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

A surprisingly familiar complaint

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

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

In other words: nobody wants to work for free.

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

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

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

A document that almost turned the corner

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

For a moment, then, this looked promising.

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

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

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

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

Why were they grousing? They had cause.

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

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

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

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

And the priests insisted that things were getting worse:

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

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

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

The infrastructure underneath devotion

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

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

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

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

It was also about who still had the money.

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

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Resources

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

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

You might also be interested in:

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

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

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

A Blogroll for the Avid Reader

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

By all means, suggest other discoveries in the comments.

NUNS, BOOKS, WOMEN, AND MATERIAL THINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MUSICOLOGY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LARGER-SCALE MUSICOLOGY

Musicology Now — https://musicologynow.org/

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

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

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

RILM Bibliolore — https://bibliolore.org/

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

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

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

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Building for the Ear (from Chaco Canyon to Medieval Vorarlberg), in which a Soundscape article made me think differently about all those uphill climbs I took in Austria -- and their sound implications.

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

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

Sooner or Later It All Gets Done: How History Emerges from Small Details

One of the recurring themes in my scholarly life is “lots of little details.” That’s true of many things in life, of course, but this morning I’m struck with its scholarly application. I’m prone to taking account of a lot of bits-of-evidence, the small details that by themselves are trivial but in the big picture add up to something significant. Assuming I’m lucky, of course.

Historians often inherit sources shaped by earlier editors’ priorities, so part of my work has been learning how to ask new questions of familiar materials. Many of our sources with “lots of details” come from the nineteenth century -- Ludwig Rapp and his mastery of parish clerical details in Topographisch-historische Beschreibung is one of my current faves! Wow, what a collector of detail! So truly, local archives and chronicle accounts were edited by folks excited for what the data can show – about war, about politics, about economics. Their questions, however, did not always extend to other kinds of questions, like those about relationships, and households, and famine, and fear.

Thus, even in a place like Bregenz, where the surviving sources were so negatively impacted by war, and invasion, and the predations of time, I love that there are still questions I can ask, and answers in the little details that come from careful consideration of the sources with new questions in mind. I’ve turned up “new” sources on Thalbach, for instance, not by finding actual new documents, but by reading the extant documents for details that didn’t matter to the indexers of past times – payments to and charity for the devout women of the town. Sometimes the clue is as small as a repeated instruction to light a candle at a grave — something no nineteenth-century editor thought worth indexing, but wonderfully delicious for my argument.

And now, I’m plowing my way through prayerbooks, looking for ways in which spirituality is manifest not as treatise but as practice. We have given preference to the authorial voice, particularly those by named authors and/or those approved by the church, for instance. But what is interesting to me is how those sermon-shaped ideas became fixed in these women’s lives – not so much what they *heard* but what they *did* with that spiritual guidance provided to them.

So yes, I’m reading 15^th century prayerbooks for fun and enlightenment. I think these sources can tell us something important – not so much about what these women actually believed, but about what they did as a matter of practice. Actions speak louder than words; prayers, repeated, and copied, and collected, and shared, tell us a lot about how belief became present as part of daily life.

That’s an awful lot of words, of course. Words words words. Oodles and scads of words. 397 folios of words in one case. 120 pages of words in another.

But little by little by little, and sooner or later it all gets done.

Or, as we also say, “every day a little progress.”

That, in the end, is often how historical knowledge grows: not from dramatic discoveries, but from patient attention to what earlier readers overlooked. And spreadsheets. But that’s another post.

WORKS CITED

Image from Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek, Hs 17: a late 16th-century Thalbach prayerbook, fol. 216, "O junckfrow maria ain künigin der himel," marked with a tab in its left-hand margin.

Ludwig Rapp, Topographisch-historische Beschreibung des Generalvikariates Vorarlberg, 5 vols (Brixen: Weger, 1894-1924). I especially love volumes 2 & 3, the Bregenz volumes.