Commemorating the Dead in Late Medieval Strasbourg

The city of Strasbourg is a familiar place to scholars of the sixteenth-century Reformation, an urban centre of unquestioned significance. Its stature in the scholarship of the later middle ages is by no means so pronounced, but wrongly so: it was quite the equal in wealth, influence, and cultural life to its more well-studied southern German counterparts, such as Nuremberg and Augsburg—and, dare one say, to the cities of northern Italy. Charlotte Stanford’s study of the memorial culture of Strasbourg in this period makes, therefore, an important contribution not just to the history of the city, but to scholarly awareness of the rich archival resources which it has to offer. The ‘Book of Donors’ (Strasbourg, Archives de la Ville et de la Communauté urbaine [Archives municipales], 1 OND 1) is a form of obituary register recording donations to the institution known in Latin as the fabrica, in German as the Frauenwerk, in French as the Œuvre Notre-Dame, and best rendered into English as ‘Our Lady’s Works’ (in the sense of ‘a works’, a factory); an establishment which was both the cathedral building-yard itself and the endowment fund which supported it. It maintained a chapel dedicated to Mary in a prominent location within the cathedral, right in front of the choir screen, and collected donations on a massive scale: the book contains 6,954 entries, listing 8,622 gifts, by 7,803 individuals through to the year 1521. The object of Stanford’s study is very much a piece of civic history: of those individual donors whose status can be determined with certainty, 422 were religious, but 3,374 were lay

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Chapel · Choir · Endowment · Ephemera · German · Listing (finance · Political science · Scholarship · Visual arts · Classics · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity