is an important consideration. There are “collections” in Transkribus, and “documents” within the collections. As a reminder to the reader: I’m not aiming at edition prep; I’m working toward extracting my data. So I created a hodge-podge organization that made sense to me. Instead of a collection that was the entire chronicle – something that I believe would probably be best practice – I broke out my chronicle into its gatherings, so I can navigate to-and-fro easily.

And then, I uploaded subsections of the gatherings as documents, rather than the entire gathering at a go or (at the other end of the spectrum) the individual leaves of the chronicle. This is being created for my convenience, after all, and this first go-round I wasn’t certain how things worked. I have between 4 and 16 pages in each “document.” I did learn that the windows folder bugaboo, randomization, occasionally impacted my uploads, which is one of the reasons that I kept my “documents” short. I also decided to retain document naming based on image number; for me, my spreadsheet is the controlling document. Renaming is both time-intensive and an area in which error can enter. As a result, my documents are named such compelling things as “IMG_1421-1427.” It works for me. (On the other hand, my naming for the gatherings is a bit more obvious to the outsider: “ChronikGath3” works here, and continuously typing in “ThalbachChronikGath3” just seemed like more work than needful since I’m not contemplating doing this with other chronicles, at least not in the next three years.)

Finally, after uploading the first document in the first collection, it was time to drive. I selected my pages, hit the “Recognize” button, and was taken to the interface. I added the “public model” that I had selected through testing, then took a deep breath, and hit “recognize.” The job runs in the background, and eventually the selected pages will have header colors that turn orange, to signal that the draft text is ready to review.

USING AI TEXT RECOGNITION TO CREATE A SEAT-OF-THE-PANTS EDITION

Here’s the part where things get wonderful. The AI model I chose is actually pretty decent with my text. As a new reader of Kurrentschrift, it took me a while to get a hang of it, but I used the process to teach myself the reading skills which will be necessary to me for this document and a couple of others upcoming. (I’m a 14th-15th century scholar; our handwriting is MUCH more legible, thank you very much!) For those who are in my boat, here are a few things I did that made learning to read the script go quickly.

First, I pull the transcribed text into a document file so that it’s on my local machine. (Remember, I’m that “rural internet” guru; failure to reach the world as a whole is as regular an experience as is going grocery shopping.) Alas, I haven’t been using the export function, though it’s there; instead, I cut-and-paste. It’s a rube’s approach, I know, but it’s fast, and it puts everything in a space I can edit with my own tools and habits. (I’m on LibreOffice these days; again, YMMV. But it’s free, and it doesn’t keep trying to put everything in OneDrive. Which is out in cyberspace. And often unavailable here at the farm. I’m glaring at you, Microsoft.)

To manage these texts, I insert headers for each individual page in all caps (to stand out from the transcribed text). For my purposes, the image number and the MS gathering and folio numbers suffice – along the lines of “PHOTO 1363 CHRONICLE GATH3 p. 34”. Also, like the AI transcription, I honor the line breaks of the original, so that toggling from transcription to image and back is easy. (Also, I insert my cut-and-paste as unformatted text; others might want the line numbers, but there were enough errors in line identification that I found it easier to do without.) This was a good cross-check to that randomizing ordering that windows puts on file transfer; by checking each image against its image number and page or folio number, I was able to ensure that the order of my text was in fact the order of the chronicle (except that the chronicle gatherings are actually out of order, but that’s a fault in the manuscript, not the editor nor the technology!).

Second, I got myself a couple of tables of cursive letterforms compared to Fraktur letter forms, so that the basic shapes were something I could puzzle through. I admit that my first pass awareness-level was so low that on the first four pages I read, the only word I could decode independently was “septuagesima.” However, once I learned that those really precise looking “n’s” were actually the letter “e,” I started to see the handwriting emerge from the page.

Third, it is my practice to work through systematically, allowing “bad readings” in order to get from zero to literate. I mangled my way through the first four pages, by which time the d’ as “der” and the dß as “das” was pretty clear. I go line by line, and I’ve learned to highlight the relevant information in different highlighter as I go. (For me, yellow is people, green is liturgy, blue is date or place, red is music, sweet music.) My goal is extraction, not perfection. It’s embarrassing to note that neither the AI nor I at first recognized the swoop at the end of words as an “-n.” Likewise, it took a while before I was confident enough to simply obliterate the AI’s suggestions for my own reading of a word. That said, it’s truly a case of learn-by-doing; as I hit page 20, I was starting to read each word instead of decoding it letter by letter.

Fourth, as a matter of process, I’m comfortable leaving in uncertainties. This work isn’t directly for publication, so if I wasn’t sure of a word, I would simply accept it or type in my best guess, then put in square brackets another possible reading, and frame things with question marks. For instance: “unser lieben Erbar [? frawen?] officii” – even as a newbie reader, the word “erbar” makes no sense here, but rather than worry about it at length, I put in my contextual reading and then moved on. I can search those up and revisit them after I’ve plowed through the first time.

Finally, as I indicated before, I reward myself with the “ping” of a data finding by using those highlighter buttons liberally. As I look back now over less than a month of intermittent work, I’ve got a long roster of people and events to code into my other note-taking systems. I haven’t harvested them yet, but they’ll be easy to identify as I finish up the process. Having those rewards in sight makes the days of “ugh, I can’t DO this” more bearable. And each time I return to the document, more and more of it looks like German instead of just “ink scrawls.”

MY TAKEAWAYS: THE MAGIC OF TECHNOLOGY

The reality is, the technology is remarkably impressive. Even without training it on my manuscript, it’s getting 75 to 80% of the text down properly. (It confuses Q for G, though: Quardian is not a word. Maybe next time I’ll try training the model.) That’s amazing!

It’s working from manuscript, and that’s an imperfect environment. Every so often, particularly when the scribe’s lines have a waver to them or when the page was curved in the photo, it mangles lines and mixes up word order – the manual corrective is absolutely necessary. 

The benefit is that as a scholar, I’m a factor of ten times more competent with the script now than I was at the end of the first week. Having learned to read a cursive 16th-century hand without AI assistance, I can testify to the massive jump-start that having a plausible transcript makes, as long as I’m working systematically, letter by letter and word by word. 

It’s just like practicing. If you work on the details and the techniques, there comes that moment where all of a sudden your perspective shifts from notes on the page to the sounds of the past. And that, my friends, is magical.

ACCESS
https://www.transkribus.org/
https://www.youtube.com/@transkribus
 

Diligent Devotion: Maria Euphrosina Vöglin’s Leadership at Thalbach

Image of the Annunciation as a Thalbach monastic seal (from the hand of Euphrosina Vöglin)

The women’s tertiary monastery of Thalbach in Bregenz benefited from a series of long-serving and devoted leaders. A peek into the short narrative descriptions of their convent efforts provides a glimpse into the varied emphases these convent administrators placed on spiritual life, governance, and the material well-being of the community. Some prioritized the stability of the convent’s finances, others focused on the education of the sisters, while still others devoted their attention to the aesthetics and soundscape of worship. In her thirty years of convent service, Maria Euphrosina Vöglin (r. 1683–1713; d. 1716) had a chance to embody all three. She shaped the convent through her personal devotional practices, her canny skills on the administrative front, and a marked sensitivity to the role of music and ritual in the convent’s spiritual life.

Diligently Devoted

At the end of the seventeenth century, Sister Maria Euphrosina Vöglin was elected Maisterin at Thalbach by the sisters and duly endorsed by the appropriate male clerics, including the Order’s Provincial. Euphrosina was a particular devotee of the Virgin Mary, for the Chroniclist tells us that she prayed her office fervently on a daily basis. Since, in a post-Tridentine environment, the Little Office of the Virgin – her presumed prayer focus – was normally assigned only to Saturdays and special feast days, we learn from this introduction that she was enacting a more-is-better faith practice, for she performed privately what was done more publicly in the convent’s regular cycle of prayer. In other words, the first thing we learn about Euphrosina is her exemplary faith; as convent leader she serves as a model to the other sisters, who should prioritize prayer even if it should fall outside of the bounds of performed liturgy.

Not only was she a faithful Catholic; according to the convent’s Chronicle, she served “laudably and well” as Maisterin for 30 years. Given her length of service, she developed skills as an able administrator. Some of her attention was architectural. It was during her reign that the monastery building refurbishment was completed, for instance, and she also expanded the choir; this may be the time when the interior window was added. Ludwig Rapp reports that she drafted a letter to the Mayor and Council of inner Bregenzerwald, in which she begs them for a “generous” contribution for her monastery. She points out that their need was great both architecturally and spiritually: “so that it does not fall into disrepair and the divine service and holy order's discipline do not disappear” (Euphrosina Vöglin petition, as quoted in Rapp 634).

She also focused on the nuances of the divine service “because of the music and the chorale,” as the Chronicle tells us. This I take to mean that she oversaw both the instrumentalists and the sisters’ own performances in services. The chroniclist confirms that “She also paid diligent attention to the fact that the divine service was held properly.” She was, in other words, a stickler for the forms and orders of the church, and also for the richness of their living and resonant sounds. She must have appreciated the multimedia appeal of the services. She also evidently recognized beauty itself as an element of spiritual life, for she also “had many beautiful vestments, antipendia and other things made for the church,” as we learn near the end of the Chronicle chapter.

I stress the distributed nature of the Chroniclist’s account, focused early on prayer placement and sound, and only later on visual splendor, since that suggests to me an element of hierarchy in the description of Euphrosina’s devotions. The assessment offered emphasizes what I suspect was the more unusual capacities that she brought – the aural and devotional – and left more stereotypical contributions of feminine handwork for the close of the entry. This also could reflect a gradual shift of Euphrosina’s physical efforts over time. Her active engagement with liturgy and prayer coincides in the account with her emphasis on bricks-and-mortar projects, a spiritual match to the physical enhancements of the cloister. The feminine handwork, in contrast, coincides with text focused on her  charitable work and her resignation of office at age 74.

In addition to her advocacy for prayer and worship, Euphrosina also led the sisters in more educational endeavors, for we know from Leroy Shaw’s theatrical research that she produced at least one Latin play (“De Theophila a mundi voluptatibus abstracta”) during her years in service. She also acquired Gallia vindicata (1594/r.1702) by Paolo Sfondrati, a defense of the Catholic Church’s position against the political and religious turmoil in late 16th-century France, demonstrating her interest in the broader landscape of Catholic counter-reformation polemics (Fechter). (She is not, however, the same Euphrosina Vöglin responsible for the book of prayers published in Augsburg in 1682; that Euphrosina was a widow, a Lutheran, and of the previous generation, dying the year before our Euphrosina ascends to the role as head of convent.)

Managing in Times of Hardship

Given the historical circumstances, Maria Euphrosina was required to guide the convent through hard economic times. The cost of grain skyrocketed, and a series of war taxes were imposed, so that the coffers ran thin. In response, she did two things. She appealed the taxes, which were bitterly high, and would have confiscated 1/3 of the convent’s lands (Thalbach Chronicle Gathering 2 fol. 6; Rapp, p. 633-4). As she wrote to a convent advocate in Constance, “we (the nuns) have no foundation, nothing superfluous, but we, 24 professed nuns, are barely able to provide the necessary maintenance of our order and poorly managed cloister, and we have no daily mass and no dedicated confessor." (As quoted in Rapp 631). We learn from other documents that some relief was awarded, perhaps because the sisters were able to demonstrate that they had to help with the farming by bringing in their own crops (!) (Rapp, p. 633), but ultimately they had to pay 40 fl. in war contributions in 1686, and pay the Turkish tax again in 1708 (Fussenegger, 123).

Euphrosina also indulged in some creative fundraising, and her own mother donated to the convent to help stabilize their finances. Well, sort of. Technically, her mom repurposed her brother’s funds for Euphrosina’s own use, and Euphrosina gave them outright to the convent (Thalbach Chronicle, gathering 2, fol. 6r). We have no evidence that her brother was happy with this outcome, but he didn’t try to retrieve the funds, either.

During these years of hardship, Euphrosina proved flexible: she might be a taskmaster in the context of the order of services, but demonstrated more compassion in the lives of the sisters. She arranged that during the 40-day fast of Lent when the convent was subsisting largely on fungi and herbs, they would have roasted meat on Sunday night (in contravention of the regular rules) in order to keep them hale (Thalbach Chronicle Gathering 2, fol. 6r). This practice seems to have been surprisingly common. The sisters of Kirchheim unter Teck similarly broke their fast when roasted meat was “all that was available” (Kirchheim Chronicle). Practical constraints meant that the choice of health with a few bent rules triumphed over near starvation in both contexts. Since many individuals paid their debts in the form of foods – a half a lamb, a basket of eggs, and so on –  pragmatism in a context of hardship might mean that the food available was the food consumed.

This pragmatism and empathetic management was rewarded by an increase in convent recruitment, particularly among the monied class. Large dowries were paid to the convent and material goods such as religious garments, bedclothes, breviaries, silver spoons and silver jugs were provided to the entering daughters, as mentioned in the dowry documents that Euphrosina so frequently signed in her role as Meisterin. (Bregenz KA 15 Schachtel 225A, Mitgleider).

Generous to traveling clerics and to the city’s poor, she was seen by the Chroniclist and convent alike as “a true child of the order” (ein getreyen ordnuß kind). After her death, the convent pledged to say a Pater noster and an Ave Maria for her every Sunday without exception, both a signal of their dedication to keeping her name in Convent memory and a curious observation about the ways in which conflicting demands could otherwise interfere with memorial practice (Chronicle Gathering 2, fol. 6r).

Life Context

Bregenz-born, Euphrosina had arrived at the convent in 1652 at age 13 under the birth name of Maria Franziska Vöglin. She lived there until her death in 1716. Curiously, these details (found in the Chronicle’s gathering 5) are separate from the discussion of her administrative service.  Her family was evidently poised for religious service, for her brother Anton Vogel was Abbot of Mehrerau (1681–1711) (see MehrerauKl, 2639)

What’s at Stake

Maria Euphrosina Vöglin’s long tenure at Thalbach demonstrates how convent leadership in the early modern period was far more than a matter of spiritual devotion—it required financial acumen, political navigational skills, and an understanding of the sensory and aesthetic dimensions of worship. Her case challenges simplistic views of female monastic life as passive or cloistered away from the world; instead, she emerges as an active agent shaping not only her convent’s inner life but also their relationships to the civic and religious landscape of Bregenz.

By paying close attention to figures like Euphrosina, we gain insight into the lived realities of post-Tridentine monasticism, where prayer, administration, and survival strategies were deeply entwined. Her legacy, preserved in archival traces, folded in as an illustrative story in the house chronicle, and reiterated through convent memoria “without exception,” raises broader questions about the role of women in shaping institutional histories—who gets remembered, and how?

---

Primary Sources 

Appointment of Antonius Vogel as abbot: Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Mehrerau Kloster, Charter 2639 (6. März 1681).

Kirchheim unter Teck Chronicle: edited in Christian Friderich Sattler, “Wie diβ loblich closter zu Sant Johannes bapten zu Kirchen under deck prediger-ordens reformiert worden und durch wölich personen,” in Idem, Geschichte des herzogthums Wurtenberg unter der regierung der herzogen, 5 vols (Tübingen, 1779–1783), vol. 4, Beilagen, Num. 42, S. 173–280. Note: Sattler 280 is also numbered 296.

Maria Euphrosina Vöglin’s seal (e.g. from a document of 1686)

Thalbach Chronicle (consulted from manuscript): Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Kloster Thalbach Hs 9, Chronik des Klosters 1336–1629.

Thalbach membership documents: Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Klosterakten Schachtel 15, 225A–225C, Kloster Thalbach, Konventmitglieder, Aufnahmen und Abrechnungen, Erbschaften.

Secondary Literature 

Fechter, Werner. “Inkunabeln aus Thalbacher Besitz.” Biblos 25 (1976): 233–42.

Fussenegger, Gerold. “Bregenz: Terziarinnenkloster Thalbach.” In: Alemania Franciscana Antiqua 9 (1963): 93-140.

Jenisch, Georg Paulus. Davidischer Seelen [Funerary memoria for Fr. Euphrosina Vöglin]. Augspurg: Johann Jacob Schonigk, 1682. This book of prayers is dedicated to a different individual, one who had been married, lived in Augsburg, and died shortly before our Euphrosina took over as Thalbach’s Maisterin.

Rapp, Ludwig. Topographisch-historische Beschreibung des Generalvikariates Vorarlberg, Bd. 2.  Brixen 1896.

Shaw, Leroy R. “Georg Kaiser auf der deutschsprachigen Bühne 1945–1960,” Maske und Kothurn, 9(1963-12): 68–96.

 

Singing Tubercular songs with Fader Movitz (Fredman’s Epistles 1790) (Feb 11, 2025)

Image of Fader Moviz playing the viol with text bubble, "Movitz, your Consumption, it pulls you into the grave..."

While those of you in New York City might be lucky enough to attend the book-launch for John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis (Mar 18, 2025), the rest of us are hanging around with “old TB” – its readings, its meanings, and its character.

Musically speaking, there’s a lot of literature on tubercular heroines (Violetta in La Traviata; Mimi in La Boheme; Antonia in Tales of Hoffmann)

• Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. “Famous last breaths: The tubercular heroine in Opera.” Parallax, 2:1 (1996): 1-22, DOI: 10.1080/13534649609362002

• Kasunic, David. “Tubercular Singing,” Postmodern Culture 24:3 (May 2014).

• Morens, David M. “At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8:11 (Nov. 2002):1353-8.

If we follow artistic assertions, to be consumptive is evidently to be a soprano, since so many of the roles are in the Leading Lady idiom. And, of course, these narratives blend into those of the cautionary tale, where the fallen woman and the consumptive prove to be one and the same. That latter theme remains common, with an added whiff of poverty – just think of Fantine from Les Mis, or Satine from Moulin Rouge, not to mention Violetta herself.

TB / Consumption accounted for up to one in six deaths in France 

by the early twentieth century.

The prevalence of the disease made the it and its social consequences quite topical, of course. Though weirdly, not for men, at least not as artistic representation. There are hosts of deaths of artistic men from consumption – Boccherini, Chopin, Keats, George Orwell… But women feature in much of the music, both before and after the baccilus’s discovery in 1882.

Take, for example, this abbreviated list of tubercular characters. Lots of women, and our passionate consumptive Chopin.

• Fader Movitz (Freman’s Epistles by Carl Michael Bellman, 1790)

• Chopin dies of consumption, 1849

• Violetta Valery (La Traviata, Giuseppe Verdi, 1853)

• 1865 Jean-Antoine Villemin: proved TB was contagious (not heritable)

• Antonia (Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Jacques Offenbach, 1881)

• 1882: Robert Koch announces discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis

• Mimi (La Bohème,  Giacomo Puccini,1896)

• Lady Madeline (La Chute de la Maison Usher, Claude Debussy, [incomplete] 1918)

• Sister Benedict (Bells of St Mary's, 1945)

• Fantine (Les Misérables, 1980)

• Satine (Moulin Rouge, 2001)

   

 “In the 18th century in Western Europe, TB had become epidemic with a mortality rate as high as 900 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per year, more elevated among young people. For this reason, TB was also called ‘the robber of youth.’” -- Barberis et al (2017)

On the list, the odd man out – the odd MAN – is that 18^th century character, Fader Movitz. He, and his illness, features in Epistle no. 30: “Till fader Movitz, under dess sjukdom, lungsoten. Elegi” [To Father Movitz, during his illness, consumption. An elegy]. Fader Movitz might not be young, but he is definitely characterized as one of the 900 consumptives per year; we learn various of his symptoms, and know from early on inn stanza 1 that he is terminally ill, though in TB’s typical slow motion fashion. Unlike the ethereal soprano heroines of later operatic tradition, however, Fader Movitz is neither young nor transfiguring; instead, his illness is woven into a bawdy, bittersweet world of drinking songs and resignation.

The composer of the work, Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795), was a Swedish composer, musician, and lyricist. His song collection, Fredman’s Epistles, contains 82 songs. “To Father Movitz” is relatively typical of the song types; they mix themes of drinking with character sketches and scenes ranging from the pastoral to the poignant to the saucy. Movitz appears in 28 of the settings, so this isn’t his only appearance! He is a composer with a famous Concerto, we learn from the book’s character list.

Coming in the middle of the pack, “To Father Movitz” is clearly a song about his consumption (“Lungsot”). Death is coming, but there may be some time (line 4) – after all, TB is a slow-moving disease. Nevertheless, it is an active disease, one that “pulls you into the grave” (line 5). In fact, it’s so effective at drawing you toward death that the first part of the next line belongs not to the singer but solely to the instrumentalists. There’s a bit of a musical pun on the striking of the octave, and then we move upwards (finally) to sing about the fond memories one had.

Drink from your glass, see Death waiting for you,
Sharpen his sword, and stand at your doorstep.
Do not be alarmed, he only glares at the grave door,
Beats it again, maybe even in a year.
Movitz, your Consumption*, it pulls you into the grave.
- - - Strike now the Octave;
Tune your strings, sing about the Spring of life. : |||

(stanza 3): Heavens! you die, your cough scares me;
Emptiness and sound, the entrails make a sound;
The tongue is white, the saving heart hatches;
Soft as a fungus are late marrow and skin.
Breathe. - Fie a thousand times! what fumes are your ashes.
- - - Lend me your bottle.
Movitz, Gutår! Bowl! Sing about the God of wine. : |||

The song is strophic, but sets its mood effectively; all those descending lines, the minor mood, the simple harmonic language, the largely syllabic setting – we aren’t singing of triumph but instead of the inevitable outcome in the local cemetery. And the active agency of consumption is signaled musically by the shift from the predominantly step-wise treatment to the more dramatic leaping, as the illness personified pulls poor Movitz toward the grave.

The third strophe gets into even more graphic details: the cough, the disruption to the guts, the gradual falling apart of health into pallid skin and grotesque forms of mucus-coated tongue. Ick. But, think back on happier times, and toast the God of wine. The inevitable is, well, inevitable.

                           

“About 10 million people around the world do fall ill with the disease. And even though it is preventable and curable, about 1.5 million people die. So it is known as the world's top infectious killer according to the WHO.” -- AMA report, 2/5/25

In this current moment, TB has taken on special poignancy. We know that TB is still “the world’s top infectious killer” under normal circumstances. It doesn’t need to be; there are treatment courses that take 4 to 12 months, depending on drug and dosage. If it isn’t one of those (scary) resistant strains, it’s treatable. And yet people continue to die.

And some of them are dying today in America.

Today, we are experiencing the country's highest-ever TB case numbers over a one-year period. -- AMA report, Feb 2025 and Kansas Civic Alert, Feb 2025

With the Kansas City outbreak doing its best to set records, we should remember that an illness like TB is both PREVENTABLE and TREATABLE. 

Don’t be “that” character in song or story; redemptive endings and transfigured souls are all very well in fiction. But in real life, we’d rather spend our time like Fader Movitz, focused on wine and happy memories.

Not a Village, a Community: Building Thalbach’s Church (1609)

A glimpse of the Thalbach church and its windows

In 1609, it was time to raise the walls on the Thalbach convent church in Bregenz. Much labor went into the church, including that of the Tertiaries themselves, for the sisters helped haul stone, cleaned up the worksite, and generally contributed their own proverbial sweat of the brow to the project.

But supplies don’t come cheap, and the sisters turned to fundraising to meet their needs. Their reach was remarkably large, for contributions came from more than the local village and represented donors ranging from the princely to the servant. This suggests the importance of the Catholic network of the day, one which extended across social classes and geographical boundaries to connect the community of the faithful.

The Thalbach Chronicle records the gifts of 75 people, places, institutions, and families who supported the building enterprise. In the middle of the pack in terms of openness of purse fall the administrative gifts. The Lords of Bregenz-and-Hohenegg had their representatives pay for screens so that the sisters could be in seclusion in the church, and the representative of Duke Albrecht of Bavaria gave cash.

At first glance, the Chroniclist’s donor list appears fragmented, but a closer examination reveals patterns in the record. Most donors are identified by place, but 28 people are identified without geographical markers, including all of the donors who gave in Hellers rather than in florins. That probably reflects the convent’s (or at least the chroniclist’s) bookkeeping habits, since she clusters her entries by type of payment: florins, in kind, women’s donations (!), hellers. Some of the inconsistencies of identifying details simply reflect different decisions made at different times for the separate chapters that list donors.

A different situation holds, I think, for the women donors, who are separated into a chapter of their own (as if their cash were somehow different from their male peers). About half of the women donors lack geographical placemarkers, and are identified instead by marital status (wife, widow) and/or natal identity. This decision seems more gendered; marital affiliation “names” the woman, whereas for men, their community serves as part of their defining characteristics. This is perhaps confirmed by the fact that the unmarried women -- “noble and virtuous maidens” in the language of the chronicle – are tied to place. It seems an X+Y kind of equation: as a person one needs a name and either a place or a social connection – to be sure that the reader knows whose gift is being recorded.

For the remaining two-thirds of the gift-related entries, geography is part of this identity equation. Some donations might be predicted. Two former Thalbach sisters, now serving as leaders of convents elsewhere, sent contributions, as did the prioress of Hirschthal and a canonness from Lindau Abbey. Similarly, collective gifts came from several churches/monasteries and the city of Feldkirch, from whence many of the sisters came.  

Yet the donor pool extended far beyond the expected circles of monastic and clerical supporters. Of the 38 individual donors with geographical markers, nine are from Bregenz and five from Wolfurt – the “local citizenry” contributing their piece to the sisters whose prayers were said on their behalf. Two donations come from Hohenegg, which, though farther away, sent multiple sisters to Thalbach. But beyond these strongholds, the chroniclist records gifts from a whopping 22 other locations, one-off contributions from a mix of secular and sacred donors – the local parish priest, a member of the lesser nobility, a particular family, the mayor, an abbot.  Many donations come from Vorarlberg or the Allgäu, but others came in from places as far afield as Schwartzenburg, Zweifalten, and St Moritz in Augsburg.

What this pattern of support shows is the strength of the Catholic network, not just amongst clerical folk, but also, and especially, amongst the laity in the early seventeenth century. True, five individual parish priests donated to the building of the church. But so did widows, and tax collectors, and even a servant. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but evidently, it takes a whole Catholic community to raise a church.