Looking Back: Favorite Blog Posts of 2025

I have committed enough prose here this year that the process of looking back was actually helpful for me – and I hope it surfaces some things that you might find of interest. As a matter of practice, I throw some things up on the blog so I’m reminded of them later – a kind of outsourcing of the brain. There’s this, for instance:

Age and the Monastic Life at Thalbach in Bregenz

Looking at age in convents is an interesting bit of demographic thinking that must have impacted the lived experiences of the sisters, even in an unenclosed convent like Thalbach. (Talbach? Thalbach? I’ve spent so much times in the documents that I forget how I came to decide which spelling to prefer! Yikes!) Anyway, if you’re curious about monastic experience, you can look at the data; if you’re more of a newbie to understanding the monastic life, this post on Initiation into Monastic Life gives some orientation to the topic.

Another thing that was fun this year was thinking about inner voices and outer voices; Margery Kempe is a good example of that:

Margery Kempe Listens

This is a topic that still calls to my heart, especially since it’s the “bright shiny distraction” from the writing I’m doing in the moment, which is very much in the trenches shoveling of small details of practice based on nuances of text in the world of commemorations. But I digress.

The single most popular thing I wrote was another one of those exploratory pieces, thinking about archaeology of Chaco Canyon alongside the topography of Vorarlberg churches. It asks what it means to build for the ear, and not just the eye:

Building for the Ear from Chaco Canyon to Medieval Vorarlberg

I’m glad this post “resonated.” (I’ll see myself out…) Seriously, though, that question of how sound moves through space is really interesting, and if it doesn’t wind up fitting the book outline, it probably needs to move into article form. AFTER the book, self, AFTER the book.

Then there’s the question of writing process. I’ve written several posts about writing this year, a kind of meta-reflection on one way to get it done. I don’t believe in the One True Path to productivity – you do you – but I do believe we’re all a bit better off if we share our tricks for how to make that writing, and particularly scholarly writing, work. For example, how do you let things go and get to your primary focus? Enter, stage left, the research question:

Using Research Questions to Defeat Data Hoarding

This tool is helpful; it provides focus and helps winnow down to the core of an argument, particularly if your “just one more” meter is set as high as mine.

Then there are the practical details. This list of links is one I’ve pinned, for obvious reasons, so if you’re needing a quick where-to-go in the manuscript and incunable space, this is my first attempt to get things out of my overburdened bookmarks folder and up into navigable space. Kinda like the old web. Nostalgia as tool?

Manuscript and Incunable Research Links

Sometimes you post when your passions take you away. “In Praise of Janky Translations” is both about what I think important in a push-back against perfection, and about how translation and text prediction occupy very different spaces. It captures my voice pretty darned well, I think, and captures a moment of tech outrage that is my contribution to the “STOP PUTTING AI IN EVERYTHING” conversation.

In Praise of Janky Translations

I’m not anti-AI in the big picture, but it clearly, CLEARLY, does not belong in the translation tool in the form it took here. No, no, no. Just don’t.

And last, but not least, I’ll end with a post that reflects a practical exercise, one that still sits in my heart as one of the better things I’ve invented this year. I decided to make a gratitude list, with as many items as I am years old. It was a good exercise, and one I recommend to you as we close out the year that was.

Gratitudes

Happy New Year, everyone! May the words come...

What I’m reading in non-fiction… 2025

Not everything I read this year was about invented worlds. A significant portion of my reading life was spent with books that insist on the realness of reality: bodies, illnesses, narratives, institutions, uncertainties. These are not books I raced through, and to be honest a lot of them were article-adjacent. Still, these are the books that asked me for attention in some way, and each of them repaid my time spent. (Note: this is not my monastic reading list, which I keep separately. That reading was also rich and rewarding, but felt a bit too niche even for a cheerfully quirky blog. This is my curated should-appeal-to-all list. Message me if you want the professional version.)

John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis

This is a book about tuberculosis, but it is also a book about inequality, attention, and the moral frameworks we use to decide what kinds of suffering matter. Green is very clear about his own positionality, and I especially like that he never pretends to be neutral. What makes the book effective is precisely that combination: careful research paired with an insistence that facts alone are not enough. I came away thinking less about TB as a disease of the past and more about how we decide which diseases – and sufferers thereof – we choose to discuss, and which we don’t.

Arthur Frank, Letting Stories Breathe and The Wounded Storyteller

Arthur Frank has long been central to thinking about illness narratives, and returning to these books (even if under deadline!) felt to me a bit like revisiting a conversation rather than encountering something new. The Wounded Storyteller, grounded in Frank’s own experiences of heart attack and cancer, remains a careful meditation on what it means to tell stories from illness rather than about it. Letting Stories Breathe extends his work, asking what ethical obligations listeners, scholars, and institutions have toward stories once they are told. I found myself dwelling when I needed to be skimming; his books are so engaging and thoughtful that they resist instrumental reading.

Herman Roodenburg, The Eloquence of the Body

Roodenburg’s study of gesture, particularly through figures such as Constantijn Huygens, treats bodily expression not as spontaneous overflow but as a learned and practiced habit. Roodenburg’s insight is that gesture is cultural knowledge and cultural capital: acquired, refined, and socially legible. I found this book especially useful as a reminder that bodies do not merely express meaning; they are trained to produce it. Also, this book quietly reshapes how one watches people speak. I was naughty and read chapters that weren’t directly applicable to the work I was doing. Shhhh, don’t tell my family.

Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede

This is a cheat, since it’s fiction, but I chose it here deliberately. To me, Godden’s novel about Dominican nuns captures the texture of monastic life in ways that most non-fiction accounts struggle to do. She brings to life the rhythms of prayer, frictions of communal living, and the mix of discipline and intimacy. All are rendered with an attentiveness that feels ethnographic, even though it remains clearly imagined. Sometimes fiction is simply better at conveying lived experience than analysis can be. And yes, I’ve blogged about it before: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/04/postulant-novice-professed-initiation.html

Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

Campbell writes about people whose work is death-adjacent: gravediggers, embalmers, executioners, forensic specialists. The book is notable for its restraint. Rather than sensationalizing these professions, she speaks to their ordinariness. It’s a job, even if it’s a job with a body involved. What emerges is not a meditation on death itself so much as on how societies distribute the labor of dealing with it, and how those who do that labor understand their roles.

Jamie Holmes, Nonsense

Holmes explores ambiguity and uncertainty, not as problems to be solved but as conditions that shape perception, decision-making, and belief. The book ranges from psychology to politics to everyday cognition but remains grounded in the idea that humans are deeply uncomfortable with not knowing, often to our detriment. I found it useful less for its individual examples than for the framework it offers: ambiguity doesn’t just confuse us, it actively changes how we see.

So pause, he argues, and look again. Holmes’s central recommendation is not the cultivation of better answers, but, importantly, of building better tolerances: for ambiguity, for incomplete information, for meanings that do not resolve on first encounter. Wherever uncertainty makes us anxious, he tells us, we tend to rush toward coherence – any coherence. We grasp at patterns, explanations, or stories that soothe us rather than clarify what we’re looking at. Holmes urges us to deliberately slow down that meaning-making reflex. Sit with the discomfort long enough to notice what your mind is doing. What shortcuts does your mind take? What assumptions does it accept? What narratives do we prefer for their stability rather than their coherence? As we pause, alternative interpretations have room to surface. What initially looked like nonsense may reveal itself as complexity, or at least as a problem improperly framed.

For Holmes, this is not a call to relativism or indecision, but to intellectual humility. He wants us to be willing to revise, to hold competing possibilities in mind, and to recognize that understanding often emerges not from closing down ambiguity, but from staying with it a little longer than feels comfortable.

Not a bad set of action items as we head into a New Year...

What I’m reading… 2025

I had an incredible year in booklandia, reading nearly 200 books. Of course, 60 of those were read during my Asian sojourn, and many of those were of the “lighter reading” variety. I happily binged my way through several of the Horatio Alger series, for instance – 19^th century views of American life that are unapologetically popcorn reading. If you’re curious, they’re freely available on Project Gutenberg (which is available to you even if you happen to be in China, by the way!): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/168

But alongside the binges were books that built world, wonderful worlds. These books have stayed with me as rooms in my mental house. Even thinking back on them now floods me with bits and pieces of their stories and revitalizes the characters that inhabit them.

Hao Jingfang, Vagabonds

A group of young people had been sent from Mars to Earth as a special delegation. Can you ever come home from a strange place again? I picked up this novel partly because I was heading to China, and partly because the idea of being an outsider in one’s “own” place feels profoundly 21^st-century. This book spoke to me, and I lingered over its intricate story.

Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (and the rest of the Wayfarers series)

It’s hard for me to articulate just how much fun this series is. Multi-species crew on a tunnel ship with an AI character – no, not that kind of AI, think sort of “Ship’s Doctor” from Star Trek, or perhaps even Data – legitimately a character. Each character is flawed; each is trying; each wants to connect. And really, isn’t that what it means to live fully? Go ahead, buy the whole series. It’s joyful, generous, and deeply humane science fiction. Much fun!

1. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
2. A Closed and Common Orbit
3. Record of a Spaceborn Few
4. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within

KJ Parker, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

Okay, I’m a sucker for the historically quasi-plausible and quasi-invented riproaringly good tale. Tom Holt’s Who’s Afraid of Beowulf was worth the re-read, as were the first 9 of the Lindsey Davis Roman mysteries with Flavia Albia (which were a significant part of my China reading), and the eight short novellas by Alex Zudor in his Agent Strabo mystery series.*

But for witty sarcasm and an engaging glimpse into Roman engineering, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City was a gobble-me-up. (KJ Parker is actually a Tom Holt pseudonym; I’m not sure why he needed one, but, well, marketing is a mystery, eh?). In this tale of city siege, I loved not loving the main character! Orhan is grumpy, opinionated, loud-mouthed, rebellious, creative, crafty, and someone I wouldn’t want to *be* but I’d certainly like to *know.* We get the story from his perspective, snark and all. It’s fast-moving, and yet also full of very human moments. Read it!

Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

I fell for these books thanks to my library app. Yes, and again yes. I read them in publication order but it doesn’t really matter. The premise remains the same: What if you could go back in time? But there are rules. Nothing you can do in the past will change the present. You can’t move from your seat. You can only visit people who have been to the cafe. And you must return before the coffee gets cold.

These lyrical invocations of human connections and missed connections revisited are heart-wrenching mini-worlds, each chapter a glimpse into a relationship that comes to life for the reader. It’s not that you won’t tear up; it’s that the tears have a purpose.

1. Before the Coffee Gets Cold
2. Tales From the Cafe
3. Before Your Memory Fades
4. Before We Forget Kindness
5. Before We Say Goodbye

Of course, there were work books and drive-to-work books and read-on-the-train books and too-tired-for-TV books. And so, so many were amazing reads. But in terms of world that are now part of my world, these four stand apart.

Happy reading to you all!

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*The Zudor collection

Special bonus, since they aren’t widely known: Alex A. Zudor, Vox Populi: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella

These fit the theme of the unrepentant and unredeemable character, as we first meet Agent Strabo at a personal low: cashiered out of the Roman Army, and deciding if there’s any remaining reason to live. He gets hooked into an investigation, and the story takes off. These are great airplane reading – I read two on my flight to Nepal. They are short and have relatively simple plotlines, which is part of their appeal. They aren’t world-building in the way the other series are, but they are a yummy distraction, well-suited for the time waiting for the food cart to roll down the aisle.

1. Vox Populi: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
2. Si Tacuisses: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
3. Mala Parta: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
4. Quis Custodiet: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
5. Non Omnia: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
6. In Vino Veritas: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
7. Acta Est Fabula: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
8. Et Tu, Bruta?: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella

...so many good books, so little time!...

In praise of janky translations: an anti-google diatribe

Once upon a time as recently as yesterday, I lived in a world in which Google Translate was an imperfect but useful tool. I could ask it my best guess of what someone had said to me, and it would spit out a decent explantion of what we were talking about. I could point my phone camera at a wall-label in a museum, and out would come the information I was reading about in a language I can speak. This all was incredibly useful, particularly on my Asian trip last summer.

Another thing I happened to use Google Translate for was as a short-cut in my research. Now, I’ve been trained up with the best of them. I know that looking at the original language of, say, a medieval charter is the best and most accurate way to understand that document’s meaning. Nevertheless, when working at volume, it can be handy to skim, and while I can get in the groove with modern German, my medieval Alemannic dialect reading is slower-paced. If I want a really fast assessment of something, there’s nothing like my native tongue, which is English, as you’ve probably guessed by now.

So, when looking over the roughly 200 charters relevant to the current chapter, I’ve been going through them quickly via google translate to see if there’s utility in doing the close-up work of line-by-line and word-by-word reading. About one out of every 5 will have a topic of particular interest. I can skim a 69-line whole-side-of-a-cow sized parchment charter in its janky English translation in about 10 minutes. I can read said document directly in something more like 45 minutes.

Let’s think about the math:

• To skim English: 10x200 = 2,000 minutes, or roughly 30 hours of reading.
• To read medieval Alemannic: 45x200=9,000, or roughly 150 hours of reading

Okay, I’ll even be fair; add back another 20 hours for going through the targeted documents in detail and I’m still looking at the difference between 50 hours of work and 150 hours of work.

Why am I heated up about this topic? Well, they broke google translate last night.

Let me say that again, with all the feels:

THEY BROKE GOOGLE TRANSLATE LAST NIGHT.

I have receipts, of course. I’m going to share just one, because it’s been a long and stressful day this morning (bwahaha).

Here’s a clause out of one of my documents:

3. brieff Alsz dann der vorgemelt keb hailig Santgall unnser hußsatter Jarlichen ain Suma gebt Im den vigrechten der gestifften Jorlichen Jarzeten

Here’s its translation, as of yesterday:

3. Furthermore, the aforementioned abbey of Saint Gall, our patron, shall pay annually a sum to the vicar for the proper observance of the established annual memorial services.

Usable, right? Tells me the basics of what’s going on. Is it elegant? No. Is it fully accurate? Also no. It is, I think we’d all agree, a janky translation. (Oxford definition of janky: “of extremely poor or unreliable quality.”).

But here’s the thing: this janky translation is USABLE. It tells me whether or not this is a place I want to spend some of my precious minutes. I mean, I like down time just like everyone else; these translations are a shortcut!

But no, it wasn’t getting enough time-on-the-page, I guess, so Google “improved” (and I use that word with scare quotes for a reason, so be scared, be very very scared) its translation tool. Let’s look at the result, shall we?

3. When the aforementioned [name omitted], the [name omitted], gives our [name omitted] an annual sum in accordance with the established annual [terms omitted].

This is predictive technology gone bad. The AI underpinning here is obvious. The “improved” tool is happy to predict anything that’s sort of standard in a regular document of this type. But all, all, ALL of the interesting details are now redacted. Because names, and places, and specific amounts of money are NOT predictable. So I guess we shouldn’t need to see them, eh? Because everything useful in life is predictable. (Mad, me mad? Whatever do you mean???)

And this, this is what they’re calling the “classic” version of the tool. Not that it bears any resemblance to what the tool was doing yesterday, of course. But it’s a handy marketing ploy for a company that clearly Does Not Give A Shit about the user experience. The advanced version, well, it simply redacted lines 6 to 9 of my document altogether since those are just like line 5, a list of payments to particular chaplains.

But MY study is looking (in part) at exactly that. I need to know how much more the parish priest gets than the altarist at the St Mang altar. It’s part of my evidence. And it changes over time. Oh, which makes it unpredictable.

So when we premise translations on what words mean, we get one kind of information. Yesterday, I might argue with whether the “Mesner” was better translated as a “sacristan” or a “sexton.”

In the land of predictive AI, however, we premise translations on what other texts think might come next, and that means skipping the “minutiae.” The result? I can no longer tell from the translation that the Mesner, whatever his role might be, was even present in the document. A bad translation is something I can argue with; a predictive omission is something I can’t even see.

This is arguably great if you’re translating prose. It’s an absolute disaster if you’re looking at legal records and payments and guidelines for the foundations. Those kinds of documents are actually designed to deliver the very small, unpredictable details that AI wants to suppress. They are accounting devices, legal instruments, and memory machines. It’s like AI trying to tell you what flavor of icecream is your favorite based on other people’s orders. It has absolutely, positively no idea of what *you* might want, but that won’t stop it trying, using that oh-so-confident voice, though.

Janky, bad translations, in other words, are part of my world of work. They have a use. They may be inelegant, but their very bumps and hiccups are pointers to the curious oddity. They keep the text visible as a text. As a user, I still see names, sums, offices, altars, weird textual repetitions – the very things that are likely innovations in this particular textual example. Predictive smoothing, by contrast, is a lie of fluency. It gives you the shape of a charter without its substance. To put it another way, jankiness is epistemologically honest. It doesn’t pretend to understand more than it does.

Cory Doctorow has brought us the concept of “enshittification,” the reality that a captured audience is merely monetary potential to the big firms that think they own our data. And yes, this update is truly, truly, truly the enshittified version of what a translator is supposed to do. In fact, from where I’m sitting, this is not even translation anymore. It’s instead content abstraction masquerading as translation. A translator is accountable to the source text; a predictive model is accountable to statistical plausibility. In fact, I have trouble communicating just how BAD it is at the job it was perfectly adquate at yesterday, but you get the general gist.

And the reality is that an enshittified product is pretty much what you’re stuck with from here on out, unless Google changes its mind, and rolls back to yesterday’s model.

Happily for me, I can, in fact, read my texts. I have access to good dictionaries, and I do subscribe to DeepL for toggling languages with modern German. (DeepL struggles *hard* with Alemannic, but then, don’t we all?). And in a pinch, ChatGPT actuall does a decent job with the odd sentence or two.

But the fact that yesterday was easy, and today my tool is broken? This is the way of this tech-heavy world of ours. Because yesterday’s Google Translate assumed that you were the expert deciding what mattered. Today’s assumes the model knows better. That’s not just frustrating; it’s a quiet and very, very creepy reordering of authority in knowledge production. Scholars of thin archives (like the ones I work on in Bregenz, Austria and in Bischofszell, Switzerland) are exactly the ones who lose when the world (or the tech-companies) decides that unpredictability is noise. Because the unpredictable is often where the truth lies.

Academic Games

For today’s post, to be clear, my role is amplifier first, and commentator second.

In case you wondered what academics do for fun, well, sometimes we weird out in corners of academia. This winter's winner from where I'm sitting is the 200-page published review of a 145-page book. No, that's not a typo; the review is longer than the book.

And the thing is, the writing of the review is just so, so, so quotably bad that my colleagues have turned it into a game. You scroll through the review and drop in at random and read a sentence or two, and decide if it's quoteworthy. And the joy of the game is that everyone's a winner. (There's a variant with extra points if your quote contains the word "epistemic" which appears 150 times in the review. And wow, the footnotes too! The whole thing is delicious!)

Credit to @jameschalmers.bsky.social and @benstanley.eu for drawing both review and game to my attention.

So, I have to admit that I delighted in this game. First of all, a review, as a matter of courtesy, should not be more than about 2% of the length of the item reviewed. Okay, maybe 5%. It’s pretty simple math: 300 page book at 5%: you can write a 15 page review if you’re completely nerding out. But that’s your upper limit. After that, you’re just in it for the kicks. And more kicks. Perhaps this meme could be instructive:

http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/540658-beating-a-dead-horse

It gave me all the feels – like watching a senior professor take the time to systematically destroy a graduate student in public during Q&A. (You know who I mean.) The world has no need for that; it’s neither instructive nor helpful nor even, at the end of the day, a boon to the human race. In fact, it’s kinda nasty. I’m glad that such behavior is generally condemned in the venues I’m involved in today; I wonder if the Comp-Law field might also have some things to observe about this piece, and suspect that it does.

And one of the reasons I don’t mind poking fun is that there’s hierarchy at play here as well; senior professor at the Sorbonne reviews book by scholars he characterizes as “unencumbered by reputation” (p.242). Well, refer to the meme above; you’ve already won that competition. Have some compassion.

But while compassion is in short supply, the game of quotability is over-amply supplied. In even a brief selection, Legrand demonstrates a series of writing quirks. I know that Comparative Law (and law in general for that matter) likes its literary flourishes. But these are, um, is “recklessly ornate” a fair assessment? You be the judge.

Start with over-the top image:

“even the kudzu-like proliferating orthodoxy that does not yet see retains the power of sight potentially allowing it to outsoar the darkness of not-seeing” (p.437)

Be proud of me, I did NOT ask Gemini to make me an image of Kudzu with eyes. Yikes.

We move on to over-the-top vocabulary:

“As rationality finds itself being relativized — the estimation of plurality must be a key factor in the comparatist’s allegiance to foreignness — comparison structurally invites conflict, no appeal to contrived and evanescent overarching commonalities being in a position to overcome the constitutive comparative dissensus” (p.428)

Relativized >>> evanescent >>> dissensus: the heat-o-meter just keeps rising as the sentence grows.

And, of course, there’s over-the-top sentence-building. Stop me when I get to a period?

“This review is not the proper locus to assess the merits or demerits of ‘tradition’ at any length although I am minded to specify that I consider Glenn’s move from ‘system’ to ‘tradition’ as largely cosmetic, a variation on the theme of David’s historically overarching model that remains deeply ingrained within orthodox comparative law’s ways generally and within the civil law’s manner in particular — which is why my preference easily goes to culture, a decisively more rewarding heuristic (tradition and possibly system, in the broadest sense of the term, being better apprehended as cultural subsets).” (p. 297)

Whew.

So, there’s a lot not to like. This review certainly wins some kind of academic Bulwer-Lytton prize, but for academia.

Why, oh why, do you think the editors of the journal chose to publish this? I suspect them of actually being kind of clever. Rarely do issues of comparative law make it into my headspace. After all, I’m a musicologist and a monastic historian, and I tend to dabble more in genre fiction than, er, comparative law. Yet as a non-expert outsider, I delighted in the inanities here, and was equally delighted by the community of scholars which came out to play with the materials.

There’s a sense of fun in being able to poke at such clearly contrived sentiments as those expressed here – and yes, to play a little bit of “I’ve read that, I have heard of this other thing, and oh, that could actually be interesting” with its footnotes. And, it’s low stakes – a chance to deal out an easy “my writing might be bad, but it’s certainly not THAT bad” card at the end of a long semester. Plus, we academics enjoy performative overwriting and disciplinary in-jokes, and this review provides a rare playground for exploring a bit of both elements.

So, you can chalk it up to "people being weird on the internet" or to modern-day publishing being a fool’s game. But now you know what at least some academics do for fun on their "time off."

Legrand, Pierre. "Comparative Law’s Shallows and Hollows: A Negative Critique on Ablepsy" [Review of Sabrina Ragone and Guido Smorto. Comparative Law: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023. 145 pp. ISBN 978 0 19 289339 0]. The Journal of Comparative Law 22 (2025): 239-439. https://www.pierre-legrand.com/ewExternalFiles/JCL_20-2_01_Legrand_ComparativeLawsShallowsAndHallows.pdf

Bregenz Shooting Confraternity of 1498

This post on the Bregenz “Schützenbruderschaft” is organized into three parts. Part 1 presents extended excerpts from the Bregenz Schützenbruderschaft regulations of 1498, based on transcriptions from a 1711 copy, given here in my own translations. (If you want the transcriptions, message me; I didn’t have the energy to give them final polish and put them up here, but I’m pretty happy with the translations.) That is followed by a discussion that explores the Bruderschaft’s civic, devotional, and memorial practices, placing them in both local and broader European contexts. Finally, I give a substantive works cited with archival sources and secondary literature for anyone who wants to dive deeper.

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PART 1: Translated excerpts from the Bregenz Schützenbruderschaft Regulations of 1498; sections 2-6 quoted in full. Transcribed from the copy of 1711, Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Ohne Herkunftsangabe, 5652 (“Die Armbrust- und Büchsenschützen zu Bregenz stiften eine Bruderschaft”); translations are the author’s own.

Know and understand all those who see, read, or hear this letter, that the common rifle and riflemen here in Bregenz, according to the principle, consider and decide that friendship, unity, and brotherly cooperation, where faithfully observed, is pleasing to God and brings peace and benefit to the people here in this time …. [Listing of various leaders who approved the brotherhood. All these] have conceived and established a brotherhood as follows:

Firstly, in the honor of the holy and indefatigable Trinity of the highly praised Virgin Mary and Mother of God, and of the dear saints named Saint Sebastian, Saint Anthony, Saint Gallen, Saint Agatha, and Saint Barbara, with these aforementioned ordinances and decrees, Namely, such a brotherhood shall henceforth, as long as it is worthy, stand in common rifle and crossbow shooting authority… [discussion of how it is to be constituted, with leadership including both riflemen and crossbowmen].

Secondly, the brothers shall have two annual services every year, namely on St. Sebastian's Day and St. Agnes' Day, and begin in honor of the aforementioned patron saints, with a sung service and several spoken masses, as many as two members of the brotherhood are able to perform, which shall always be announced to all brothers and sisters.

Thirdly, if someone in the brotherhood dies, a sung memorial service shall be held for them, and announced to all brothers and sisters on the Sunday before, and the brotherhood shall place two bare candles, and after the memorial service take them back and keep them, and give St. Gallen one schilling pfennig from them.

Fourthly, whoever wishes to join such a brotherhood who is a crossbowman or rifleman, shall give eight marks from himself and his wife at the beginning of the year, and if he has no wife, still pay as many, but whoever wishes to join such a brotherhood who is not a marksman, a soldier or woman, shall be summoned before the four marksmen masters. And those who are common marksmen from both lords as mentioned above, will then be taken into the brotherhood by them according to form and fairness.

Fifthly, all who join such brotherhood, whether they are members or not, shall give one schilling pfennig each, and one woman or girl alone shall also give one schilling pfennig on St. Sebastian's Day, for as long as she is alive. However, whoever does not give the schilling, is not obligated to do anything else in connection with such brotherhood.

Sixthly, The more people join such brotherhood, the more worship is promoted and maintained.

Seventh, the four rifle and crossbow masters shall be selected once a year on St. Sebastian's Day,...

Eighthly, ...the four marksmen shall and may, as often as they deem necessary, summon the marksmen to gather for a Viertel (quarter) of wax. Anyone who does not come, and does not present a sufficient excuse, is liable to pay the Viertel of wax without exception. The validity of the excuse shall be judged by the four Schützenmeister…

Lastly, ...the aforementioned gentlemen, mayor and town council, shall know and agree to increase or decrease in one or more articles, always in the manner and occasion as is proper and necessary… [Followed by a lengthy list of those who approved these statutes.]

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DISCUSSION

I spent some time on the Bregenz shooting confraternity regulations, partly because confraternities are inherently interesting as a social force to be reckoned with, and partly because the regulations gave such helpful details about liturgical services at the parish church of St Gall. This mixture of civic, devotional, and occasionally quasi-military functions is exactly what scholars describe as typical of late medieval shooting brotherhoods; for example, Brown and Small emphasize that crossbow- and rifle-guilds across the Low Countries cultivated both military practice and socially cohesive festivity.

Section 2 reminds us that the Bruderschaft is more than just a shooting club; it provides two sung church services for its members along with “several spoken masses,” with an emphasis on abundance; this salvific work was an important motivation for joining a confraternity during the period of its foundation. Alyssa Abraham’s study of early modern confraternities stresses that liturgical visibility – the ability to stage sung or massed devotions – was a core way that such groups asserted corporate identity, and Bregenz fits that larger pattern. In Bregenz, these ceremonies are centered on St Sebastian’s Day, January 20^th, and St Agnes’s Day, January 21^st, so these Bruderschaft celebrations are essentially a mid-January event for which more remote members might come to town. This is also the date for the annual election, so there is a combination of salvation work and regular business meeting.

Section 3 continues into the memorial functions of the group. Confraternities of the period frequently held services for the deceased, and the Bregenz group is no exception. There is a sung memorial service, with enough lead-time that the members of the Bruderschaft can arrange to attend. Moreover, there is a candle-as-coin allusion, the “two bare candles,” used in the service, and then subdivided as a physical, material good, held by the Bruderschaft, but with a portion – one schilling pfennig – as alms for the parish church where that memorial was held. Jonathan Glixon’s research has shown that confraternities across Italy and the Low Countries played highly structured roles in funerals. Confraternities’ duties ranged from preparing bodies, processing to the church, and providing sung laude. (He even finds evidence for polyphony; I should be so lucky!) Although Bregenz services are less elaborate, their sung memorial service and candle obligations sit very comfortably within this wider funerary economy.

Thirdly, if someone in the brotherhood dies, a sung memorial service shall be held for them, and announced to all brothers and sisters on the Sunday before, and the brotherhood shall place two bare candles, and after the memorial service take them back and keep them, and give St. Gallen one schilling pfennig from them.

Wax is money during the service, and it is also the funds for the meetings during the year, for which a “Viertel (quarter) of wax” is due whether or not you attend. The organization is also funded by joining fees (8 marks) and by annual dues (1 schilling pfennig). And the organizers clearly understand the “more is merrier” trope, noting that the larger the Bruderschaft grows, the more involved and complex the church services can be (Section 6). Such wax-based economies match a long-standing Northern European pattern: Brown and Small note that archery confraternities were routinely fined in either sous or wax, and statutes from Bethune (1413) even required members to provide a wax candle each year for Corpus Christi processions. Material obligations supported ritual visibility.

While the initial affiliation of the Bregenz confraternity was with the holy Trinity, it became known as the Sebastian Bruderschaft over time. Of course, that listing of saints in clause 1 of the Bregenz Bruderschaft regulations allowed and perhaps encouraged such slippage over time. There is something wickedly delicious about the fact that the martyr, shot full of arrows, becomes the patron for a shooting organization. Comparable organizations elsewhere – in Modena, as researched by Alyssa Abraham, or in Rheinfelden, Switzerland – often had ties to Sebastian’s role as plague intercessor. Sebastian’s popularity grew rapidly over the fifteenth century, which saw repeated waves of plague, and it’s not impossible that the Bregenz confraternity founding had both his roles in mind. (I have discussed Sebastian’s presence in plague prayers in articles.)

The Bregenz confraternity leaves various footprints across the legal landscape over the next two centuries. In 1505, six years after its founding, the steward of the Bruderschaft was involved in a property transaction at court. As the Bruderschaft matured, it became the object of pious donation; Jakob, Bishop of Ascalon, Auxiliary Bishop and Canon of Constance, for instance, left legacies both to the clerics at the parish church of St Gall in Bregenz and to its Riflemen's Association there. (He also donates both to the women of Hirschtal and those of Thalbach, and provides for cousins. Generous guy!). Pious legacies of this sort are well attested elsewhere: Abraham observes that confraternities actively cultivated visual and devotional presence precisely because such visibility attracted bequests, commissions, and ongoing obligations of prayer. The Bregenz confraternity was still going strong in the mid-18th century, when it was involved in various bond transactions. That longevity likewise parallels the endurance of Sebastian confraternities elsewhere. From Andernach to Hagnau to Dornbirn, Sebastian confraternity statutes and indulgences show similar patterns of devotional stability and periodic updating.

The importance of such community organizations can be seen during the counter-Reformation as well. In Bregenz, a signal moment came with the establishment of the Holy Rosary confraternity at the Parish church in 16 July 1617. While that’s the story for another post, it is still worth noting that the persistence of the shooting Bruderschaft into the seventeenth century in Bregenz suggests that, as in Venice or Florence or Bruges, confraternities could coexist with new post-Tridentine devotional forms rather than being supplanted by them.

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WORKS CITED:

PRIMARY SOURCES (consulted via monasterium.net)

• Bregenz Schützenbruderschaft Regulations of 1498 in a copy of 1711: Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Ohne Herkunftsangabe, 5652 (“Die Armbrust- und Büchsenschützen zu Bregenz stiften eine Bruderschaft”)
• Jörg Berkmann as steward to the confraternity: Bregenz Stadtarchiv, Urkunde 381: 1505 Dezember 10
• Jakob, Bishop of Ascalon, pious legacy to the “Priesterbruderschaft und der Schützengesellschaft” in Bregenz: Bregenz Stadtarchiv, Urkunde 606: 1565 Oktober 24, Konstanz.
• Bond transactions for the Bruderschaft:
  • Bregenz Stadtarchiv, Urkunde 7005, 20. Dezember 1749
  • Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, ohne Herkunftsangabe 6175, 28. August 1766
• Founding of the Holy Rosary confraternity confirmed: Bregenz Stadtarchiv, Urkunde 771, 1620 April 15, Konstanz

SECONDARY LITERATURE

• Abraham, Alyssa. “Iconography, Spectacle, and Notions of Corporate Identity: The Form and Function of Art in Early Modern Confraternities.” In A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Confraternities, edited by Konrad Eisenbichler, Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition, Vol 83 (Brill 2019): 406–432.
• Anonymous, “The Brotherhood of St Sebastian [in Rheinfelden]” [undated post], Living Traditions in Switzerland [Website] https://www.lebendige-traditionen.ch/tradition/en/home/traditions/the-brotherhood-of-st-sebastian.html
• Brown, Andrew, and Graeme Small. “Civic society and the Court Jousts, shooting fraternities and Chambers of Rhetoric in Court and civic society in the Burgundian Low Countries c.1420–1530.” In Court and Civic Society in the Burgundian Low Countries C.1420–1530, edited by Brown and Small (Manchester UP, 2007): 210-238.
• Cyrus, Cynthia J. “Prayers Against Pestilence from Women’s Monastic Communities.” Early Modern Women 16.1, [Forum on Early Modern Women and Epidemics, edited by Bernadette Andrea, Julie Campbell, and Allyson M. Poska] (Fall 2021): 63-71; https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/715811.
• Cyrus, Cynthia J. “Five Strategies in Sixteenth-Century Tertiaries’ Prayers Against Pestilence.” Academia | Letters (March 2021): Article 479; https://www.academia.edu/45687714 .
• Wegeler, Julius, “Das Schiitzenbuch der St. Sebastianus--Bruderschast in der Stadt Andernach, beginnend im Jahre 1426.” Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein, 1859, https://www.vr-elibrary.de/doi/pdf/10.7788/annalen-1859-7-jg01
• According to the Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek (https://vlb.vorarlberg.at/), statutes for similar Bruderschaften appear to be available in (somewhat) modern printed guise, but not to me, at least, not without interlibrary loan:
  • Die Bruderschaft vom heiligen Sebastian zu Hagnau: ihre Statuten, Ablässe und Gebete (Freiburg/Breisgau: Herder, 1888)
  • Bruderschaft unter dem Titel und Anrufung des hl. Martirers Sebastian in der Pfarrkirche zu Großdorf (Feldkirch: Sausgruber, 1901)
  • Statuten der Bruderschaft zum Heiligen Martyrer Sebastian in der Pfarrkirche Dornbirn-Oberdorf (n.p.: n.p., 1968)

A bookish saint from Brno

Time to explore another fine example of medieval art from the Moravian Gallery in Brno (Czech: Moravská galerie v Brně), this time a bookish saint.

The “Female Saint with Book” by an anonymous Moravian carver stems from around 1500. The wooden sculpture is tall and narrow, suitable for a niche or other tight space. She is crowned, and there appear to be jewels carved into that crown. There may be a veil over her hair, though its waist-length tresses seem to be otherwise unbound, for one strand has snuck over her shoulder and nestles against the crook of her arm. 

This youthful figure gazes out at us directly, her high forehead a sign of beauty, her straightforward gaze a signal of honesty, her rounded cheek a suggestion of affluence, her closed mouth with a hint of lift at the edge a gesture of inner repose.

Her robe boasts a modest scoop neck, and is cinched by a thin belt; yet below the waist, it flairs open in a dramatic upside-down V of imagined drapery to reveal her underkirtle. This is clearly secular garb, and may have had brocade with an elaborately textured surface, but with the insect damage we cannot tell for sure.

The right arm is lowered and has lost its hand – we have only the sleeve – but was bent at a 120-degree angle (pointing down but sort of aiming at the viewer).

The left hand is what interests me most. At that point where the outer garment flares, our figure holds a book. The position of that book is rather curious – she holds it sideways. The book’s back seems to be down; we see the top edge of the book, and if we were taller might see the front leaves as well. Moreover, the book is attached – perhaps by a bit of chain? –  to her belt since she neither needs to cradle the book nor press it hard against her side. The book floats, in other words, and she merely rests her hand lightly upon it. The book may be wrapped – is that a hint of gauzy fabric at the top? That would be characteristic of the day. It is clearly a beloved possession as well as an attribute of her sainthood.

And then, following our trajectory downward, we come to her feet, tucked in behind the folds of cloth. She stands on a rounded cushion or low dome rather than directly on the floor or rocks, as many other saints are depicted. In late-medieval sculpture, this kind of grounding signals nobility or spiritual elevation. It gives a lift to the figure – both to align her with our sight and to move her figuratively above the ordinary world – emphasizing her courtly bearing and inner refinement. Combined with her crown, her serene expression, and the cherished book in her hand, the cushion suggests that this is a saint whose sanctity is tied less to dramatic martyrdom or miracles and more to elevated learning, piety, and noble grace.

These details give us clues, but they also leave us guessing about her identity. Saints we might consider as candidates, given the statue's Moravian origins, include the intellectual Catherine of Alexandria, the tower-bound Barbara, or community-activist Elizabeth, all of whom were imagined in late-Gothic Central Europe as dignified, courtly women of faith.

Of course, the other saintly attributes for these women would be the “tell.” If this is Catherine, where is her wheel or sword? Neither seems to fit the dimensions of the space, so even if the hand had survived, the statue would be thrown out of kilter if such “regular attribute” were added. Barbara is perhaps more plausible; imagine the missing right hand holding a tower, and we could imagine her replete and identifiable. But for this statue to work, that tower would need to be curiously small; otherwise it would obscure her face. Though I suppose one that was shoulder height would work. If it were Elizabeth, we would expect some sign of her charity such as loaves, roses, or a small figure of the poor, but none appear here. The sculptor seems to have focused instead on the figure’s nobility and inner devotion, giving us a serene, book-holding figure rather than a tableau of her famous acts. In other words, we can read her sanctity through posture, gaze, crown, and that treasured book, but the overt symbols that would let us give her name are no more.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we knew more about who she is, or about who did the carving? Some artwork tells us stories, and indeed we could talk here about insect damage and the ravages of time, or about the wonderful luck of preservation. But artwork unmoored from its origins also poses questions that the attentive viewer might consider. Who was this lass, and what did she represent to the community that commissioned her, or to the artist who carved her? We cannot know, but we can appreciate the combination of artistry and effort that went into creating this beauty.

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Other posts on Brno art

• Cynthia Cyrus, "The 15thc Swabian Madonna of Brno" [blog post], Silences and Sounds, 15 Nov 2025, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-15thc-swabian-madonna-of-brno.html
• Cynthia Cyrus, "Brno’s Torso of Christ" [blog post], Silences and Sounds, 19 Nov 2025, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/11/brnos-torso-of-christ.html
• Cynthia Cyrus, "Carving the Nativity in 1520" [blog post], Silences and Sounds, 21 Nov 2025, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/11/carving-nativity-in-1520.html 

Manuscript and incunable research links

This listing reflects my “frequently consulted” list of resources for manuscript and incunable research as I’m working on a medieval/early modern house of tertiaries, Thalbach in Bregenz, Vorarlberg, Austria. My aim in compiling this list of links is not to be systematic, but rather utilitarian, since I’m now frequently across browsers and even computers, and want “my” link list all in one place. There is a strong bias toward vernacular German / Austrian resources, since Vorarlberg was linked sometimes to Bavaria, sometimes to Tyrol and Innsbruck, and always to the broader Bodensee orbit.

Though I don’t claim “coverage” of digital resources, I did want my list to be useful to others, so I’ve done a few things. I’ve grouped it in clusters that might help a new researcher get started. I’ve tried to provide a brief explanation of what a resource is, and sometimes provided a “jump in” link that let’s you navigate more quickly to a search page.

I’m certainly open to adding further resources as they come to my attention, and invite your contributions. You can reach me at my vanderbilt.edu email (cynthia.cyrus “at”…) with suggestions.

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Navigation

Manuscripts | Fragments | Incunables | Calendars & Saints | Nuns’ Libraries (Projects) | Memoria | Early Modern Vorarlberg Resources |

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Manuscripts, Works, & Catalogues

• Handschriftencensus: Inventory of medieval German-language works and the manuscripts that contain them.
• Manuscript portal: https://handschriftencensus.de/hss
• Works portal: https://handschriftencensus.de/werke/
• Handschriftenportal: : Centralized access to German manuscript catalogues (formerly Manuscripta Mediaevalia).
• Main portal (with search function): https://handschriftenportal.de/
• Catalogues for Germany (HKOL): https://bilder.manuscripta-mediaevalia.de/hs/kataloge-online.htm
• Catalogues for other Countries (HKOL): https://bilder.manuscripta-mediaevalia.de/hs/kataloge-hsa.htm
• manuscripta.at: ÖNB listing of Austrian manuscript catalogues
  • https://manuscripta.at/kataloge.php 

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UMBRELLA SITES FOR DIGITIZED MANUSCRIPTS

Manuscripta.at – digitized manuscripts from Austria: https://manuscripta.at/digitalisate.php

e-codices – Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/

KdiH – German-language illustrated manuscripts of the Middle Ages: https://kdih.badw.de/datenbank/start

Siân Echartd, Medieval Manuscripts on the Web – guide to online manuscript resources (scroll down for location-based listings) https://sianechard.ca/web-pages/medieval-manuscripts-on-the-web/

Open Culture – list of 160,000 medieval manuscripts online https://www.openculture.com/2020/12/160000-medieval-manuscripts-online-where-to-find-them.html

Mechthild transmission Study (MMMMO) – Overview of manuscript transmission of Liber specialis gratiae https://zfdg.de/2024_002

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FRAGMENTS

• Fragmentarium – digitization,description, and scholarly study of medieval manuscript fragments; allows virtual reunification of dispersed fragments, https://fragmentarium.ms/
• Digital Scriptorium – US-based database including medieval and early modern manuscripts/fragments, https://digital-scriptorium.org/
• HAAB Aschebuch Fragments – Identification of fragments from the 2004 Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek fire, https://haab-digital.klassik-stiftung.de/viewer/Identifizierung_Aschebuchfragmente/

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INCUNABLES

• ISTC – Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, https://data.cerl.org/istc/
• VD16 – German 16th-century prints catalogue, https://www.bsb-muenchen.de/sammlungen/historische-drucke/recherche/vd-16/
• GW / GKW – Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, https://www.gesamtkatalogderwiegendrucke.de/ (and its English overview: https://www.gesamtkatalogderwiegendrucke.de/GWWelcomeEN.xhtml)
• INKA – Tübingen – Incunabula Catalog of German Libraries, https://www.inka.uni-tuebingen.de/
• Hain, Repertorium bibliographicum (1826)
  • vol 1: https://books.google.de/books?id=eRIFAAAAMAAJ
  • vol 2: https://books.google.de/books?3wid=xhMFAAAAMAAJ
  • Copinger’s supplement: https://archive.org/details/supplementtohai00copigoog/page/n7/mode/2up
  • The 1906 follow-along by Reichling https://archive.org/details/appendicesadhai01reicgoog/page/n4/mode/2up
• vdlb: Distributed Digital Library of Incunabula, https://www.hab.de/en/distributed-digital-library-of-incunabula/
• OENB – Austrian Incunables , https://www.onb.ac.at/sammlungen/sammlung-von-handschriften-und-alten-drucken/bestaende/alte-drucke/inkunabeln (Note, under quick link searches, you can pre-select for incunables)
• RELICS – Renaissance Liturgical Imprints: A Census, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/r/relics/

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CALENDARS & SAINTS

• Corpus Kalendarium – relational database of calendars from European Books of Hours: 
• https://www.cokldb.org/
• Grotefend – Calendars and feasts: 
• http://bilder.manuscripta-mediaevalia.de/gaeste//grotefend/grotefend.htm
• Lechner, Mittelalterliche Kirchenfeste und Kalendarien in Bayern
•  https://books.google.com/books?id=uYNQAQAAMAAJ
• Medieval Calendar Calculator: https://www.wallandbinkley.com/mcc/
• Date of Easter: https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/easter/easter_text2b.htm
• Perpetual Easter Calculator: https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/easter/easter_text2c
• Ökumenisches Heiligenlexikon: https://www.heiligenlexikon.de/

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Nuns' Libraries (Projects)

• Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project -- Manuscripts from German-Speaking Lands: https://hab.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/en/
  • Helmstedt, Augustinian nunnery of Marienberg
  • Lamspringe, Benedictine canonesses
  • Medingen, Cistercian nunnery
  • Augsburg, Dominican nunnery of St Ursula
  • Karlburg, Benedictine nunnery
  • Mödingen, Dominican nunnery of Maria Medingen
• Late-medieval monastic libraries in Lower Saxony: https://www.hab.de/en/reconstruction-and-study-of-late-medieval-monastery-libraries-in-lower-saxony/
• Schriftlichkeit in Süddeutschen Frauenklöstern: https://frauenkloester.bavarikon.de/Projekt/Hauptseite
  • Altenhohenau (Dominikanerinnen)
  • Altomünster (OSB/Birgittenkloster)
  • Munich houses (Pütrich-Regelhaus as Franziskanertertiarinnen, St Jakob am Anger as Klarissenkloster)
  • Neuburg a. d. Donau as Benediktinerinnenkloster)
• St Katharina in Nuremberg: http://db-st-katharina.vmguest.uni-jena.de/home/
• Medingen Project: http://medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk/index.php/manuscript-01-2/
• MSS from Merseburg, Naumburg, Kollegiatstifts Zeitz: https://archive.thulb.uni-jena.de/korax/templates/master/template_korax2/index.xml

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MEMORIA

Ottosen, Responsories of the Latin Office of the Dead (a reformulated version of the database undergirding his doctoral thesis, The Responsories and Versicles of the Latin Office of the Dead, https://www.cantusplanus.de/databases/Ottosen/index.html

Hugener, Buchführung für die Ewigkeit, Totengedenken, Verschriftlichung und Traditionsbildung im Spätmittelalter, https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=rgVMDAAAQBAJ&hl=en

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Early Modern Vorarlberg Resources

• Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek Catalogue -- https://vlb.vorarlberg.at/suche/
• Monasterium.net (virtual charters) -- https://www.monasterium.net/
• Parish registers for St Gallen in Bregenz: https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/oesterreich/vorarlberg/bregenz/
• Rapp, Topographisch-historische Beschreibung …Dekanat Bregenz: https://texte.volare.vorarlberg.at/viewer/image/000079738/2/
• Publications by Vorarlberg Archivists: http://apps.vorarlberg.at/vorarlberg/vorarlberg/bildung_schule/bildung/landesarchiv/weitere/pub/vortraege/beitraegevonderzeitigenun.htm
• Schmid 2013, Der Klerus des deutschen Teils der Diözese Konstanz am Ende des 15. Jahrhunderts, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/33180282.pdf
• Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv – Wikisource https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Freiburger_Di%C3%B6zesan-Archiv
• Thalbach Akten (Rep 14-173): https://apps.vorarlberg.at/vorarlberg/pdf/rep_14-173klosterthalbach.pdf
• Bregenz Pfarrarchiv Akten (Rep 14-097): http://apps.vorarlberg.at/vorarlberg/pdf/rep_14-097pfarrarchivbre1.pdf
• Kloster Mehrerau Akten: https://docplayer.org/50843680-Kloster-mehrerau-akten.html
• Abbots of Mehrerau: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_%C3%84bte_von_Mehrerau

Let me know if this was useful. And, to navigate back around the page, here's that navigation list again:

Manuscripts | Fragments | Incunables | Calendars & Saints | Nuns’ Libraries (Projects) | Memoria | Early Modern Vorarlberg Resources |