Crossroads of Identity: The Late Medieval Evolutions of a Hospital Community

Abstract

The community of Heilig Kreuz, outside Mainz, Germany, has long been something of a historiographical enigma. Its first internal records, dating to the mid-15th century, testify to the presence of a canonry “at the church of the Blessed Virgin in the fields outside the walls of Mainz.” In the scant scholarship on Heilig Kreuz, it has been characterized as replacing an earlier, informal community of lepers on the same site. In this paper I argue that, rather, the changing institutional form of the community was an attempt to guarantee continuity of care for the vulnerable. The codex containing the “customs and oaths” of the house testifies to a process of formalizing religious observance and affirming religious status that can be seen in other leper hospitals in the region throughout the later 15th century. The oaths for canons and clerks pledging “service to the persons residing there,” in a formula resembling that of many hospital rules concerning service of the sick, and the fact that the statutes were recorded “to avoid perils” that might otherwise befall the community, can be understood in the context of the efforts of the archbishops of Mainz to exercise more direct control over the city’s hospitals.

Introduction

In this paper, I aim to situate the medieval institution of Heilig Kreuz in the historiography, explicate relevant archival evidence, and make the case for Heilig Kreuz as a community of care. This institution, located in the central Rhine valley, near Mainz, no longer survives. In identifying it as a hospital, I depart from the historiography. I am arguing for continuities in the identity of a religious community. We should, I believe, see one community — despite its transformations — where the historiography has seen two: an informal refuge for the leprous, first, and secondly, a canonry, a house of clergy living together under shared vows. It is the canonry alone which has produced internal records. But the local archives of Mainz attest to the existence of a community with clerical and lay staff on the site of Heilig Kreuz for at least a century before the creation of the rules in the mid-15th century. And these statutes themselves contain, I believe, evidence for the ongoing provision of care by the canons of Heilig Kreuz, at a time when many local hospitals were experiencing external pressures as a result of political upheaval. As I have argued elsewhere, hospitals were defined under the law of the church as religious institutions. But the implications of this legal status for those who served as hospital staff, how hospitals were overseen, and who was understood to belong to the category of the sick-poor whom hospitals were obliged to serve, were contested throughout the later Middle Ages [1].

Study

In 1352, a shopkeeper named Katherine bequeathed sums to multiple religious institutions in and around Mainz. Her brother Peter, a priest and her executor, saw that Heilig Kreuz received three pounds towards the building of a church that had been commissioned by Archbishop Peter von Aspelt in 1320, as well as a separate sum for the brothers of the house [2]. Katherine’s will grouped Heilig Kreuz together with the canonries at St. Alban’s and St. Stephan, with communities of beguines and beghards, and with two of Mainz’s hospitals. Heilig Kreuz may have been founded as early as the 11th century, as Ludwig Falck has hypothesized [3]. By the 14th century, it was clearly an established community, both linked with other religious houses in and around the city and identified with a community of the leprous. I use this terminology because medieval leprosy and Hansen’s Disease are not always identical; nor was the disease stigmatized and accompanied by segregation in the medieval period as it was in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This case study can help us understand not only the history and understandings of the religious life, but also the history of medieval hospitals as communities providing care in a range of forms. The assertion that medieval hospitals, because they cannot easily be analyzed as precursors of hospitals in the modern, western, clinical model, should not be understood as “real” hospitals, does both the institutions and hospital historiography a disservice [4]. Heilig Kreuz had more communal stability than it did institutional documentation. Moreover, as so often in the case of hospitals, the sick residing there — the core population giving the place its purpose — are the group for which we have the least evidence. Nevertheless, the history of Heilig Kreuz can help us understand the history of such communities despite their archival vulnerability, the fact that a lack of post-medieval institutional continuity made it comparatively unlikely for their internal documents to survive. As Sethina Watson has recently argued, hospitals for which we do have surviving documentation represent the tip of a lost iceberg [5]. And from the interventions of bishops, donations of shopkeepers, rules devised for the community, and mentions of Heilig Kreuz in the records of hospitals and other religious institutions, we can piece together the history of a flexible community surviving on the legal periphery of the religious life in the later Middle Ages.

In speaking of a legal periphery, I am not seeking to evoke a religious landscape in which religious and quasi-religious communities stood on opposing sides of a divide or followed divergent trajectories. Rather, I am building on the scholarship of Sherri Franks Johnson, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, and others who have pointed out that religious communities could exist for long periods of time in a state of comparative fluidity, in what Elizabeth Makowski has analyzed as the space between ecclesiastical theory and practice [6-8]. In the archdiocese of Mainz, the tenure of particular archbishops correlates with phases of what we might term religious centralization, bringing individual houses into conformity — or apparent conformity — with canon law. This is visible under Siegfried III in the 1230s, Wernher von Epstein in the 1270s-80s, and Peter von Aspelt (r. 1306-20), who endowed the building of a new church at Heilig Kreuz. The creation of the bilingual book of statutes and oaths for the community, made in the second half of the 15th century, occurred at a time of turmoil. After the conflict over the archiepiscopal see between Dieter von Isenburg and Adolf von Nassau, from 1461-63, Mainz’s Heilig Geist Spital, having supported Dieter’s losing party, had passed back into the control of the cathedral chapter after centuries of independence. In the aftermath, Mainz’s other hospitals worked to shore up their claims to independent religious identity. The women’s community which managed the city’s “new hospital” sought a relationship with the nearby Cistercian cloister of Eberbach. The hospital of St. Katherine had its statutes written down in 1471. And the leper hospital of St. Georg started making copies of its charters, and received several sets of statutes in quick succession in the 1480s-90s [1]. I believe that the creation of Heilig Kreuz’ book of oaths and statutes was similarly motivated.

I turn now to the evidence we have for the history of Heilig Kreuz predating its 15th-century statutes, which present a very orderly — and a very incomplete — narrative. Mainz was a city of multiple independent hospitals by the mid-13th century, as well as other, smaller hospitals managed by the Benedictine abbeys of St. Alban and St. Jakob [9]. These were part of dense urban and peri-urban networks of religious institutions and individuals [10]. Where Heilig Kreuz appears in the documentary record in this period, it is linked both to St. Alban and St. Jakob, and to a community of the leprous outside the city walls [11,12]. These are only passing mentions, but they place Heilig Kreuz alongside other communities of care in the symbolic and religious topography of Mainz, bolstering my hypothesis about its communal identity.

The surviving 15th-century statutes show us Heilig Kreuz as a religious community, where previous archival appearances show it chiefly as a landmark in the peri-urban landscape of Mainz, appearing in charters and in the records of Mainz’s oldest hospital, helping them to map the inspection routes for their properties outside the city [13,14]. Such uses of communities as landmarks can help us see how medieval people understood their environments, and help us reconstruct religious and charitable as well as physical landscapes [15]. The existence of a community with a church at Heilig Kreuz is attested by both the episcopal records of Peter von Aspelt and by Katherine’s will. The surviving codex itself testifies to the existence of further internal records, now lost [16]. The earliest entries copied into the book are from 1404: a register of properties appears to have served as a binding for the oaths before its more elaborate, tooled binding was added. An early modern hand and pen have added cross-references to another manuscript in the margins of the oaths and statutes, and occasionally crossed out words.

The oaths of Heilig Kreuz began with a promise of obedience to the dean and prelates and continued with the statutes binding all new canons to make donations upon entry (Figure 1). All new canons were to pledge obedience, as well as consenting to share a communal seal with the abbots and communities of St. Alban and St. Jacob, and promising not to act in any way that would oppose the oaths of any of the canonries of Mainz. The vows then became more idiosyncratic. “Item,” ran the oath for new vicars, “that I will serve the customs and statutes of this place… both written and unwritten, that both have been and will be observed by the prelates and the persons of this church [16].” The fact that Heilig Kreuz, in topographical descriptions, is linked with those known as “guden leuden” and “maledern” (both of these terms are typically used in connection with leper hospitals in the central Rhineland), leads me to the hypothesis that these persons were diagnosed as having leprosy [17].

Figure 1.

Oath of the scholars, swearing service to the house and its residents. Stadtarchiv 13/190, f18v.

Property leased by the cathedral chapter to the hospital of St. Katherine includes fields “over the path by Heilig Kreuz, by the lepers.” The same document contains references to leprous persons residing in the field between the Heilig Geist Spital and Heilig Kreuz itself [11]. So, while Heilig Kreuz does not appear to have been organized as a leper hospital, it does appear to have been one of several religious communities which provided care for the leprous in and around Mainz. The formulae of the oaths to be taken by men assuming various roles in the community are — naturally — repetitive, but all of them include oaths of loyalty to “the persons of the place” as well as to the community as a whole. And this strikes me as suggestive, especially when considered alongside the emphasis on the antiquity and validity of the statutes themselves. Moreover, the oath-takers swear to work for the “service and honor [utilitatem et honorem]” of these “persons” in ways that parallel standard formulations in hospital rules, in which men and women swear to serve the needs of the sick [18,19]. In the vernacular version of the oaths, moreover, the persons become the “special persons of the foundation,” the “besundern personen,” and all those that “are near it or live therein,” men or women, who are to be kept from harm by day and night [16].

This very unusual formulation is consistent with the canonry’s association with communities of the leprous living outside the city. Members of such informal communities experienced more vulnerability than those with the legal privileges that living in hospitals provided [19]. But they also enjoyed more mobility and more autonomy. Studies of such informal communities of lepers present obvious archival challenges, and are still in their infancy [20]. But it is my hope that more work with archival sources by scholars aware of such communities may help us begin to replace them, as it were, in our imagined medieval landscapes. As attested by their statutes, the canons of Heilig Kreuz appear to have felt a sense of both legal and moral obligation to care for them. Whether this duty of care is also hinted at in Peter von Aspelt’s provision of a dedicated church, where the leprous would have been able to worship outside the city walls, must remain speculative [21].

The statutes of Heilig Kreuz as a whole community were written down “to avoid perils,” the sort of perils, according to the document’s authors, that had often befallen ecclesiastical houses and those associated with them, and which well might befall them in the future [16]. As discussed above, I believe this indicates that the community of Heilig Kreuz sought to safeguard its legal privileges as a religious institution, and thus continuity in the care the house provided (see especially chapter 1 from [1]). Today, following these statutes is a record of a 1450 chapter meeting, held on the feast day of the Holy Cross. This meeting was convened not only to address quotidian community business, but also to place limits on when and how they could admit new members, all of whom would be required to swear the oaths. Copied in at the conclusion of the codex, it appears to be the earliest lengthy record now extant of this active and anxious community [16].

Conclusions and Lacunae

As Figure 2 shows, I have not offered anything like a thorough treatment of all the records copied and compiled in the surviving statute book of Heilig Kreuz. But what I have attempted to do is to contextualize this unusual survival. At first glance, with its high-quality parchment and elegant red and blue capitals, it is a comparatively luxurious object made for a prosperous community. While it is such an object, it is also a record of commitment to care, and to guaranteeing legal safeguards for that care, at a time of political turmoil. The legal parameters for religious institutions were both refined and contested in the later Middle Ages. The implications of this for hospital communities — often both independent and impecunious — could be particularly fraught. In the statutes of Heilig Kreuz, I believe we see evidence both for the community’s defense of its independence in the turbulent mid-15th century, and for its ongoing concern with care for the leprous who resided in or around this house, at its crossroads in the fields. Such communities of the sick and those who cared for them can be hard to trace in the archival record because of the ways in which hospitals’ legal status changed in the later Middle Ages. But close attention to language and context can enable us to reconstruct a picture, however incomplete, of how and for whom hospitals functioned in late medieval Europe.

Figure 2.

Incomplete notes on community transactions. Stadtarchiv 13/190, f84v.

Funding Statement

I gratefully acknowledge the funding provided by the Fulbright Association for the research underlying this article. An early version was presented at the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America in 2022.