Guarding the Mouth: Speech and Silence in Thalbach’s 1479 Statutes

I started reading a set of Thalbach’s convent statutes and discovered that their late-fifteenth-century Provincial, Heinrich Karrer, was remarkably worried about women talking.

That’s perhaps an unfair way to put it—but not entirely unfair.

In 1479 Karrer, Provincial of the Upper German Franciscan province and Visitator General of the brothers and sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, issued a new set of statutes for the women living at Thalbach in Bregenz. An earlier set of regulations had apparently not worked entirely as intended, so Karrer replaced it with something he considered more useful.

What caught my attention was what these new statutes regulate—and what they (mostly) do not.

There is very little here about reading. Nothing about study. Almost nothing about household labor. Prayer itself receives surprisingly little detailed attention. 

Instead, again and again, the statutes return to speech: when the sisters should be silent, what kinds of conversation they should avoid, what they may say to outsiders, how they may speak to one another, and what happens when words damage the peace or reputation of the house.

First,silence

The statutes begin predictably enough with worship. The sisters are to attend divine service diligently, especially Mass and preaching, unless illness or necessary work prevents them. Then Karrer moves almost immediately to silence:

Let all the sisters observe silence diligently in the morning, in the evening, and at the table. (Und das alle swesteren ir schwigen mörgens und öbendes und ob tische flißenklich haltent; und welche das an nottorft bricht, die sol vor tische sitzen.)

Break that silence without necessity and there’s a consequence: the offender must sit apart at table.

But this is not really a rule demanding silence all the time. The next provision makes that clearer. The sisters are to be prudent in “speech and conduct,” both inside and outside the house, and to avoid idle talk. Anyone who fails must confess not simply that she talked, but how often, in what way, and about what. The Mother then decides on a suitable penance.

And the regulation is communal. A sister who hears another breaking the rule and fails to report it receives the same punishment.

That last bit recurs often enough to matter. This is by prescript a self-regulating community. You’d better tattle if you see things going wrong.

Good sound, dangerous sound

To my eye (or ear), the contrast is not between sound and silence so much as between kinds of sound.

The very first sounds mentioned in the statutes are good ones: Mass and the preaching of God’s Word. The sisters should be there to hear them. Dangerous sounds come afterward: idle talk, private conversations, insults, accusations, gossip, contradiction.

That distinction makes sense within the broader Franciscan tradition.

The Third Order rule confirmed by Nicholas IV in Supra montem in 1289 imagined a religious life structured in part through hearing and speaking.

Let each strive, while the office of Mass is being celebrated and the word of preaching is being offered, to observe silence and to be intent upon prayer and the office.… (Studeat quilibet, dum Missae celebratur officium, et praedicationis verbum proponitur, servare silentium; orationi et officio sit intentus...

Brothers and sisters were to say the canonical Hours—or substitute Pater nosters if they could not—and attend Mass when possible. They were to hear preaching and exhortation. But during Mass and the homily they were also to observe silence and attend to prayer. The rule even warns about careless oaths made in ordinary speech, noting rather ruefully that slips happen when one talks a lot.

Silence, in other words, was not simply the absence of religious sound. It helped distinguish useful speech from useless speech, attentive hearing from distraction. Francesca Sbardella makes a related point in her study of silence in Catholic cloistered life: silence is not an empty space left when speech stops. It is a practiced condition through which speech, behavior, relationships, and religious identity are organized. And the rule thinks so too: unfortunate things tend to happen in much speaking (prout contingere in multiloqui consuevit).

That seems especially useful for Thalbach.

What words can do

Karrer seems intensely aware that words have consequences.

No sister is to have unauthorized “familiarity, conversation, or private interaction” with anyone, priest or layperson.

Furthermore, no sister shall have any familiarity, conversation, or private dealings with anyone, whether priest or layperson.… (Item und will auch daz keyne schwester kaynerlay fruntschaft noch gesprech noch haymlich mit nyemands hab, er sy priester oder lay..)

(Again, a sister who knows about such behavior and does not report it shares in the punishment. Self-regulating!)

Inside the house, the stakes rise further.

If one sister were to attack another’s honor—accusing her of theft or sexual misconduct, insulting her, calling her a liar, or cursing her—she must confess publicly before the Mother and the community, ask the injured sister’s forgiveness, and eat her next meal on the floor. (Shaming and visual set-asides reinforce speech rules, but no corporeal punishment is ever mentioned, except for food deprivation, which is mentioned for unauthorized jaunts outside of the convent and as part of the increasingly severe penalties for sowing discord within the convent community.)

Words directed upward are dangerous too. Insolent speech against the Mother receives a doubled penance. And speech does not need to stay inside the convent to cause harm. A sister who speaks maliciously to outsiders in a way that damages another sister or the reputation of the house is to be called to account and punished according to the harm—or even the potential harm—her words have caused. Once again, anyone who hears and conceals such speech may receive the same penalty.

The underlying concern is not difficult to see. Words can disrupt peace within the house. They can injure another sister’s honor. They can create suspicion around a woman’s relationships with men. And they can move beyond the convent walls, damaging the reputation of the community itself.

Speech travels.

Guard your mouth AND your ears

There is a wonderful late-medieval image that gives visual form to some of these anxieties.

[IMAGE: “The Crucified Monk,” Wellcome Collection, WMS 49, photo L0029361. CC BY.]

Almuth Seebohm discussed this image in her study “The Crucified Monk.” Around the figure are texts concerned with disciplining the senses and the body. One set of verses instructs the religious to guard speech, restrain anger, and metaphorically place a lock upon the mouth and a balance upon words.

Custodi visum vehementer comprime risum
Sis custos oris et habenam stringe furoris
>Ori pone seram verbis impone stateram
Ne quid confundas ne quid sine crimine fundas

Curb the urge to laugh; be the guardian of your speech and rein in your fury. Place a lock upon your mouth; set a balance upon your words, so that you cause no confusion nor utter anything blameworthy.

The image also draws on the biblical tradition of guarding both tongue and ears: “Keep your tongue from evil” (Psalm 33:14); “I have placed a guard over my mouth” (Psalm 38:2); and even the wonderfully prickly advice from Sirach 28:28 to “Hedge in thy ears with thorns, hear not a wicked tongue, and make doors and bars to thy mouth.”

What I like about the image in relation to Thalbach is that the discipline runs in both directions. You must govern what comes out of the mouth. But you must also govern what comes into the ear.

That is very nearly what Karrer’s statutes ask the sisters to do. A woman is responsible not simply for what she herself says, but sometimes for what she hears another woman say. Listening itself creates obligation.

Governing women’s speech

And here the statutes become particularly interesting to me.

There is nothing unusual about medieval religious rules valuing silence or warning against idle talk. Benedict had done both centuries earlier. Nor is a Franciscan concern with disciplined speech surprising. But at Thalbach, the issue becomes unusually concrete.

These statutes regulate women speaking to one another, women speaking to outsiders, women speaking privately to men, women insulting one another, women talking back to authority, women spreading damaging information, and women listening to one another’s prohibited speech.

It would be easy to turn that into a simple story about male authorities silencing women. Karrer was, after all, a male provincial laying down rules for a female community. Yet the statutes are more complicated than that – more nuanced, and more reflective of women’s own exercise of authority.

The Mother is repeatedly given discretion to judge offenses and assign punishment. Sisters are expected to admonish one another. They are responsible for noticing breaches and maintaining communal discipline. The system certainly governs women’s voices, but women themselves are also part of that governance.

Nor is the object silence for silence’s sake.

The convent was not imagined as acoustically empty. It contained Mass, preaching, prayer, confession, admonition, correction, and ordinary communication. Some speech was necessary. Some was holy. Some sustained communal life. The question was which words belonged.

Reading the statutes this way makes silence look less like the opposite of sound than one means of organizing a religious soundscape. What mattered was not simply whether a Thalbach sister spoke, but what she said, to whom, where, when, who heard it, and what her words might do.

That is a surprisingly large burden for a few spoken words to carry.

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Sources

Gerold Fussenegger, “Das Frauenkloster Thalbach bei Bregenz,” Alemania Franciscana Antiqua 9 (1963): 93–140; pp. 108-112 includes a transcription of the Thalbach statutes of 1479 that have been the basis for my assessment.

Nicholas IV, Supra montem (1289), Rule of the Brothers and Sisters of Penance. (This is a blog post; I used online copies today: a Latin text https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Supra_montem and the English translation from https://ofsgb.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Supra-Montem-1289-exNAFRA.pdf.)

Francesca Sbardella, “Embodying Silence: The Resilient Action of the Unspoken in Catholic Cloistered Life,” Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni 88/2 (2022): 494ff.

Almuth Seebohm, “The Crucified Monk,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 59 (1996), 61ff.

Translation note: Translations of the Thalbach statutes quoted above are mine, based on Fussenegger’s published transcription and checked against the original German wording.

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YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

Supple Rules for Prayer: Daston’s Ideas Meet the 16thc Prayerbook: Another look at how written rules shaped women’s devotional practice at Thalbach—this time through prayerbook rubrics rather than house statutes.

Building for the Ear (from Chaco Canyon to Medieval Vorarlberg): A broader meditation on how religious communities organized sound and listening—useful context for thinking about silence, speech, and the convent soundscape.

Diligent Devotion: Maria Euphrosina Vöglin’s Leadership at Thalbach: A later example of women exercising authority within the Thalbach community, complementing the 1479 statutes’ emphasis on discipline, oversight, and communal order.

From Conference Paper to Article: Turning Talk into Prose

I was in a conversation recently with someone facing one of the dread tasks of academic writing: turning a conference paper into an article. There are people who write conference papers that are basically already articles. Neither of us fit that bill.

My conference papers are intended to be talks. Informal. Funny. Carefully paced. They have places where I gesture at an image instead of describing it, places where a slide does half the argumentative work, and places where I say something in two sentences because I know I can explain it with tone of voice, pacing, or whatever I put up on the screen.

That works perfectly well in a conference room or on Zoom. It does not, however, make a good article. The rhythm’s wrong. The vocabulary is too casual. The argument often relies more on audience connection than carefully scripted references to an expansive scholarly literature.

And I think one reason conference-to-article conversion can feel so horrible is that we often describe the job as “expanding the conference paper.” For me, that framing is almost instantly stressful, because really, the skin doesn't fit.

A conference paper doesn't need to be expanded into an article. It needs to be translated into one. You need a mechanism for getting roughly the same intellectual content out, but in a different language.

So here's my practical step-by-step process. Guess what? It includes a spreadsheet.

Step 1. Break the conference paper apart

First, I copy the conference paper into a spreadsheet. Not paragraph by paragraph. Smaller than that. I put about one or two sentences into each row of the first column.

That sounds tedious. It really isn't. And the point is to stop seeing the conference paper as a sacred block of prose that somehow has to grow into something twice its size.

Now it is just a sequence of little ideas.

Next to each one, I have an empty box to its right. That empty box is where the article version goes.

Step 2. Translate, don't polish

Then I start rewriting down the second column. I am not line-editing the conference paper. I am asking what each little unit needs to become when the audience can no longer hear me speak.

Sometimes a conference-paper sentence survives almost unchanged. Sometimes two breezy sentences become a full paragraph. Sometimes I discover that a sentence was only functioning because the slide behind me contained six pieces of evidence. Sometimes I realize that “as we all know” is doing an enormous amount of unpaid labor.

This is where the translation idea helps me.

The question isn't: How do I make this sentence more article-like?

It's: What work was this sentence doing in the talk, and what does the article need in order to do the same work?

Those are different questions.

It looks like this:

(This is a real example from this spring: my conference-paper prose on the left, and article prose on the right. The point isn’t simply to make the original longer; it’s to ask what the written version needs in order to do the same argumentative work.)

Step 3. Insert the missing stuff

As I work, I simply insert blank spreadsheet rows wherever the article needs something the conference paper didn't: supporting examples, additional evidence, references to the scholarship, historical context, the important take-away to round out the argument.

For me, those blank rows are important psychologically. They turn “THIS PAPER NEEDS SO MUCH MORE STUFF” into a series of small, local jobs.

I don't have to solve the article. I have to fill this box. Then the next one. Then the one after that. Short tasks, not long ones.

Step 4. Don't forget the slides

If the conference slides contain substantial content, they go into the spreadsheet too.

This is particularly important for the way I give papers, because a lot of information can be sitting on the screen while I am saying very little about it. A chart that was visible for thirty seconds might become a full paragraph of article prose. An image may need description, contextualization, citation, and then actual analysis. A quotation I could simply let an audience read may need to be introduced and unpacked.

Slides are part of the conference paper's argument. If I convert only the script, I am leaving chunks of the original argument behind.

Step 5. Move back into a document

Eventually the second column begins to look less like a set of rewrites and more like an article draft. That's when I leave my beloved spreadsheet and move back into a regular document.

It may not be pretty, but by this point, it’s a continuity draft. I know what I’m saying, I know where in the article I’ll be saying it, and I’ve started using the voice that belongs to article prose instead of public delivery. It’s a win!

Step 6. Add the things articles need

Once I have a continuity draft in place, it’s easy – and fun! – to build out the parts that belong particularly to article format.

For me, that usually means a more substantial contextualizing introduction – the “lit review.” This is an excuse to decide what I want to include as context, and what not. The theorizing section is also an excuse to dive back into how I got interested in this problem in the first place. I limit myself to a maximum of three scholarly days, because playing around with the literature is the “big idea” part of the gig, and I could sit there for weeks, if given a chance.

It also means the conclusion gets bigger. Conference conclusions can sometimes amount to: “Look! This thing I have just shown you is neat, and here is why you should care.” Articles have more room for moralizing. I like the “so what, so what, now what” formulation. So what did we learn? And then: so what does that change (and for whom)? And finally: now what? What does this case let us see differently? What larger conversation does it alter? What becomes possible because we've followed the evidence this far?

Those questions are much easier for me to answer once I actually have article prose in front of me.

Step 7. Normal edits

After all of that work, the conference paper is essentially gone. I am editing an article.

That means the usual work: structure, argument, rhythm, clarity, flow, repetition, citations, transitions, and all the other things that make a draft slowly become something somebody else might want to read. (Taking out the giant shouty “LOOK FOR EX” and actually DO that work!). But that’s just cleanup!

Conference Paper → Article: The Seven Steps Break the conference paper apart Translate, don’t polish Insert the missing stuff Don’t forget the slides >Move back into a document Add the things articles need Normal edits

Why This Works for Me

I've used this exact process twice this past spring. Both conference papers became articles, and both articles were accepted, hooray! So I'm inclined to think the method has legs.

I don't imagine everyone needs the spreadsheet. Some people can probably make this transformation comfortably inside a Word document. That’s not me, though. Rewriting there feels like “failed text being edited,” over and over and over again.

The spreadsheet does something useful for my brain: it makes the act of translation visible. On the left is what worked when I was standing in front of a room. On the right is what has to work when I'm not there anymore. Low stress, lots of little steps, and a real sense of progress as the article comes together.

Bit by bit, as they say, and sooner or later it all gets done. With my spreadsheet method, it gets done faster, and with a lot less stress.

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YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan: Before the prose comes the plan. This post works through my approach to choosing a journal, figuring out an article’s likely shape, building a broad outline, and assembling the bibliography that will support the writing.

Writing with Scissors and Tape: When a continuity draft had all the right material but none of the right choreography, I stopped trying to line-edit and just cut the thing apart. Paper strips, index cards, scissors, and tape became a way to see the argument again.

The Editing Horizon:Shaping the Argument First: Editing gets easier when you stop trying to fix everything at once. This post separates argument-level revision from sentence-level polish and makes the case for giving each kind of editorial work its own turn.

Laboring on Labor Day in the Vineyard of Life

This year the wild grape took over EVERYTHING, so I decided it was the year to make grape jelly. Unfortunately, by the time I got out to pick them, they’d turned to raisins in the heat. Sigh. (We were traveling, it is what it is.)

But, as it happens, my son’s place is close to a creek and has a good bit more shade – and when we went out to do some yardwork together, lo and behold, he too has a grape vine. His vine was trying to strangle the tree; it was EVERYWHERE. Clearly, an intervention was required.

So we did what one does: we picked grapes – a lot of grapes. Two full grocery bags of grapes. In fact, this colander is holding only half the grapes:

Wild grapes? Why wild grapes? As my son said, "they're spicy!" Wild grapes are a bit on the bitter/sour axis but more "fresh and cleansing" than cheek-sucking sour. We each ate about ten, but over the course of an hour. So yes, wild grapes: little powerful flavor packets!

Then it was time for the REAL work to begin. (I love me a three-day weekend!)

First you clean the grapes. Then you put them in a pot. (I de-stemmed about half of them, and put the rest in stem-on, which worked pretty well.) Add about a cup of water to the pot, and cook them, mashing them with a potato masher:

Bring it to a boil, turn it down to a simmer, and let it cook for 15 to 20 minutes. Every so often, go mash mash mash. It is, after all, LABOR Day weekend!

Once it’s cooked down and your lovely grapes have fallen to bits, you strain it. I actually did that twice. First with a colander to get all the stems, seeds and “stuff,” then with the cheesecloth to pull out the pulp. (Remind me to buy new cheesecloth!) Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze that juice out of the cloth. I mean, it may be a three-day weekend, but this doesn’t need to be a three-day process. We have standards. And plans. And besides, you picked your grapes; you cooked your grapes. You want every precious morsel of that juice. But don’t wring the cheesecloth – that will get you pulp in your juice. Ugh, more straining needed. Do labor, but don’t labor unnecessarily.

And then, you check the recipes, and think to yourself: no, no, that can’t be right. Because there’s this extra step. Refrigerate your grape juice. We live in this particular algorithmic day and age – none of the top ten recipes for “wild grape jelly” called for this step; everyone assumes you have tame, store-bought grapes. But my memory was: you neeeeeeed to refrigerate the thing if you’re using wild grapes. So I looked up the why – why did my brain think there was an extra step? Search is awful, so I’ll cut to the chase: you cool it and let it rest because of tartrate crystals – the same thing known as ‘wine diamonds.’ They may SOUND pretty, but they can create grit if you don’t strain them out.

So you put your precious grape juice in – well, I used a well-washed disposable soda bottle – and let it settle out overnight in the fridge.

And then, carefully pour off your liquid (and yes, most of my crystals stayed in the bottle, hooray!):

To make it especially “clear,” I poured the juice through my finest metal sieve. Actually, there was a good bit of pulp that had glopped through the yesterday filtering:

(Okay, okay, don’t wring the cheesecloth. I’ve made a note.)

And from there, you’re ready for the grape-jelly making as if it were easy. Boil the juice and pectin and bring to a full boil. Add your sugar, bring back to a boil. Stir stir stir while it boils for a minute. Pull off heat and put into prepared canning jars. If you can find the guts of your canner, do the whole “properly processed and shelf-stable” thing. Otherwise, do as I do and declare it freezer jelly: one small jar to the fridge for fast consumption, one small jar to my son because he DID help pick the grapes, and two to the freezer for winter remembrances – the taste of summer, caught in early fall, to be consumed on toast on a cold winter morning.

The labors of Labor day pay off!

p.s. It isn't laboring for free if you get jelly out of it!

Nobody Wants to Work for Free: Bregenz Clergy Complain in 1703

A surprisingly familiar complaint

In July 1703, the clergy of Bregenz sent a complaint to the city council. It begins with an appeal to what they considered simple common sense:

“The light of nature makes it easy for everyone to recognize that no one willingly serves in wars or otherwise at their own expense and provision.” [Demnach das Lieht der Natur einem ieden leichtlich zuerkhennen gibt, daß keiner gern Kriege, oder auch sonsten diene auf seine aigne Kösten und verpflegung.]

In other words: nobody wants to work for free.

The clergy then pointed out that this was, more or less, exactly what they had been doing.

“We clergymen here have already served for two years without having received the provided provisions.” [Nun aber wir geistliche allhier schon alberaith zwey iahr dienen, ohne das wir desswagen die gestifte verpflegung zugemessen gehabt.]

This was not where I expected a document about endowed anniversaries—Jahrtage—to go.

A document that almost turned the corner

I photographed this document because—yay!—it mentioned anniversary foundations. Those are very much my lane these days: endowed commemorations paid for Masses, vigils, prayers, bells, processions, and other acts intended to keep the dead present within a community’s ritual life.

For a moment, then, this looked promising.

But instead of telling me more about how Bregenz commemorated its dead in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, the document turned the corner into 1703 municipal finance.

Still: it is a pretty cool corner, so I’m sharing it here.

We find the clergy complaining that revenues that should have supported them had collapsed. Why? Military disruption -- the War of the Spanish Succession -- had made it difficult to collect rents, and this was BEFORE the attempted invasion of Bregenz that was to come a few months later. Likewise, income from endowed anniversaries had fallen sharply. And the local administrator had apparently stopped paying out the foundations altogether:

“This year the endowments were completely abolished by the administrator, and not a single cent has been paid to either the clergy or the poor.” [Die Stifftungen diß jahr von dem Pfleger gar aufgehebt, und weder der Geistligkheit noch den Armen das geringste ist bezahlt worden.]

Why were they grousing? They had cause.

The problem was not simply that the clergy wanted more money. It’s that parish life actually does cost money.

The priest complained that the loss of offerings had damaged what should have been one of his principal sources of support. Yet the obligations attached to his office continued.

Among them were meals associated with major feast days. The document mentions Corpus Christi, Christmas, Easter, the dedication feast, and the patronal feast. It also describes regular meals and payments connected with the clergy serving the parish.

In other words, the income could disappear more quickly than the expectations.

And the priests insisted that things were getting worse:

“Because of the growing population, the work and duties increase continually.” [Weilen dan wegen anwachsender Zahl … Sorg und geshafft immer dar mehr einwachser.]

Even the two previous priests, they noted, had complained that they could not maintain a respectable living in the parish—and that had been in better times, when the revenues actually arrived.

Their request to the council was therefore straightforward: stop reducing parish income by suppressing foundations and taking away offerings.

The infrastructure underneath devotion

This document probably will not make it into my book. It comes too late, and its concerns a point away from the story I am telling. But I think it offers a useful reminder.

An endowed anniversary was not simply a prayer written into a charter. It depended on a financial-administrative backbone: rents being collected, money being administered, clergy being paid, meals being provided, and institutions continuing to honor old obligations.

What that means is that war or political disruption did not have to abolish a religious practice directly. It could simply damage the financial machinery underneath it.

And suddenly a Jahrtag was not only about memory, prayer, and the dead.

It was also about who still had the money.

Politics will politic. Meanwhile, somebody has to pay for lunch.

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Resources

Image: Matthäus Merian, view of Bregenz, 1647, Theatrum Europaeum. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Document: Bregenz, Stadtarchiv, Historische Akten 516 (In Bregenz tätig oder ansässig gewesene katholische Priester, 1491-1926), Document 9: Complaint of the Bregenz Parish Clergy Concerning Unpaid Anniversary Endowments and Parish Revenues, 18 July 1703.

You might also be interested in:

Who Gets to Pick the Priest? Bregenz Remembers Its Church: A 1658 dispute over who gets to appoint Bregenz’s parish priest sends the town rummaging through more than two centuries of records. Old charters, remembered priests, and institutional history all become ammunition when Bregenz and Mehrerau disagree over who controls the parish.

Kin, Cash, and Convent: Providing for Nieces (and Nephews) in 1613 Bludenz: A widow’s 1613 bequest reveals the money behind religious choices: inheritances, convent dowries, family loyalties, and some carefully placed conditions. It’s another reminder that early modern devotion depended on very practical financial arrangements.

Not a Village, a Community: Building Thalbach’s Church (1609): Churches—and religious communities—run on more than devotion. When the Thalbach sisters needed money to build their new church, gifts came from priests, widows, officials, servants, monasteries, and donors scattered across the region, revealing the networks that sustained Catholic religious life.

A Blogroll for the Avid Reader

In a world where searching is increasingly awful, I decided to replicate some of the early web patterns: a listing of blog favorites. I wanted to share multiple avenues to rewarding writing on topics near and dear to my heart. Bonus, most of these have RSS feeds, if you still live in that part of the internet. (Better than doomscrolling, amiright?!)

By all means, suggest other discoveries in the comments.

NUNS, BOOKS, WOMEN, AND MATERIAL THINGS

Medingen Manuscripts — https://medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk/  

A research blog from St Edmund Hall, Oxford, devoted to late medieval convent manuscripts, prayer books, women’s religious life, liturgy, materiality, and the effects of the Reformation on religious communities. Especially good if you like manuscripts attached to actual historical women!

History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland — https://historyofwomenreligious.org/  

A broad hub for the history of women religious from the medieval period onward: conferences, reviews, research resources, notices, and new scholarship. Their bibliography is particularly useful if you need somewhere sensible to begin (or are chasing that elusive memory fragment of that thing you read three years ago...)

Early Modern Female Book Ownership / #HerBook — https://earlymodernfemalebookownership.wordpress.com/

Books that once belonged to women are the point here: inscriptions, handwriting, reading practices, ownership marks, textual self-presentation, and books that have since wandered off into libraries and private collections. A wonderful site for anyone who likes evidence left in the margins.

Feminist Histories — https://feministhistories.substack.com/

Natalie Donnell writes long-form archival history about women exercising their political, diplomatic, familial, and economic power in early modern Europe. Well researched, very readable, and full of women who turn out to have been doing rather more than the standard narratives allow.

Free Range History — https://freerangehistory.substack.com/

Amy Freeborn writes “stories from the past, driven by curiosity and wonder,” which is a pretty good description of the appeal. Broad-ranging, approachable history that follows an interesting question wherever it leads.

Feminist History of Philosophy — https://feministhistoryofphilosophy.wordpress.com/

Sandrine Berges looks at philosophy with the women put back in. Expect forgotten thinkers, arguments about canon formation, and a more gender-inclusive history of ideas than the one many of us were originally taught.

Early Modern Fashion and Material Culture — https://sarahabendall.com/blog/

Sarah Bendall writes sharply and often wittily about clothing, objects, labor, bodies, and material life in the early modern world. Come for court dress and textiles; stay for the reminder that clothes are historical evidence too.

MUSICOLOGY

Songs of Sunrise — https://leahbroad.substack.com/

Leah Broad’s delightfully written “music newsletter for inquisitive listeners.” Music history, women musicians, biography, archives, listening, and the larger cultural stories that make repertories matter.

Musicology, Medieval to Modern — https://eeleach.blog/blog/

Elizabeth Eva Leach writes across medieval music, manuscripts, gender, research, publications, and the occasional realities of academic life. Especially rewarding if your tastes run toward manuscripts and medieval song.

Karen McAulay, Musicologist — https://karenmcaulaymusicologist.blog/

Karen McAulay writes about Scottish music collecting, publishing, national identity, women musicians, archives, and the wonderfully winding paths research can take. Part research diary, part musical history, with plenty of curiosity, useful discoveries, and the occasional irresistible archival rabbit hole.  

Words on Music — https://wordsonmusic.substack.com/

Rebecca Franks calls this “a place to explore the art of writing about music.” Smart, vivid prose on listening, performance, books, criticism, and what makes music worth writing about in the first place.

Twangle: Music and Words — https://jessicaduchen.substack.com/

Jessica Duchen comes at things more as critic and journalist than academic musicologist, but she has a delightful way with words. Music history, biography, women musicians, performance, current classical culture, and the occasional personal detour all turn up here.

LARGER-SCALE MUSICOLOGY

Musicology Now — https://musicologynow.org/

The American Musicological Society’s public-facing platform for “sounds, words, and ideas.” A useful place to see what musicologists are thinking about beyond journal articles: archives, listening, race, gender, technology, repertory, performance, and so on.

Sounding Out! — https://soundstudiesblog.com/

“Pushing sound studies into the red since 2009,” and still doing it. Essays on sound, listening, voice, race, gender, media, technology, embodiment, and culture, usually with more energy than the phrase “interdisciplinary sound studies” has a right to suggest.

RILM Bibliolore — https://bibliolore.org/

Musicology produces an astonishing amount of bibliography; Bibliolore picks out nuggets to share. Expect discoveries, anniversaries, books, archival curiosities, international scholarship, and other delightful oddities.

Musicological Brainfood — https://www.musicology.org/brainfood/

The International Musicological Society’s series of short provocations and “amuse-bouches” from the field. Good for testing new ideas, spotting emerging conversations, and encountering perspectives well beyond one national or disciplinary corner of musicology.

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Musical Presence and Funeral Choices, where Brian Fairley’s work on recorded singing in Soviet Georgia (in which you could sing at your own funeral!!!) opened up much bigger questions for me about family memory, technology, musical presence, and what it means to leave a voice behind.

Supple Rules for Prayer: Daston’s Ideas Meet the 16thc Prayerbook; I found that Lorraine Daston’s Rules gave me a new way to think about prayerbook rubrics: not merely as instructions or choreography, but as “supple rules” for practiced devotion. What happens when we treat prayer as a craft learned through repetition, judgment, bodily habit, and use?

Who Gets to Pick the Priest? Bregenz Remembers Its Church

Sometimes an archival document tells you about the period when it was written.

Sometimes it tells you about the period it remembers.

And sometimes it rummages through two and a half centuries of church history because somebody in 1658 is annoyed about those over-reaching monks over at Mehrerau.

This is one of those latter documents.

I was working through material connected with the parish church of St Gall in Bregenz when I came across a memorandum recorded at the Rathaus on 18 February 1658. (Thank you, Florian Guggenberger, for the ready access to the Stadtarchiv materials on VERY short notice earlier this summer!)

This document is, on first encounter, a list of priests: Joß Laimbthebler in 1401; Simon Amma[n] in 1475; Peter “Noth” in 1483 and 1490; Hans Berlinger in 1509, 1519, and 1527; Claus Arger in 1541; Michael Geiger in 1575; Ferdinand von der Tannen in 1585; and then a rather messier succession of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century clergy.

Lists! I like lists. I have, in fact, spent a slightly alarming amount of time reconstructing the chaplains, prebendaries, priests, and pastors who served medieval Bregenz. (Stay tuned, that article on Bregenz Chaplains is coming soon to a Florilegium issue near you!)

But this document is not really a list.

It is an argument.

And the argument is really about who gets to control a parish.

STAGE ONE: Ecclesiastical Spaghetti

The medieval parish church of St Gall had accumulated a complicated set of institutional relationships.

The parish church of St Gall stood within a complex web of monastic patronage and ecclesiastical rights, including important connections to the Benedictine abbey of Mehrerau. The parish was served by a succession of Leutpriester or Pfarrer, while the high-altar Pfründner – the benefice holder who was functionally the parish's “Number Two” priest – was under the patronage of the Premonstratensian abbey of Weißenau (Minderau). It’s like if Picard and Riker had different bosses. Weird, hunh?

To emphasize that reality: the pastor of the parish was historically a secular priest (with a few exceptions), not simply a monk sent over from the abbey. Mehrerau had important rights in relation to the parish, but – as we are about to see – exactly what those rights entitled the monastery to do was still being argued about in the seventeenth century.

His “second,” on the other hand, was another important clerical position at St Gall, the high-altar prebend or Pfründe. This role belonged to an entirely different monastic orbit. Its patronage rights lay with the Premonstratensian abbey of Weißenau, also called “Minderau” in the local sources. My reconstruction of the Bregenz clergy follows Weißenau canons through that benefice for generations. Moreover, the monastery not only presented candidates; its own members repeatedly served as Bregenz Pfründner.

So, very roughly, our characters so far are:

Bregenz: parish community with a long history of secular parish priests.

Mehrerau: important rights over the parish.

Weißenau: rights over the separate high-altar Pfründe.

Everyone clear?

Excellent.

Now let us spend two centuries arguing about it.

The arrangement was old enough that in 1390 Jakob vom Tor, then Bregenz Pfründner, was already fighting with Weißenau about whether the monastery had to provide firewood for a room associated with his benefice.

Never let it be said that medieval ecclesiastical jurisdiction was all theology and canon law. Sometimes it is also: who owes me firewood?

STAGE 2: We enter the seventeenth century

By the later sixteenth century, these old divisions of authority were being reformulated.

In 1581, the abbots of Mehrerau and Weißenau made formal arrangements concerning their respective Bregenz rights. Then, in 1610, Mehrerau purchased Weißenau's right to place clerics in the high-altar Pfründe outright.

That transaction matters.

But it did not automatically give Mehrerau the right to put one of its own monks into the separate office of parish priest.

And that distinction is precisely where our 1658 document gets interesting.

The memorandum opens by insisting that the Bregenz pastors had historically been weltliche Priester, that is, secular priests, also known as Leutpriester. (A secular priest is a Catholic priest who serves in the ordinary life of a diocese or parish rather than belonging to a monastic or religious order such as the Benedictines or Franciscans.) The document’s compiler says this can be demonstrated authentically from numerous sealed parchment charters and open instruments, and then starts producing his receipts from the past.

In 1401: Joß Laimbthebler.

In 1475: Magister Simon Amma[n].

In 1483 and 1490: Magister Peter “Noth”—almost certainly Peter Rott, whose surname the seventeenth-century reader has misread.

In 1509, 1519, and 1527: Johannes Berlinger.

In 1541: Claus Arger.

In 1575: Michael Geiger.

The compiler is not collecting a list of priests just because priests are interesting (though they can be).

He is establishing custom.

For generations, he argues, the people exercising the cure of souls at Bregenz were secular clergy.

Plus, he supplements his claims with reference to an alphabet soup of documents. Joß Laimbthebler “accepted the obligation for the Metzger anniversary. (Ref. J).” Simon Amman served in 1475 “(according to document B).” And so on. When I say he brought his receipts, well, he sure did reference them. Though as is the way of such things, the appendices have gone missing from the record. But his allusions to external documents sure SOUND like proof is being provided.

STAGE THREE: When parchment gives out, ask the old people

Eventually, of course, the documentary trail becomes patchier.

And this is where the memorandum proves delightful.

Its compiler turns to people who remembered the priests.

One witness, Georg Hüglin, was 94 years old.

His recollections are not always chronologically precise, and the compiler knows it. He remarks that people remembered these priests and had known them personally but could no longer recall the exact years reliably enough to write them down:

Doch bis dato die eigentliche Zeit und Jahr noch nicht erkundiget werden mögen, denn die Leute, so dessen zwar wohl gedachten und sie gekannt, können sich jedoch der Zeit nicht so gewiss [erinnern], dass man's schreiben könne.

But up to the present the precise times and years have not been ascertained, for although the people remembered them well and had known them, they could not remember the dates with sufficient certainty for them to be written down.

That distinction – we know the man was here; we don't know exactly when – is rather sophisticated historical practice for 1658.

Hüglin remembers, for instance, the earliest Bregenz pastor he could recall, a man associated somehow with Bildstein and “den man genent Lörman” – “whom they called Lörman.” Alas, I have not yet identified him.

Others of his remembered (secular) priests appear under uncertain names: one proves to be Müllegg (first name unspecified); another is the already independently documented Moises Hagen/Haag.

These are precisely the sorts of clerics who fall through institutional lists. And that matters to me; I have worked hard in that Florilegium article to reconstructs the much larger clerical world surrounding St Gall: chaplains, prebendaries, altar priests, assistants, and other men whose relationship to the parish was more complicated than a tidy succession of pastors.

To my eye, this new document effectively catches seventeenth-century Bregenz trying to do some of the same prosopographical work.

But for completely different reasons.

STAGE FOUR: Apparently Kaspar Schmidt's sermons were not a hit

And then, on the next page, we get to the gossip.

Or, more fairly, to the oral historical testimony, some of it reinforced by a secondary witness.

Kaspar Schmidt became Bregenz pastor in 1589. A surviving description of the parish income, written by Schmidt himself on 22 July 1594, says that he was then in his fifth-going-on-sixth year and intended to leave.

The 1658 testimony, however, tells us why some people remembered him leaving:

der Schmid im praedigen nit angenemb gewesen

Schmidt had been “not pleasing/acceptable in preaching.”

His sermons, apparently, were not to Bregenz parishoners’ taste.

As a result, our document explains, the prelate moved Schmidt to Grünenbach, and Andreas Krafft came to Bregenz.

This is a tiny piece of evidence, but I love it because it restores something that institutional histories often flatten out. Parishioners actually listened to sermons. They evaluated. They had expectations.

And apparently they could make their dissatisfaction consequential enough that somebody rearranged the clergy appointments!

The timing makes the story especially intriguing. Schmidt was preparing to leave in 1594, precisely when Catholic institutions around Bregenz were undergoing intensified post-Tridentine reform. At nearby Thalbach, for instance, a visitation in 1594 was followed in 1595 by substantial reforms of the sisters' liturgical practice.

To be honest, I do not know what Bregenz disliked about Schmidt's preaching. Perhaps he was insufficiently reformist. Perhaps he was too reformist. Perhaps he was doctrinally tedious. Perhaps he had all the charisma of damp wool.

The document doesn't tell us.

But it does tell us that preaching mattered enough to be remembered more than sixty years later as the reason for replacing a priest. And that’s an interesting historical factoid all its own!

STAGE FIVE: And then everything gets more complicated

Righto. So, one of the curiosities of our unfolding saga is that Krafft was not another secular priest.

He was a conventual of Mehrerau.

The memorandum documents him serving the Bregenz parish in 1602. Later, after the secular priest Ulrich Stueff had served and then gone to Wasserburg, another Mehrerau conventual, Michael Boner, apparently came onto the parish.

So if the old Bregenz custom was secular Leutpriester, what were Mehrerau monks doing there?

Temporary permissions, apparently. Or, as my administratively inclined self would say: “waivers.”

The memorandum cites a letter of 31 January 1619 from the episcopal authorities at Constance. From it, the writer says, it appears that Mehrerau sought to have prolonged for several years an indult allowing the abbey to have the Bregenz parish served by one of its conventuals.

And at this point our 1658 writer positively pounces on this simple but telling detail, switching from German into Latin. (You can almost hear his excitement!)

Ergo ex propria confessione.

By your own admission.

The logic here is deliciously straightforward:

If staffing Bregenz with Mehrerau monks was your ancient and permanent right, why were you asking the bishop in 1619 to extend your permission to do it?

STAGE FIVE-AND-A-HALF: Buying one job does not get you the other one

This becomes even more pointed when placed beside the Pfründe.

Weißenau's association with that benefice remained active surprisingly late. Sebastian Reck, a Weißenau monk, was formally invested in half the Bregenz Pfründe in 1563 and was still Pfründpriester in 1570. Thomas Lachmair, another Weißenau monk, appears as Pfründpriester zu Bregenz in 1573. Mathias Bildstein, a Bregenz-born Premonstratensian associated with Weißenau, is the next documented holder in 1591.

Then came the 1610 purchase.

Mehrerau acquired Weißenau's presentation rights to the high-altar prebend.

Fine.

But, importantly, the Pfründner was not the Pfarrer.

Nine years after buying one permanent appointment right, Mehrerau was apparently still asking Constance to prolong a temporary permission concerning the other.

That, I think, is the constitutional distinction around which the 1658 memorandum revolves.

Or, put less constitutionally:

Congratulations on buying the Pfründe. The town would like to remind you that this does not mean you own all the priests.

TAKE-AWAY #1: Why remember 1401 in 1658?

Because institutional memory is power.

By 1658, the town was not simply interested in antiquarian trivia about Joß Laimbthebler, Simon Amma[n], Peter Rott, or Johannes Berlinger.

It needed them. It needed their history.

Each dead priest became evidence.

The parchment charter from 1401 mattered because it demonstrated what Bregenz believed its church had once been. So did the documents from 1475, 1483, 1490, 1509, 1519, 1527, 1541, and 1575.

When the parchment evidence thinned, the memories of elderly townspeople extended the chain.

And when Mehrerau's own paperwork supplied the word indultum, the town turned the monastery's archive against it.

This is church history being made into legal argument.

TAKE-AWAY #2: Reform is not a straight line

It is tempting to describe post-Tridentine Catholic reform as a movement toward centralized authority: standardized liturgy, disciplined clergy, regulated religious communities, stronger institutional oversight.

There is plenty of that here.

At Thalbach, the sisters themselves experienced reform directly in 1595, when they took on the Roman Breviary. Their later institutional culture remained deeply attentive to proper worship. Maria Euphrosina Vöglin, Maisterin from 1683 to 1713, was praised precisely because she ensured that divine service was performed properly, attending particularly to music and chant; she also navigated the financial and political relationships necessary to keep the community functioning.

But the Bregenz parish dispute reminds us that “reform” did not simply mean authority flowing downward from Rome to bishop to monastery to obedient local Christians.

Authority was being renegotiated sideways.

Between town and abbey.

Between Mehrerau and Weißenau.

Between secular priests and religious clergy.

Between parishioners and the men preaching at them.

Between episcopal privilege and local custom.

Even between documentary memory and living memory.

And the institutional rearrangement unfolded gradually. In 1581, Mehrerau and Weißenau formalized the division of rights. In 1610, Mehrerau bought Weißenau's Pfründner rights. In 1619, it still sought episcopal extension of permission to place a conventual in the parish office. In 1639, its privileges were confirmed. And in 1658, Bregenz was still arguing about what all of that actually meant.

That is not a clean transition.

It is negotiation.

TAKE-AWAY #3: The priests behind the list

There is another reason this document arrived at a particularly good moment for me.

I have just finished page proofs for an article reconstructing Bregenz's chaplains and ecclesiastical benefices. That project began from the problem that a parish church was never just its parish priest. St Gall supported an extraordinary ecology of clerics attached to altars, chapels, charitable foundations, and subsidiary benefices.

The surviving evidence makes those men visible unevenly.

And now, too late to sneak into the article – because of course this is when archives produce the really juicy document – I have found Bregenz itself attempting a reconstruction of its clergy.

But the town's question is different from mine.

I asked:

Who served this church, and what did they do?

The compiler of 1658 asked:

Who served this church, and how do their identities prove who has the right to control it?

Same priests.

Same archive.

Different stakes.

And that difference is useful.

My forthcoming article reconstructs the ecclesiastical machinery of medieval and early modern Bregenz from the surviving traces of the people who operated it. The 1658 memorandum, on the other hand, shows what happened when that machinery itself became historical evidence.

Two hundred and fifty years of priests were summoned into a seventeenth-century argument.

Even the one whose sermons nobody liked.

And somewhere behind the whole dispute I can still hear Jakob vom Tor, back in 1390, asking Weißenau to send firewood for the cold, cold winters.

Over the years, the questions have changed. The institutional arrangements have changed. Even the uses of the past have changed. But those arguments left traces – and, fortunately for us, Bregenz kept the receipts. 

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WORKS CONSULTED:

Bregenz, Stadtarchiv Historische Akten 516 (In Bregenz tätig oder ansässig gewesene katholische Priester, 1491-1926), Document 5: “Protocoll vnd bericht die succession der pfarrherren zu Bregenz betr. de 18. febri 1658 beschreiben.” [Record and report describing the succession of parish priests in Bregenz, dated 18 February 1658.]

Cynthia J. Cyrus, “Bregenz Chaplains, 1387–1587,” Florilegium 39 (2026): forthcoming.

YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

The Vorarlberg Chapel I Wasn’t Looking For  A wrong turn on a research hike leads to the history of chapels, convents, and religious communities scattered through the landscape above Bregenz – and a reminder that archival connections don't always make a smooth hand-off.

BregenzShooting Confraternity of 1498  What happens when civic life, devotional practice, and parish memory get bundled into one Bregenz brotherhood? This post translates and explores the 1498 regulations of the city's shooting confraternity.

SisterAnna Wittweilerin Looks Up  A young Thalbach sister becomes Maisterin in 1619, keeping a diary that preserves everything from liturgical reform to spectacular weather – and a comet. It's a glimpse of how large historical changes actually looked from inside a Bregenz convent.

Diligent Devotion: MariaEuphrosina Vöglin’s Leadership at Thalbach  Maria Euphrosina Vöglin's long leadership at Thalbach brings together devotion, administration, money, music, and the practical work of sustaining a religious community in the post-Tridentine world.

The1507 South Wall Frescoes of Brand’s Parish Church (Vorarlberg)  A close look at another Vorarlberg parish church and the evidence embedded in its decoration – useful for thinking about how local communities built, remembered, and interpreted their churches over time. The post appears in the archive alongside the North Wall follow-up.

The Vorarlberg Chapel I Wasn’t Looking For

I was in Vorarlberg, Austria (on the Bodensee) for research as part of a large summer archival trip – thanks to the Fyfe Faculty Excellence fund. Mostly, that was museum, or library, or archive, or street-front, or church, or chapel, or waystation.

And then there was the day I set off to see if I could hike to the Hirschberg.

This wasn’t a random destination, though it was definitely research-adjacent. You see, once upon a time the Franciscans (MY Franciscans if you’ll permit me an ownership-by-affection) were gathered up at the convent of Thalbach in Bregenz. That initial foundation happened in the 14^th century (if you believe the Sisters’ Chronicle) or 15^th century (if you tie yourself to actual documents like a true historian, sigh).

And they lived at Thalbach for centuries. And they became Franciscan-affiliated formally in the period after the Council of Trent, living as Tertiaries.

And time went on.

And then, AND THEN, closure happened. During the Aufhebung, when Emperor Joseph decided that contemplative work was at odds with state productivity needs, the convents of Thalbach and of St Anne’s in Bregenz were both closed (in 1782), the sisters dispersed, and the innards were sold or burned as useless.

So the building sat empty.

And sat empty some more.

But, BUT. One of the nearby surviving sisterhoods – a Dominican group – had, once upon a time, been living in community on the Hirschberg near Bregenz. And then the storms came through. Bad storms. Zapzapzap of lightning. Poof, their convent went up in flames. 1462 was a bad year. And you know what? So was 1463, when lightning struck again. Yikes!

So the sisters moved to Hirschthal bei Kennelbach. Yay, happy endings! For a while, that is. But the Kennelbach convent was vulnerable, too, and in 1796, their not-on-a-hillside convent was destroyed in yet another fire on the night of January 1–2, 1796. In the middle of winter. The fear was fierce. Could they survive?

The answer lay in an empty building. One even commissioned and, in part, built by nuns through the labor of their own hands, as it happens. Thalbach had been sitting around, just aging (as buildings do) for sixteen years. One of the Hirschberg (aka Kennelbach aka Hirschtal) sisters had a great idea: ask the city council for some building-based charity. And it worked! They were able to move in! And within six months, on 22 April 1979, they bought the “verwiaste Kloster Thalbach” from the city outright – for 4700 gulden, on the condition that they provide free schooling for girls in Bregenz.

And now Thalbach, which had been built for Franciscan Tertiaries, became, after that chronological gap, a home to Dominican sisters. And thus it stayed until 1983, when declining vocations and an economically disadvantageous environment meant another closure. This time, the building went to another Catholic spiritual group, Das Werk, and they still inhabit the convent now.

My chosen task on a Sunday, then, was to wander my way up to the Hirschberg. Because I can. Because it’s there. Because it’s easier to hike somewhere than just to hike when you want to plan your day.

It’s a longish hike from Bregenz, and I knew enough of my own capacities to plan for the bus-ride back in advance of my adventure. So I set off as one does, with water-bottle and snacks and hiking kit and phone charger, and went exploring uphill in the mountains.

It was splendid.

Hiking in Vorarlberg is easy (well, except for the hiking part). I use a combination of Waldfinder (the Vorarlberg hiking app) and AllTrails (which gives decent trail-dotted lines) and Google maps (which gives names, yay), and just zig and zag on the dotted trail indicators as mood takes me (and as the various trail signs indicate). I started by hiking up the Gebhardsberg to the former site of a Bregenz chaplaincy in the mountains, though the buildings there reflect the impact of the Swedish invasion – rebuilding in sacred spaces is certainly a “thing.”

GEBHARDSBERG

Uphill, yup: hiking up to the Gebhardsberg

Classic ruins

Inside the reconstituted chapel, set for someone's wedding

And then up and over hillsides, past lovely streams, in and out of shade, through various towns (Langen bei Bregenz being the most notable), and up and across 

VORARLBERG COUNTRYSIDE 

Shrub and hill-view

St. Wendelin at Fluh; founded in 1666, and rebuilt 1846–47; served as pilgrimage chapel and then in 1872 as Parish church; St Wendelin of Trier is patron of country folk and herdsmen.

Glorious roads and paths...

And stunning hillside views

A small waterfall

A parade of old cars

Lovely plantings -- the yellow blossoms were full of bees!

Yes, I was having a good time. Meadow and trees and a bit too much sun!

until I got up to the trail on up ….

The chapel of Maria Heimsuchung -- the Visitation -- at Hirschbergsau: a cute rural chapel dating from 1893, built over the grounds of a previous chapel. Contains a bell dated 1619, cast by Johann Baptist Ernst.

Another view of the Hirschbergsau chapel

...to the wrong Marian chapel. Yes, It seems that I went to the Maria Heimsuchung Kapelle (The Visitation chapel) in the Hirschbergsau -- the meadow part -- instead of the Marienkapelle (The Marian Chapel) at the mountain peak on the other side of the mountain. In other words, coming up from Langen, I chose the wrong fork in the trail, and went about 90 minutes out of my way. Whoopsies!

YELLOW GOAL / RED DESTINATION

Two Marian chapels, both in the mountains above Langen...

The day already being a long one, however, I took it as a signal that hiking is about the journey, not the destination, and instead of adding another two hours to my weary legs, I took my photos of the chapel that greeted me at MY destination, and put “hike to the Hirschberg Marienkapelle” onto my list for some future adventure.

And then I hiked back down and caught my bus back, and had a lovely beer and a quiet evening, and got ready for a scholarly week by list-making (as one does).

About all of this I have several reflections:

1) Wherever you are, that’s the adventure you’re having.
2) Hiking in Vorarlberg is among the most lovely things one can do in all of this wide world.
3) A sunny day of hiking is NEVER a mistake.
4) Always double-check your destination. If you care. Do you really care?
5) History gives us connections, but the hand-off isn’t always smooth.
6) Be interested in what’s around you; that can be as joyous as the thing you think you’re working on.
7) When in doubt, your next destination is probably uphill. Be ready for that.
8) Wrong turns still take us places. Sometimes they even have chapels.
9) Maps are excellent tools. Users can be excellent fools. You have permission to enjoy that gap!
10) Go for it. Take water, a sun hat and bus fare (or a bus app), but go for it.

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Resources

• Go here, not there: My goal was actually supposed to be THIS Marian chapel. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marienkapelle_(Langen_bei_Bregenz)

• Vorarlberg app for hiking: https://waldfinder.at/

• Vorarlberg app for managing bus / train routes: The Verkehrsverbund Vorarlberg route planner is available as the app “cleVVVer Mobil” for Android and for iPhone.

  • https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.hafas.android.vvv&hl=de_AT

  • https://apps.apple.com/at/app/clevvver-mobil/id533107345

• Pay for your bus with ease using the Fairtiq app, which calculates your fare based on check-in (when you get on the bus) and check-out (when you step off), and will calculate your day’s maximum fare for you without having to think about it. Easy peasy!

You might also be interested in…

• The Thalbach building campaign: Long before Hirschthal’s Dominicans moved into Thalbach, their prioress had helped support its building. This post gives a glimpse of the regional networks linking women’s religious houses.

• How Thalbach remembered its own beginnings: How old was Thalbach, really? The convent Chronicle had answers—and wanted you to know that they drew on documents!

• Why everything church-like seems to be uphill in Vorarlberg: Why are Vorarlberg’s sacred places so often uphill? Elevation could be inconvenient for walkers precisely because it was useful for bells.