What’s yours is mine: a tale of greed at the closure of a monastery

There once were a set of sisters at Talheim bei Mössingen. They lived and prayed and made a life together. And then the Reformation came.

They were beloved of their neighbors, even though, for more than a generation, they stayed on as the Catholic holdovers in a mostly Protestant town. Why do we think so? They served as Godmothers – multiple times – in the local Protestant church register. Religious differences were evidently less important than social connection and pious behavior in the eyes of the broader community.

Such connectedness, however, did not actually help them much when it did come time for the convent to shutter its doors. During these closing years, the convent had been secularized, but the sisters were – in theory – permitted to reside there until death. Theory and practice, however, do not always align.

And this is where our lively cast of characters comes in. Let’s meet them in social-hierarchy order:

• DUKES: Protestant Duke Ludwig of Württemberg, and his successor Duke Friedrich, generally well-intentioned but not always on top of the details. They know a thing or two about authority, though!
• ASSISTANCE PROVIDED BY: the Catholic Count of Fürstenberg, where the sisters held properties. He supports them, but sometimes that support takes strange shapes!
• EVIL-DOING LOCAL NOBLE: Caspar von Karpffen, holder of a quarter of the town of Talheim and always eager for more. See also his daughter Sabina, and Sabina’s husband Christoph von Karpffen: The von Karpffen family demands all the sisters' things – and Caspar holds two sisters hostage until they deed away their property. Then it really gets ugly.
• FUERSTENBERG BAILIFF from Trochtelfingen: to help with the tussle, he too abducts a sister. “To protect her.” With friends like these, who needs enemies? This act draws the ire of the Württemberg dukes, and then absolutely everyone (except the sisters) engages in a big game of "No, no, no, MY authority."

The story itself goes like this.

In 1593, Caspar von Karpffen imprisoned two sisters in Talheim Castle, supposedly because of offenses they had committed. What offenses? Theodor Schön, whose 1890 account supplies this story, does not explain. Nor is it a one-week lockup situation: he keeps them imprisoned for two years. He finally releases them in 1595, after they sign an agreement to give him all their property. He “generously” promises them an allowance. Insert maniacal laughter clip here.

Because, yeah, the amount he pays them is so small, they couldn’t afford their bread on a daily basis. I guess eating is optional? Anyway, that’s von Karpffen in a nutshell: a nasty piece of work.

Nor was this simply a matter of taking over their fields while leaving the sisters comfortably housed (as the legal agreements stipulated). Oh, no. Silverware, church ornaments, bedding, livestock: their movable possessions went to the von Karpffen household too. And he wasn’t done: after stripping away the means of supporting themselves and the little luxuries like blankets and eating utensils, Karpffen continued to demand that they pay taxes, including the extensive Turkish levy, along with further burdens and exactions. Not even begging could make up this deficit.

And sometimes the help that you get is… complicated. The Count of Fürstenberg intervened, but for reasons that remain obscure to me, his bailiff forcibly removed a sister. “For her protection” is kind of vague. Here, let me abduct you to keep you safe. Ummmm, not sure that’s a win.

Nor was it deemed politically proper. Von Karpffen – in whose territory the sisters still live, be it remembered – complained to Duke Ludwig. In his version of the story, Fürstenberg support was a vile intrusion into Württemberg’s jurisdiction for no reason at all. Instead of asking what was going on (the dukes, not always ones for asking for fussy details like “and what did the victim say”), the duke had the bailiff arrested – and also had him fined 200 guilders. When doing your job actually costs you money; the bailiff wasn’t having a very good day.

So there we are. The first two sisters had been released, but into abject poverty. Another sister has been carried off, and the official response becomes a dispute over whose official was entitled to do what, and where. The women’s predicament had become an occasion for men to defend their rights of government. Neener-neener.

Yet those competing claims also gave the sisters somewhere to turn. Duke Ludwig initially accepted Karpffen’s account, but he wasn’t bad at heart. He actually intervened on the sisters’ behalf once he learned more. Crucially, Schön reports that Ludwig considered the punishment of the sisters beyond Karpffen’s authority. That two-year arrest had been out of bounds.

It was going well for the sisters, but then Duke Ludwig died before he could bring the matter to a satisfactory conclusion. Sigh. His successor, Friedrich, however, continued to work on the intervention, trying to sort through competing claims, and tending to the needs of his subjects, ALL of his subjects.

So what happened? Duke Friedrich reprimanded von Karpffen, and then summoned the parties before the ducal chancellery. But it feels just like a present-day story: the judge commands, but Karpffen failed to appear. Officials went to him. He supplied excuses, poor excuses. Plus, he refused to return the property.

Eventually, under renewed pressure, von Karpffen yielded—but with a reservation, of course. The sisters could have their property back, but after their deaths, he claimed, it should come to him.

The Württemberg officials had other things to do. So they accepted the transfer without actually settling whether that future claim had any validity. For the moment, the women could resume possession, have their land cultivated, gather the harvest, and collect outstanding rents. Most of their property was recovered.

You might think this would be the point at which von Karpffen admitted defeat. You would be wrong.

In July 1601, he had his local official remove the sisters’ hay from their meadows. Hay. They have a showdown over a field of hay.

But hay gets your livestock through the winter. It is an asset: stored nourishment, future milk, the means of keeping your valuable animals alive. How would you like it if the local noble decided to help himself to your vacation fund—and to your winter’s food budget? And then sent you the tax bill on top of that?

Taking the hay was actually an attack on the sisters’ ability to make use of the property they had just recovered. Possession on paper was one thing. Getting the harvest safely home was another. You can tell me what to do, but you can’t make me do it.

So the sisters did what they had to do: they filed another complaint. This time, Friedrich ordered his officials to uphold their restored possession. And on July 27, the Württemberg Schultheiß, a local governing magistrate, arrived at the meadow. Nor did he come alone. Tempers were getting short, and von Karpffen needed a lesson. So the Württemberg magistrate showed up with approximately thirty peasants armed with spears and pitchforks. (Insert visual mob scene from any historic film you’ve ever seen, with raging peasants and a sense of urgency.) They drove away Karpffen’s rival official – and then they hauled off the hay.

Thirty peasants. Spears. Pitchforks. Two competing officials. The hay now had an armed escort.

After which, naturally, came the lawyers.

On April 3, 1602, the two sisters, Veronica Waldträffin and Apollonia Spindlerin, appointed Sebastian Wolf to represent them. I particularly like this detail. These women mostly appear passive in the account; they serve as prisoners, dependents, and objects of protection. Here, on the other hand, we see them taking direct action: securing legal representation to defend their interests. I guess the time had come!

Von Karpffen, meanwhile, obtained a mandate from the Imperial Chamber Court awarding him the disputed hay – or its value if it was no longer available – with a substantial penalty attached to noncompliance. Schön attributes this result to “false representations,” and I’ll take his word on the point, having not read the court records myself. So von Karpffen’s not just a scheming meany; he’s a lying scheming meany. Got it.

Imagine being the sisters. You’ve recovered your property through ducal intervention. Someone takes your harvest. The duke’s men recover it. And now an imperial court says the man who took it is actually owed the hay.

The duke submitted objections. But it’s a legal case; long-lived and complicated. The dispute outlived Caspar von Karpffen, who died in 1603. It also outlived Duke Friedrich, who died in 1608.

Eventually, it outlived the sisters.

And this is where the family connections matter. Caspar had already assigned his claim to the convent to his son-in-law, Christoph, as a marriage portion for his daughter Sabina. Property that still supported living religious women had now been promised as somebody else’s marriage settlement.

Brazen thievery apparently works. After the last sister’s death, Christoph von Karpffen took possession. And, as Schön’s account shows, the convent and its estates subsequently passed through further family marriage arrangements.

What’s yours is mine. And then it’s my daughter’s dowry. And her daughter’s beyond that. And so on, and so on, and so on.

There is one final complication. Schön tells this story with considerable indignation, but his concluding concern is that property intended for religious purposes ended up in private hands. He praises the Württemberg dukes for preserving former Catholic church wealth for Protestant ecclesiastical uses. His preferred outcome was that Württemberg should acquire the estate and devote at least part of it to church purposes.

That makes the dukes’ role worth examining carefully. Their interventions materially helped the sisters. Their interests also extended to what would happen after the women were gone.

For the sisters, meanwhile, the urgent questions were rather more immediate. Could they get their property back? Collect their rents? Keep their bedding? Feed their animals through another winter? Did they ever get their knives, forks, and spoons back?

They had neighbors who named them godmothers, officials who intervened, a lawyer to represent them, and a duke willing to send thirty armed peasants into a meadow.

And still they had to fight for the hay.

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WORKS CITED

Gerhard Kittelberger, “Franziskanerinnenkloster Talheim”, Klöster in Baden-Württemberg, http://www.kloester-bw.de/?nr=538. Kittelberger’s entry alerted me to the story. 

Beschreibung des Oberamts Rottenburg, second edition, vol. II (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1900), p. 353-4. Includes a summary of the sisters’ Statutes of 1401 and contextual details.

Theodor Schön, “Die letzten Schicksale des Beguinenklosters zu Thalheim im Oberamt Rottenburg,” Blätter für württembergische Kirchengeschichte 5 (1890): 82–84. Best German-language rendition of the story. 

And yes, I enjoyed this tale well enough to pursue it bibliographically even though it WASN'T on my list of things to do! 

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Kin, Cash, and Convent: Providing for Nieces (and Nephews) in 1613 Bludenz: A determined aunt uses her will to support a niece’s religious future—with conditions attached. Another encounter with convents, inheritance, and the family politics of deciding who gets what.

When the Gestapo Came for the Sisters: A much later chapter in the history of forced convent closures, drawn from testimony preserved in the Nuremberg Trial records. The consequences reached beyond cloister walls into schools, charitable work, and the communities the sisters served.

Listening in on the Nuns’ Rebellion at Kloster Goldenstein: What happens when sisters refuse to accept that someone else has finished deciding where they belong? Three elderly nuns of the present-day reclaim their convent, and their familiar sounds of prayer and daily life become an assertion of their right to remain.

Elvis, Neumes, and Ethiopian Manuscripts: Music on Display at HMML

One of the gifts of my particular time at HMML has been the installation of a music exhibit in the various display cases. What a happy alignment of interests! Since I wander past the exhibit every day, and have had occasion to lunch with Sarah, the intern who contributed to its existence, I thought I’d post a few of the tidbits here.

First, because I am a wee bit homesick, and because my husband Tom would LOVE this, is the “random physical object in a music-adjacent world”: the five-dollar bill signed by Elvis Presley. You know, I’ve thought about the collecting of artists’ signatures, and I’ve thought about music and money, but I’ve never actually thought of those categories as a Venn diagram!

What this says about music and fan culture and the provision of ready paper, of course, could be a narrative all its own. I’m here for the pop of pleasure that the unexpected brings, and will not talk about whether or not our own Velvet Elvis – another kind of artistic adjacency -- might or might not have ornamented the bathroom in our early years. Ahem.

On the more serious front, there’s the binding scrap, with its oh-so-visible adjustments (read: manuscript cutouts) to accommodate its post-musical role as book-binding material:

The physicality of the loss, with its five strips removed -- presumably so that the page would lie flat around the binding cords that would have tied a bulky front or back cover to the spine of the book – speaks to the parchment’s afterlife.

But equally important to my eye (and ear) is the representation of how the music sounded across the page. Above, we get the more ornate, multi-note neumes of the opening of the introit antiphon. You can just see the bowl of the “P” since the line of the letter has been trimmed off to the left. Underlining shows what’s survived: Protector noster, aspice Deus, et respice in faciem Christi tui…  — “Look upon us, O God our protector, and look upon the face of your anointed…” Then, in contrast, the simplicity of its accompanying psalm tone: Quam dilecta tabernacula tua, Domine virtutum  — “How lovely are your dwelling places, O Lord of hosts.” Note note note note note note.

And then, wow, the Alleluia (with the red bar for a squiggly ornate “A”) and the soloistic falderol of the tumbling untexted neumes before the start of the verse. What a contrast! Even when we can’t reconstruct the specifics of the pitch from the musical source itself (since these are unheighted neumes; we get the musical gesture but not the musical notes), we can tell that variety was at the heart of the service, and can see visibly (wow, that Alleluia) what relish a musician of the day might have felt in working through the combination of obligatory text and the musical variety that comes with it.

For my third example, I have lingered by the least familiar items, the Ethiopian examples, since I know relatively little about them, and HMML has been so active in the preservation of those materials. Ethiopia was HMML’s first significant project with Eastern Christian manuscripts – one that resulted in a collection of 9K microfilms, the Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Library (EMML). It’s a real research boon. Plus, I was able to sit in on a lunch-and-learn about repatriating some … inappropriately sourced … manuscripts that had turned up in the West and needed to be sent back to their true home. There should be a HMML news story soon; the trip resulted in some impressive international press!

Anyway, among the music materials on display, there is this lovely combination book of Marian praises and liturgical items – the Me'eraf, which is a book for the Divine Office:

You’ll notice that this 18th-century book has had what we describe in my world as “extensive wear.” It’s not pristine-clean; the large visible stain at the bottom is joined by what I would guess are the oils and fingerprints that discolor the bottom right margin where the page would be touched to turn it. You can still see the pricking marks along the edges that guided the shaping of the page. Though its ornate upper border still is present, the darkening of the page suppresses its once-vivid colors. And you can see there on the bottom left that someone wrote in the once-blank spaces. This is a book that was used.

It is also a book that includes interlineal (between the lines) musical details. In that way, it’s much like the books with which I am familiar. Whether in Austria or Ethiopia, church scribes found ways to represent a complicated art. There are words, there are sounds, there are pauses and contrasting musical gestures. To copy such a thing is a time-consuming act. To copy such a thing is a labor of love. To copy such a thing is a gift to humanity – a spiritual legacy that is still visible to us in the present day. That’s a thread of human connection right there, and one that brings my book-loving heart a moment of deep and satisfying pleasure.

To have a display is always a joy; there are more things in the world than one researcher can ever, ever see. The display cases give the scholar-in-residence a chance to wander around looking at the things that caught another person’s eye, and the threads that tie those disparate objects together.

A display like this activates an internal ear, giving me space to imagine contexts and sounds in new ways. I’ve spent an uncomfortable amount of time “reading” the scores in my head as I do a few necessary stretches. Toes, heels, toes, heels, to the accompaniment of a mental reconstruction of some quite experimental works.

As I’ve dwelt with the display—and, as the finishing touches appeared, with its explanatory labels—I’ve realized how much these encounters feed the focused work inside my carrel. How does music manifest outside performance itself? What do our own musical shorthands suggest about how a historical person might have understood such a reference? What does alluding to music do in a particular context? And might the strange-to-me, known-to-thee quality of some of these items—that mix of recognition and bewilderment—help me think about how people with different kinds of musical knowledge encountered the same object? Such questions follow me back to my research. In its own way, the musical display will have influenced the shape of the discussion that emerges from my own project research.

All because a person needs to get up and stretch every couple of hours. 

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