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.
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.
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