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| 1728, 1336, 1338, 1340, 1655, 1532, 1557, 1612, 1597: How old is your evidence? |
The Chronicle of Thalbach is a mass of contradictions. (And what monastic chronicle isn’t?) For our chroniclist, history is a bit of a wrestling match, one that needs to reconcile institutional mandates with historical documentation in order to assert the convent’s enduring significance in a period of increasing bureaucratic scrutiny.
I’m starting back through for my fourth journey through the Thalbach Chronicle and its meanings. The chronicle is (largely) an early 18th century contextual document. In her narrative, the chroniclist tried to do three broad things:
- show the ongoing importance of the convent (with its relatively strong array of incoming novices and postulants and its significant leaders over time),
- trace its history as the oldest women’s monastery in Bregenz, and
- stake its claim as one of the significant Catholic monasteries in the region.
She was writing, in other words, from a position of (justifiable) pride in the convent’s history and its linkage to other convents in the region – a reformer of Wonnenstein, Brunnenstein, and Grimmenstein, for instance. To put it bluntly, she’s writing a history of (women’s) Catholicism triumphant.
As I am studying her narrative this time, however, I’m struck by two areas of tension that the chroniclist faces, though I’ll focus today primarily on the first of these. Notably, our chronicle historian faced a significant Then/Now challenge. She’s writing under command – the chronicle has been commissioned, or at least commanded, by her superiors, she tells us – but she’s also grounded in the documents and legacies of the past. Her audience, in other words, is uncertain. Is it the Catholic leadership? Her future sisters? Some external audience (such as the increasingly involved Imperial audience)? The convent stems from two generations before the Aufhebung, the monastic closures of the end of the century, and already the bureaucracy is closing in. There’s a sense in which that pressure to prove the monastery’s importance shapes the narrative as delivered.
To that end, the author claims that she is writing in “the year 1728” (Gathering 1, p. 3), but she is also writing “as I found it in the old writings of the house of God” (Gathering 1, p. 1). She is laying claim to “found” information; her narrative, she asserts, is document-based. And if document based, it must be authentic, yes? Such grounding in the convent record is important to her, for she repeats those claims several times. She cites the “old documents” of 1655 (Gathering 1, p. 4) and the “old booklet” (p. 7). Oldness is evidently a virtue in documents. Plus, she is clearly concerned about showing her authority and research capacities.
That trend of reference to “older” sources continues:
- There are “old records” which attest to Dorothea Kelhofferin’s role as Mater in 1532 (Gathering 2, p. 1).
- There are other unspecified “old writings” regarding Regula Weisin’s ascension (in 1557) as convent leader (Gathering 3, page 36). Regula was to serve in the role for forty years (1557-1597), so her selection was indeed a matter of significance for the convent
- In Gathering 4, p. 74, we learn about a gift of fish (!) that Amalia Loherin “then wrote this with her own hand in the old good book, which still exists” – one that dates back to 1612.
- Gathering 5a p. 102 suggests that Loherin may have been a kind of genius of accounting practices, since the 100fl, given “30 years ago,” was documented as coming due in 1627, a timely infusion of much-needed cash for the convent!
Oldness and designated leadership – the convent heroes who shaped the successes of the monastery over the centuries -- are thus intertwined. The venerable documentary record – the very stuff of “old records” -- reinforces the idea that significant people and significant documentation are coextensive. Oldness is, by implication, trustworthy. Thus, if an old record says something is so, it has authority.
Such references to Old Records draw us into the realm that Steven Colbert has designated as “Truthiness.” We trust the purported fact or story as much for how it makes us feel and how it explains historical happenings as for any external evidence of its reality. For instance, Amalia Loherin, our beloved financial wizard, is otherwise unattested by that name in the Thalbach record. This is perhaps a slight hiccup in the chroniclist’s pathway of argumentation; we only have her word that the documents (or the person) once existed. On the other hand, names do change; Amalia’s absence may be amended by future findings. And the vividness of the fish story is vivid enough to fit the category of stories that should have been true; she is telling a story here of how the convent came to be financially self-sufficient. The name may be wrong, but the implications – a fully funded and financially secure convent – are demonstrated through these anecdotes.
Even if she is sometimes telling anecdotes on slender evidence, our chroniclist does get frustrated with the absence of information in what convent documentation does survive. She found, for instance “in an old booklet… that the trustworthy and well-loved Mr. Hiltbrand-Brandenburg of Biberach had traveled to Rome in his post, but it is not written in which year it happened.” (Gathering 1, p. 7). As a researcher trying to tack-and-tie the details of her story, our chroniclist finds that the habits of earlier writers can be frustrating But she’s also sure that his actions were important; she exhorts her fellow monastics to say 3 rosaries on his behalf every year.
The second area of tension is that of convent identity. She’s sure, on the one hand, that the convent was founded by devout sisters, and supported by an unnamed widow. She is also equally convinced (or should that be, she is equally devoted to convincing us as readers) that the convent had always belonged to the Franciscan third order (p. 3), as early as 1338, or perhaps 1340 when the sisters went back to Constance. This is, of course, pish-posh – a historical fabrication generated on political grounds in a moment of intense political need. The convent only became Third Order when commanded to do so after the Council of Trent in the late 16th century. But that, as they say, is a story for another day.
TAKE-AWAY:
The Thalbach chronicler’s narrative invites us to consider how historical memory is shaped—not only by the documents themselves, but also by the pressures of the moment in which the author writes. The Thalbach chroniclist is concerned that we readers understand her reliance on written records from the convent archives. She did not, in fact, need to tell the reader that documents were old, so her framing of the age of her sources reflects her own intentionality. She is calling to the reader's attention this tension of past and present, historical story and living tradition. And she is doing so by naming her heroes, telling their stories, and even accounting for the convent’s annual gift of fish.
CHRONICLE SOURCE:
Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Kloster Thalbach Hs 9, Chronik des Klosters 1336-1629. References are to pagination where it exists, but to gathering and page number where formal pagination is missing. One gathering is out of order, and another (omitted entirely from the Vienna copy) has been separated in the archival record.
The Vienna copy (ÖNB Cod. 7406: Chronicle and Necrology) largely accords with the VLA copy on the points discussed above.
NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY: I use the gender-neutral label “chroniclist” rather than the masculine gendered “chronicler” to reflect the reality of women’s agency in the creation of such monastic chronicles. Though un-named, the chroniclist also served as convent archivist for several years; her hand is found frequently in the surviving archive records of the early 18th century.
