Der Bischof als Vater der Armen: Otto von Bamberg (German Edition)

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In Germany, however, the tumulus cult remained rare, and in Bavaria in particular no pilgrimages to local saints' graves arose in the early Middle Ages, besides those to cathedrals and monastic churches. Le Goff, and J. Zeugen christlichen Glauben in Bayern , 3 vols. Michael Buchberger Regensburg, , pp. During the later Middle Ages, new kinds of cults competed with these older tumulus devotions.

Perhaps the first to emerge to challenge the grave cult, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was the eucharistic cult, occupying an intermediary position between the physicality of the older types of devotion and the subsequent forms of visual and imagistic piety. At the shrines of these cults, the Eucharist was revered much like a relic; but it was the sensual act of viewing the hosts that transferred onto the faithful a kind of salvific grace. The legends associated with these sites vividly evoke the steady rise of eucharistic devotion in the later Middle Ages and the diffusion of the belief in the Real Presence.

Miraculously preserved from mistreatment at the hands of women, magicians, heretics, and Jews, the host was celebrated at Bavaria's shrines as a divine locus that possessed the power to protect and avenge itself. The consecrated wafer performed its miracles in various ways. When dropped by the careless, it refused to be moved from its resting place. For those who desired to use it for magic, the wafer bled as a warning. For those who doubted the divine presence, apparitions appeared to convince them. And when tortured, the host revealed its agonies to Christians who avenged the crime.

In Bavaria, this last, most frequently retold legend about the Eucharist was often associated with the Jews. During two successive waves of pilgrimage foundations in the mid fourteenth and late fifteenth centuries, a number of shrines dedicated to "Bleeding Hosts" appeared in the territory.

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The legends retold about these sites often explained and justified Jewish pogroms. Because of their hatred of Christ, the narrative intoned, Jews would purchase hosts from a Christian betrayer and torture them in ways. When the hosts would begin to bleed as a warning, the Jews, to hide their crime, would throw the wafers into a fiery furnace, but they would not be consumed. In the legends of some shrines, a vision of the Christ child also appeared. In desperation, the myth related, the Jews would cast the wafers into wells or into a river that would immediately turn blood-red.

The Virgin or angels would appear to announce the crime to Christians, who would avenge the deed by executing the offending Jews and the "Judas" who had betrayed Christian society by supplying the wafers to the Jews. Within the boundaries of Bavaria, shrines with legends like these were especially common in the Donauraum , the region of northern Lower Bavaria straddling the Danube River, a fact that reveals the presence of a deeply rooted tradition of Jewish hatred in the region.

They could be tortured and defiled, and yet could triumph over their oppressors. Legends of the Bleeding Host celebrated the Eucharist as a locus for overcoming evil. Even while cults like these proliferated in Bavaria in the later Middle Ages, a number of others also appeared. Late medieval Bavarians journeyed to holy places associated with a saint, to wonder-working images of the Virgin, and to the graves of long-deceased thaumaturgists.

The first of these types of cults, that of the locus sanctus , was particularly widespread in Bavaria in the later Middle Ages. In contrast to sites with relics or saintly graves, a "holy place" shrine possessed no physical remains of the saint. Its appeal resided primarily in the perception that it was a locale particularly blessed with the saint's patronage.

In the absence of the tangible presence of the patron by way of objects like relics or artistic images, legends served to link the saint to specific places, and the subsequent tradition of thaumaturgy and intercession—often assidu-. At the locus sanctus of St. Leonhard at Inchenhofen, for example, the church possessed not even an image of this French noble saint until centuries after the pilgrimage had commenced.

The church was in fact home to but a tiny and insignificant devotion for quite a while; then as one medieval cleric tells us, Leonhard performed a stunning miracle of retribution. One day, three knights and forty horsemen visited Inchenhofen looking for a place to set up camp. Seeing signs of devotion at the church, though, and recognizing it as a holy place, the warriors searched elsewhere. Immediately after they left Leonhard's presence, one of the knights was struck dead, and his companions discovered two stolen chickens in his saddle bags.

Knowledge of this judicious punishment soon circulated in the region; Inchenhofen's pilgrimage grew dramatically, and Leonhard's presence continued to be confirmed through an ongoing tradition of thaumaturgy and intercession. The case of Inchenhofen was typical. At the same time as numinous "holy places" like these were growing in popularity, Bavaria's older grave cults also experienced a renaissance. In much of Europe, these shrines survived only as a kind of archaic remnant; yet in Bavaria, the clergy at a number of ancient abbeys, monasteries, and cathedrals moved to revive these devotions in the years around Long-forgotten saints like St.

Simpert at Augsburg or St. Rasso at Grafrath were rediscovered and their bodies ceremonially exhumed and transferred to newer, grander tombs that became the destination for large numbers of pilgrims. In much of Western Europe, widespread Marian devotion had first begun to appear in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Such worship was a fundamental departure from preexisting cults, since.

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Ottilien, , 5: Marian pilgrimages were tied to images and statues rather than to sacred places, relics, or hosts. According to legend, Mary's body had been assumed into heaven with few relics left behind; as a consequence, images became the central object for the faithful's devotion at the Virgin's shrines.

In a study of the Marian images of Bavaria, however, Torsten Gebhard proved unable to verify the presence of a single statue or image of the Virgin within the territory before the early fourteenth century. The oldest Marian images from this period employ the iconography of the sedes sapientiae , or "throne of wisdom," an early medieval type of depiction that had already fallen into disuse in most of Western Europe by the time it appeared in Bavaria. These images portray Mary as the theotokos , or "God-bearer"; she sits in a rigid forward direction and presents the Christ child to onlookers as the embodied Word of God.

This iconographic evidence suggests that a widespread, autonomous Marian devotion did not exist in Bavaria during much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Although several Marian shrines appeared in Bavaria in the mid-fifteenth century, devotions at these places remained localized. In , miracles began to be reported at a small chapel in this town believed to date to Carolingian times. Within several years thousands of pilgrims from. Beobachtungen zur Chronologie und Typologie," in Kultur und Volk. Bavaria and the southern empire had transformed the formerly insignificant church into one of the most popular destinations in Germany.

Members of the imperial nobility, the Lower and Upper Bavarian dukes, and even the Holy Roman emperor processed there, showering the site with ostentatious gifts. In alone, the shrine's revenue totaled 12, pfund pfennig , a sum equivalent to the contemporary value of roughly 4, horses or 6, cows.

And despite the pilgrimage's decline from to as a result of that conflict, it soon revived and continued to be a popular destination until Throughout the period , the Wittelsbach dynasty had continually supported the site, bestowing it with attentions otherwise reserved for only a few of the most important places of pilgrimage in the territory. Although the Marian cult was the last major type of pilgrimage to develop in Bavaria, it quickly enjoyed a widespread appeal. Rather than supplanting the other already-established host and saints' cults, however, Marian devotion continued in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to flourish alongside older pilgrimages.

Indeed, the late medieval flowering of lay piety in Bavaria was expressed largely through the simultaneous popularity of these various cults. Describing his fellow countrymen in the early sixteenth century, the humanist Johannes Aventinus included the observation that Bavarians were "pious, By , an explosion of devotion in the region had forged a sacral landscape characterized by an almost bewildering variety of sacred sites and the frequent processions of villages and individual pilgrims.

In the late fifteenth century, 3 pfund 30 pfennig would buy a horse, 1 pfund pfennig a cow. Bavaria's shrines were marketplaces in a sacred economy, exchanging healing, intercession, and indulgences in return for a pilgrim's visits, prayers, and gifts. Although visited by all types of people, including burghers, artisans, and nobles, these were primarily sites of peasant pilgrimage. Seeking cures or aid in some otherwise hopeless circumstance, the faithful approached their saintly patrons with prayers and vows, promising journeys if they received aid.

To make their entreaties more attractive, however, the prospective pilgrim offered a gift along with the appeal. Most often, votants cautiously stipulated that they would present the gift only if they were helped. In the later Middle Ages much gift-giving was a fairly simple affair: The giving of basic materials like these was usually deemed sufficient to entice the saints to use their powers of intercession. These items, moreover, were an important source of revenue for the clergy who resided at the pilgrimage church, and markets sometimes developed to resell the gifts to other pilgrims.

The relationship established by a votant's invocation of the saints was a contractual one and an essential first step on the path to receiving aid. For those who were incapacitated and incapable of making the vow, others would promise for the afflicted. The recipients of saintly help, however, were bound to fulfill the promise of pilgrimage and gift presentation. Shirking this responsibility invalidated the original vow and resulted in punishment by the saint—a sort of spur to make good on the contract.

Medieval miracle records include numerous stories warning pilgrims not to neglect the timely completion of their promise lest they begin to suffer their diseases or hardship again. In surviving records from late medieval Bavaria, this perception of miracles as the product of an unequal yet contractual exchange is common. Would-be pilgrims prayed to the saints,. Shrines may have functioned thus as important components in a sacred economy, yet they were not completely free, unregulated markets.

The clergy labored to control, nurture, and expand them, turning to a variety of media for purposes of promotion. Since late antiquity, the recording and pronouncement of a saint's miracles had served numerous polemical, apologetic, and propagandistic purposes. In his City of God , for example, the fourth-century bishop Augustine, having overcome early doubts about the reality of contemporary saintly intercession, used numerous miracles worked by the orthodox saints Stephen, Gervasius, and Protasius to polemicize against the Arians and Donatists.

In an increasingly orthodox Europe, however, the clergy who ministered at various cultic centers often considered it helpful to collect pilgrims' testimonies that proved the efficacy of their own patron and allowed their cult to compete in the increasingly diverse and crowded arena of devotion. In twelfth- and thirteenth-century France and England, scribal records of miracles began to be made at numerous places.

In Bavaria, the practice of setting down these testimonies was known as early as the eleventh century, but only in the later Middle Ages did it become truly widespread. Prompted by a rising desire to learn about cases of supernatural intervention, as well as the general increase in pious devotion, Bavaria's clergy became some of Europe's most diligent recorders of saintly miracles. The exchange relationship has also been noted for France and England; see Sigal, L'homme et le miracle , pp.

Augustine, De Civitate Dei: The City of God , trans. John O'Meara Harmondsworth, Middlesex, , bk. Augustine's attitude toward miracles is discussed in Brown, Cult of the Saints , pp. Theory, Record, and Event , Philadelphia, , pp. This cataloguing of a saint's contemporary miracles served several functions. First, because the shrines at which the cures and interventions occurred were generally small, drawing their clientele largely from the immediate vicinity, publicity helped the clerics to assure devotees of the saint's continued effectiveness in the region.

Recorded miracles were thus proclaimed to pilgrims on the church's annual feast days, when traffic at the shrine was heaviest. Included in the records were the votant's name and place of residence, the nature of his or her problem, and, usually, the year in which the miracle occurred. Second, the details of these wonders concretized a patron's intercession, thus bolstering the shrine's viability; through use of this information, clerical promoters labored to increase the size and scope of their cult.

Third, miracles supported a cult's claim to indulgences—the official Church's sanction for a pilgrimage and an important currency in the late medieval spiritual economy. Oral proclamation was well suited to a society in which only a small fraction of the entire population was literate. Yet a growing desire to hear and learn about cases of supernatural intervention-a desire evident from the rising attention in the fifteenth century to the recording of such miracles—also inspired the adoption of new media to expand the advertisement of specific sites.

Crystallized into pictures, retold in sermons, lauded in songs and poems, and published in modest broadsides and pamphlets, miracles became the focus of an active trade by Bavaria's clergy and laity in the generations immediately preceding the Reformation. Around , the pictorial depiction of these testimonies in commissioned altar cycles began to flourish in Bavaria. The distilling of wonders into narrative pictorial cycles possessed a unique advantage over oral pronouncement: It would be a mistake, though, to view such developments as born solely of clerical calculation. These representational offerings, painted or carved in wood and wax, described pictorially the aid the pilgrim had received thanks to his or her prayerful vow to the saint.

Left at the shrine, they functioned like the altar cycles as an enduring testimony, stronger than mere wax or money, to the saint's aid. Both the pictorial and oral pronouncement of miracles functioned only within the pilgrimage church proper. In the late fifteenth century, however, the clergy adopted printing as another medium for broadcasting the news of their patron's effectiveness.

With the publication of printed pamphlets, illustrated broadsides, and thin chapbooks they moved to extend their promotional campaigns beyond the physical confines of their churches. Procured at the souvenir booths that surrounded the pilgrimage church, the printed work traveled home with its new owner and could spread word of a shrine's miraculous power among those who had not personally made the journey. In an environment saturated with claims of supernatural intervention, Bavaria's pilgrims appear to have questioned the veracity of these accounts but rarely.

For these people, miracles served as the primary confirmation of the sanctity of local holy places. As a result, in the generation before the Reformation, the thin "miracle book" emerged as the single most common kind of printed document used to advertise a shrine. Nevertheless, its adoption remained relatively limited. Printed editions from this period survive from only three sites, all of the Marian cult: Harmening notes the relationship between these two developments-that is, miracle picture cycles commissioned by shrines and representational votives given by pilgrims: Jahr Nuremberg, ; In dysem buchlein seind begriffen die wunderbarliche zaychen beschehen zu Regenspurg zu der schoenen Maria der mutter gottes Nuremberg, ; In dysem Buchlein seind begriffen die wunderbarlichen zaychen beschehen zu Regenspurg zu der schoenen Maria der mutter gottes Nuremberg, ; Wunderbarlichen czychen vergangen Jars beschehen jn Regenspurg tzw der schoenen Maria der mueter gottes hye jn begriffen Regensburg, Landt Freysinger Bistumbs gelegen.

Etliche Mercklich furpit Marie seiner werden Mueter Munich, Under this last title the Tuntenhausen clerics published updated miracle books in the following years: A common style characterizes most of the printed miracle books published between and the onset of the Catholic Reformation around Usually thin, about eight to ten pages long, having a title page decorated with a print of the Virgin, these books presented a series of miracle reports taken from the shrine's manuscript collections.

The accounts were usually retold in simple succession, with miracles tumbling one after another. To keep costs low, the literary style remained simple, even terse, with conjunctions and sentence subjects frequently omitted. Only occasionally did the author attempt to corroborate or fortify these accounts with the names of witnesses or an explanation of all the circumstances surrounding the event.

Even more rarely was any effort made to place these testimonies into an interpretive framework. Most often, the pamphlet's title page announced simply that these "wonders" had been reported at the shrine and were now being published so they could be more widely known. Although briefer than most, the first surviving Alt-. It recounted a mere twenty-five miracles, a small selection from the scores that were likely on the books at the shrine at this time.

This book, like many published in Bavaria before the Reformation, was not organized in strict chronological fashion: Nor was any classification scheme used. Cases of people revived from death or near death appeared alongside the stories of those who received relief from rheumatism or a difficult childbirth. Each miracle was piled one on top of another in simple succession in a kind of ongoing narrative testimony to the multiplicity and diversity of the Virgin's intercession. Longer at fifty-four pages than most of the early miracle books, it exhibits a greater degree of technical and literary finesse than the others as well.

Wax votive images of arms, legs, and children hang all around the Virgin, and pilgrims flank her on the right and left. Two pilgrims kneel in prayer before Our Lady's altar; another approaches on a wooden leg, offering a wax foot as a votive gift. To the left of the Virgin, a man is depicted impaled on a torturing wheel; blood flowing from his body is being lapped up by a dog. This section of the print refers to the last miracle narrated in the book, the story of an unjust imprisonment and torture rectified by the Virgin.

There are considerable differences between the style of the book and that of Isseckemer's edition. A lengthy dedication and preface precedes the miracle narratives in the latter work, in. Yet the shrine became prominent only around , he reports, when the Virgin began to reveal miracles there. Since that time, all who have called on her "in good will and with their entire trust" have been answered. The miracles the Virgin is working at the shrine are consequently transformed in this account into signs intended to draw the righteous away from evil.

For God has held to one rule since the beginning of the world: Thus when he wanted to change the entire world he sent Noah who proclaimed this with many miracles When he wished to alter the promised land and to keep the unfaithful out of it he sent the people of Israel forty years filled with miracles And now God will change the course of history once again and will punish the entire world. The preface that follows these remarks is written in the form of a sermon, with text from John Isseckemer's Little Book of Mary is unusual among the early printed miracle books in many respects.

The style, vocabulary, and syntax of the work show immediately that Isseckemer was writing for an elite audience. In contrast to the edition, this later book contains longer, more involved sentences and more descriptive information. Its length would have made it costlier than the typical thin printed miracle pamphlet as well.

Unusual, too, is his grouping of similar miracles together under subdivisions, based on Bernard of Clairvaux's sevenfold mission of Mary: Here in the center of the Holy Roman Empire, he argued extravagantly, God was performing miracles through the Virgin's intercession to call the world away from sin and to repentance. This attempt to enhance the meaning of the shrine's wonders was not imitated in other, more modest miracle books; most often, the mere printing of miracles was considered sufficient to prove the power of shrine patrons.

In this respect, then, Isseckemer's Little Book of Mary remained a solitary phenomenon. In the period before the Counter-Reformation, the printed miracle book remained closely tied to the oral and pictorial pronounce-. It uses a less sophisticated schema than Isseckemer's. The clerical overseer of this church, Pantaleon Weidringer, divides Mary's miracles into five categories: Indeed, one scholar has characterized these books as a kind of "extended arm" of the pilgrimage preacher who pronounced the shrine's miracles regularly.

Still, the use of printing to circulate miracle stories had revolutionary potential in that it offered the clergy an opportunity to promote their cults to wider audiences removed from aural and visual immediacy. Although most Bavarians were apparently concerned chiefly with learning about the continuing proofs of a shrine's saintly guardianship, the legendary associations of that power were also a matter of some interest. As we have seen, the legitimacy of Bleeding Host and locus sanctus cults in particular were often initially validated through legends about the Eucharist or the saint.

And again, multiple media played a role.

Die Christliche Taufe by Johannes Seefried

Exploited and retold in broadsides and printed chronicles, depicted in art, and lauded in poetic ballads, legends focused attention on the precipitating incidents that had revealed the shrine's numinous power. Depictions of these narratives in song may have been common in Bavaria in the generations before the Reformation; yet, unlike the thousands of miraculous testimonies that survive, only a few such songs still exist. In late medieval Germany, itinerant balladeers and bards plied their trade in town and countryside, sometimes performing at pilgrimage shrines in exchange for donations.

Often they sang before banners or panels that told the story of a shrine's foundation visually. These early multimedia shows allowed audiences to visualize the events that had transpired to produce the cult. The texts that accompanied such performances have endured only when wandering minstrels or poets prized their creations enough to have them written down. One such poetic legend treats the origins of the Bleeding Host shrine at Deggendorf, a Lower Bavarian village just north of the.

As the wafers began to bleed, angels appeared to warn the sentinel, who rushed to tell the town fathers of the crime in progress. The resulting vindication of the host and the punishment of the crime, the poet alleges, gave rise to a tradition of thaumaturgy in Deggendorf. The specter of the Real Presence—tortured, made to bleed, and yet triumphing over its oppressors—had subsequently produced a plethora of miracles at Deggendorf.

Thus, as in other legends about the Bleeding Host, the poet establishes a convergence between the actions and events recorded in the New Testament and the specific incident at Deggendoff. What happened in the Lower Bavarian village was essentially a recurrence of the Passion narrative in the gospels. And following the crime against the Eucharist, the Savior's miracles had shown forth at Deggendorf: It is interesting, and important from the standpoint of our investigation, that no contemporary records by clerics of miracles survive from the Bleeding Host shrine at Deggendorf.

Nor do miracle records exist from other sites of alleged Jewish eucharistic desecration. The bard of the Deggendorf legend may have linked the Eucharist to an ongoing tradition of thaumaturgy, but Bavaria's clergy do not appear to have associated miracles with the Bleeding Host. In addition to poems and songs, the illustrated broadside served to advertise and communicate the lore of late medieval shrines. And again, very few examplars survive. Since illustrated single-page prints were often used as household wall decorations, their scarcity might be explained by their expendability.

One extant print for the Bleeding Host shrine at Passau fig. Another version of the Deggendorf legend is reprinted in Rochus von Lilliencron, Die historische Volkslieder der Deutschen vom Jahrhundert Leipzig, , 1: Through a series of cartoonlike images relating the Jewish purchase and torture of the Eucharist, the discovery and execution of the perpetrators, and the expulsion of the Jewish community from Passau, the print retells the events that produced the new pilgrimage. Such images would likely have been bought by literate and illiterate alike, since the simple visual presentation of the Bleeding Host miracle was readily understood and the print's modest cost made it an affordable souvenir of the journey to Passau.

More complex is a broadside fig. Printed in , the anonymous broadside, the text of which was likely created by a brother at the powerful monastery, recounts the story of a child who was lost in the wilds near his village for several days. To aid the search, the child's father prayed to the Virgin, who preserved the boy until he could be rescued.

An illustration depicts this rescue and shows the Ettal Virgin and Christ child floating above the Upper Bavarian landscape in which the miracle occurred. Surrounding the image of the Virgin are the names of five Marian pilgrimage sites: The accompanying rhymed text tells of the child's preservation and tersely relates the legends of these five sites.

To heal the ruler's famous breach with the papacy, a monk had presented Louis with this special Marian image and instructed him to build a monastery to house it. From that date until the present, the publication claimed, the Virgin's presence had served to confer blessing and protection on the region's inhabitants. These links, however, remained subtextual; although they would have been obvious to those who read the broadside, they were not made explicit in the work.

In addition to miracle pamphlets, songs, and broadsides, interested parties could turn for a shrine's history to written chronicles, which were also to be found for sale at some late medieval places of pilgrimage. Both these chronicles tell about the history of the shrine and connect these cults with prominent imperial, noble, and clerical officials. Including information about the church's major relics, indulgences, and endowments, or about the pilgrimage church itself, these works use the tradition of the site—its historical vicissitudes and continued survival—to prove divine blessing.

The oldest of these pilgrimage histories, the Chronicle of Mt. Andechs , was first printed around and had apparently gained a wide readership before the end of the fifteenth century. By , five separate editions of the book had been published. The author of the Andechs chronicle focused on the dramatic discovery of these sacred objects, but he also delved into the "prehistory" of the shrine, delineating the church's development before it became a widely revered pilgrimage destination.

Created in Carolingian times, the county of Andechs had been blessed with a saintly, noble line of custodians. Avid relic collectors, these counts had endowed ten monasteries in their territory and given them notable relics, each of which the author of the Chronicle of Mt.

One of the most important. My statements here employ the revised and slightly expanded version published in two printings in under the title Kronick yon dem Hochwirdigen und loblichen heyltum auff dem heyligen perg Andechs gertant in Obern Bayrn Wessobrunn, Ludwig Hain also lists another edition printed at Wessobrunn; Repertorium Bibliographicum Leipzig, , no.

Brackmann provides a full listing of these editions and all the surviving sources for the history of Andechs in "Die Entstehung der Andechserwallfahrt," Abhandlungen der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 5 Rasso, who brought back various impressive relics from the Holy Land in the tenth century, installing them in a monastery he endowed on the Amper. In subsequent centuries, the relic collection of the counts of Andechs continued to grow.

Another lineage member, Bishop Otto of Bamberg, acquired an assortment of holy hosts from the saintly Emperor Henry, who in turn had been given the wafers by Pope Leo IX r. Upon receiving these precious items, Otto, Henry's bishop, had forwarded them to his father for safekeeping in the family's mountaintop fortress. Two of these hosts, significantly, had been consecrated by the early medieval pope Gregory I r.

Wondrous in His Saints

The Andechs chronicle connected the shrine's hosts to two dramatic eucharistic miracles that had occurred at pontifical masses. At the first, Gregory had performed the sacrament before the Spanish queen Elyira, who doubted the Real Presence of the body of Christ in the Eucharist. During the celebration, a divine light bathed Gregory, and the instruments of Christ's torture, including the crown of thorns, appeared before the mass celebrants; the queen was apparently convinced. Similarly, in the second of these eucharistic miracles, this time at the mass performed by the eleventh-century Pope Leo, the name Jesus was made visible in blood on the host, assuring those present of the reality of Christ's presence.

These hosts, together with the counts' relic cache, were sealed in the walls of the family's castle for protection in , during yet another period of imperial warfare. In the subsequent fighting, the mountaintop fortress was largely destroyed; the holy relics, however, remained safe in their hiding place. Later, a church was built on the spot, and the former fortress walls were incorporated into this structure. The relics remained forgotten and neglected until one day in , when a mouse came during mass to the high altar of the church and deposited a parchment scrap identifying some of what lay hidden nearby.

The chronicle then discusses the development of popular devotion at Andechs. A year after the relics were discovered the Wittelsbachs transferred the collection to their capital at Munich, but when "terrifying" signs in and around the city were witnessed, they returned the items to their proper place of devotion on Bavaria's "Holy Mountain. Realizing the power of these items and their place of veneration, the Wittelsbachs anxiously supported the pilgrimage site, securing numerous indulgences for the powerful collection and, in , endowing a monastery there to minister to the faithful.

In its conclusion, the Andechs chronicle carefully catalogues the numerous noble and ducal benefactions and indulgences that had been given the cult and lists all the relics housed in the church. Although the style of the chronicle is terse, lacking extensive commentary or exposition, Andechs emerges in this work as a place to be revered for more than the miracle of the relics' discovery or the ongoing testimony of intercession.

Andechs's sanctity, the work made clear, rested on a centuries-long tradition of pious benefaction on the part of Bavaria's nobility and clergy. From time immemorial, the aristocracy and ecclesiastical hierarchy had showered this site with attention, using it to house numerous impressive relics, including the miraculous Eucharists, remains of the Holy Apostles, and even part of the crown of thorns. Unlike the Andechs work, however, Aventinus's short book does not treat the later development of this famous pilgrimage site, but is confined to tracing the shrine's early medieval history. Aventinus begins with a long prologue on the history of Bavaria from its settlement after the biblical Flood to the Roman conquest and the barbarian invasions.

He then focuses on the conversion of the heathen "Bajuwaren" to Christianity during the sixth-century missions of St. After their baptism in the new religion, he reports, two Bavarian dukes, Otto and Dieth, hastily constructed chapels at Regensburg and Oting. From this point, Aventinus restricts his history to the latter locale. It became the burial site for Duke Otto, and in following centuries the German emperors showered the place with numerous benefactions. Destroyed by the Magyars in the tenth century, it was rebuilt and lavished with even more gifts and attentions.

It is here, however, that the Bavarian court tutor ends his chronicle, declining to treat. See also Brackmann, "Entstehung der Andechserwallfahrt," p. In their hagiographies, the humanists often expunged the traditional testimony of saintly miracles and instead molded the saint's life into an example for pious emulation. Aventinus's account, to be sure, did not deal with the person of a saint but rather with the history of a shrine; nevertheless, he remained reticent to discuss the Virgin's miracles at the site. This they did in large part by means of geographical and topographical studies.

Yet whereas the elite circle that likely read his chronicle may have accepted the dark and mysterious tribal origins of the shrine, his historiography likely exercised little force beyond that small group. Similarly, the narratives outlining the origins of most Bavarian holy places appear to have been far less embellished than either Aventinus's history or the Andechs chronicle. The pretensions of the latter two accounts—their attempts to "prehistoricize" the pilgrimage by linking it to events in ancient and imperial history—.

Its Topography and Topographers Madison, Wis. Admittedly, our knowledge of this storytelling culture remains incomplete, but here and there we do garner pieces of evidence that reveal its configurations. The stories told about most pilgrimage sites were more spontaneous and unpredictable than the more imposing chronicle-styled creations.

Usually a shrine's legend alleged that at some point in the past the site itself, its saintly image, or its relics had simply begun to work miracles. In late medieval Bavaria, it was the devotion of pilgrims that created places of religious reverence. Thus legends that linked sites to the clerical hierarchy, the nobility, or great events in German and Bavarian history were not necessary to elicit the faithful's piety.

A typical case is that of Tuntenhausen in Upper Bavaria, about which a miracle book published in relates artlessly that a statue of the Virgin had begun to work miracles one day in the s. The Virgin's message was that the woman could cure herself by making a series of pilgrimages to that church. From that point a cult developed that was confirmed by subsequent miracles. In Bavaria, such places continued to multiply until the Reformation. Thereafter, and largely under the impact of Protestant criticism, Bavaria's clerical promoters would only increase the drama and scope of many of the territory's pilgrimage legends.

Like Aventinus and the Andechs chronicler, these men attempted to create a prehistory for religious devotion that explained why one site was revered above others. In addition, they labored persistently to anchor the power to work miracles within the tradition of an "official" Church. In this process of legendary and mythic revision, history, understood as an ongoing narrative that continued to shape the present, was to become the explicit justification for the shrine's miraculous numen.

In constructing a history of Germany in the decades immediately preceding the Reformation, scholars have often cited a number of incidents of sudden, mass pilgrimage—to Wilsnack, Niklashausen, Sternberg, Grimmental, Aachen, Trier, and Regensburg—to demonstrate the extent of late medieval piety as well as a pervasive anxiety about salvation in that era. Their reports, filled with stock topoi, frequently betray their own prejudices toward the pilgrims, rather than providing us with a true picture of the behavior and motivations of the participants.

Forgetting everything, peasants would vacate their fields. Servants shirked their duties, children ran away from their parents, and mothers and fathers abandoned their responsibilities. Underlying the criticisms in these accounts was a profound distrust of both religious enthusiasm and mobility, and the disorders each created. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation attempted to address these issues by bringing order and a new rationale to lay religious life. For the Protestant reformers who launched their war against idolatry, the "excesses" of popular devotion needed to be expunged.

Through persistent denigration and ritualized and sym-. Steven Ozment Chicago, , p. Eine Zeitenwende Stuttgart, , pp. Lortz, The Reformation in Germany , trans. From the perspective of many within the institutional Church as well, the rapid development of sacred sites into immensely popular shrines had long been viewed as problematic.

Even when we apply a healthy dose of skepticism to accounts concerning the behavior of pilgrims at late medieval shrines, it still must be allowed that the explosion of cults produced enormous disruptions. Perhaps the most persistently controversial of Germany's late medieval pilgrimage sites was the Holy Blood shrine at Wilsnack.

In after a marauding knight had attacked and burned this Saxon village, the local priest had discovered in the still-smoldering ashes of the church three unconsumed, blood-flecked hosts. Word spread in the surrounding region, and soon a pilgrimage developed, with several German bishops awarding the nascent cult indulgences. One year later, the pope, too, conferred an indulgence on the devotion to support the building of a larger pilgrimage church.

A little more than a decade later, in , the shrine's presiding bishop at Havelberg, recognizing its potential income, incorporated the church into his episcopal household. As a consequence, two-thirds of that income flowed directly into his coffers. This practice was not unusual, but Luther and others attacked it early in the Reformation as an incentive for ecclesiastical officials to encourage "false" pilgrimages.

While reports of dubious miracles and hundreds of hysterical pilgrims visiting the site had circulated as early as , no official investigation of Wilsnack was undertaken until , when the archbishop of Prague dispatched a team of examiners. Riedel, Codex diplomaticus Brandenburgensis , vol. The oldest recorded version of the Wilsnack legend is from the fifteenth century; it appears in P.

Schreiber, Das Wunderblut zu Wilsnack Strasbourg, , pp. Luther was among the first reformers to denounce the higher clergy's base financial motives for promoting contemporary pilgrimages; see his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation of , in Luther's Works , ed. Harold Grimm Philadelphia, , Relying on an orthodox Thomistic theology, Huss argued that the existence of blood relics of the Savior was physically impossible because Christ's earthly and divine natures had been hypostatically fused following the Resurrection.

Blood relics like those at Wilsnack he denounced as sacrilegious, and their miracles as frauds. The general tolerance accorded the cult outside the archdiocese of Prague began to change in , when the archbishop of Magdeburg, metropolitan of the province in which Wilsnack was located, ordered his own investigation. His team, like the Prague visitors before them, reported that the majority of the pilgrims at Wilsnack were poor and that they frequently displayed hysterical behavior at the shrine. The shrine gave them the opportunity to venerate the corporeal blood on the hosts, a heresy again because of the hypostatic union of Christ's earthly and divine natures.

An archdiocesan synod discussed the investigators' report and, although it considered suppressing the pilgrimage, settled on the less controversial option of merely condemning it. Despite other unsuccessful attempts to prohibit the pilgrimage, Wilsnack survived, growing even more popular in the second half of the fifteenth century. The dispute over Wilsnack subsided until , when the clergy at the shrine applied to Rome for an additional indulgence.

Irritated by this move, the archbishop of Magdeburg decided to act decisively against the shrine and sent another commission to Wilsnack to investigate. This team reported much the same findings as the commission of These findings were taken to a provincial synod presided over by Nicholas of Cusa, who looked with general disfavor on eucharistic pilgrimages.

Cusa's synod forbade the devotion. One year later the bishop of Havelberg and the Brandenburg elector Friedrich II were excommunicated for not enforcing the decree; they appealed their case to Nicholas V. The pope permitted the pilgrimage to be revived, but with the stipulation that a fresh consecrated host be placed alongside the blood-flecked ones. This upswing in popularity climaxed in the wake of a series of children's pilgrimages to the site in Reminiscent of similar events, especially the notorious juvenile processions to Mont-Saint-Michel that had commenced from South Germany in , these journeys to Wilsnack were criticized for their disruptiveness.

Even as town authorities tried to force the children to disband and return home, others interpreted the processions as a sign of divine grace and aided the participants. By the summer of , the traffic to the shrine was thick as hundreds of peasants, vagabonds, and day workers joined the youthful bands.

At towns along the way, late medieval chroniclers tell us, the processions were often greeted as a kind of plague. At Erfurt, for example, the town locked its gates to the approaching pilgrims, refusing to fulfill the traditional Christian duty of providing the travelers with food and lodging. Yet even though the town council prohibited its own youth from joining the processions, one chronicler recorded that children left the city. Despite the hyperbole that marked the written accounts, it must be admitted that events like these would be bound to result in a degree of chaos.

As the ranks of faithful making their way to a shrine suddenly swelled, they passed through towns and villages ill prepared to provide food and accommodation. Yet an increase in poverty and the landless was also beginning to afflict Germany in. Hesse, published as vol. In discussing Wilsnack and other mass pilgrimages, commentators sometimes linked the surge in these cults' popularity with the generally hard economic times. Referring to the pilgrims as "common people" or "the poor," chroniclers drew explicit connections among bad harvests, dearth, and the episodic outbreak of "pilgrimage fever.

For the days are very long and empty of things to do, and many are driven to pilgrimage for lack of bread to eat And so they decided to go on this pilgrimage and beg in each town along the route, reckoning that it was better to beg in a strange district than from people they knew. This writer then associated the onset of famine directly with the rise of the shrine's popularity: Wilsnack provided for many a way of earning a living through begging on the pious journey.

We will never know for certain how widespread such a practice was, yet begging remained a widely respected act of ascetic devotion in late medieval Germany. Certainly, not all who begged along the route to Wilsnack did so because of need. As a sign of apostolic poverty, the begging of alms remained a sacrificial act that many believed made their journeys more pleasing in the eyes of God. Those who commented on phenomena like Wilsnack certainly feared the pilgrims' dispossession and poverty.

Given the proper catalyst, they likely reasoned, such events might easily erupt into rebellions in demand of social reform. In the late fifteenth century—even as the ranks of pilgrims making their way to shrines like Wilsnack swelled dramatically—rural revolts were on the rise in. Ein Beitrag zur Volkskunde Braunschweig, , p. Protesting the imposition of new feudal duties and generally unattractive kinds of tenure, peasant rebels sometimes looked to Mary and the saints as their patrons.

The fear that an underlying kinship could exist between mass pilgrimages and rural revolts was bolstered by the processions to Niklashausen that began in Since the mid-fourteenth century, this tiny village in the Tauber Valley of Franconia had been home to a small Marian cult.

During Lent of , an itinerant shepherd, Hans Behem, arrived at Niklashausen and began to preach a world-renouncing and anticlerical message. On the surface, the shepherd's sermons initially resembled those of John of Capistrano, who had conducted preaching missions in Franconia during the s. Into the asceticism typical of many fifteenth-century preachers, however, Behem soon wove strands of apocalypticism, anti-clericalism, and social rebellion. Attacking the corruption of Rome, the pope and his officials, and to a lesser degree the emperor and the German princes, the shepherd of Niklashausen voiced the demands of rural revolts both past and future.

He called for the woods, streams, and pastures to be made free for all and for the tithe to be abolished—a message that was, he said, confirmed by a steady stream of Marian apparitions. The Virgin, he alleged, had told him that more grace was to be found in the tiny Tauber Valley than in all the churches of Rome.

Warning that the Apocalypse was close at hand, she was calling on the faithful to journey to Niklashausen to prevent the wrath of God from being unleashed on the world. By the summer of , all reports reckoned the number visiting Niklashausen in the thousands. First drawing its participants from the rural hamlets of the Tauber Valley proper, the new pilgrimage quickly reached areas more distant, and within a short time the. That summer, territorial, ecclesiastical, and urban leaders throughout South Germany repeatedly—and ineffectively—prohibited their subjects from visiting the site.

To clinch the matter, the small Marian church at Niklashausen was torn down to insure that no residual devotion persisted. A popular preacher like Behem was enough of a catalyst to develop a small, preexisting cult into a phenomenon bordering on full-scale revolt.

A steady stream of visions and miracles, moreover, had validated this preacher's social revolutionary message. Frequently, those who reported about mass pilgrimages such as Niklashausen recognized the role that miracles played in creating and sustaining these events, and their accounts resound with attacks on people's credulity.

People, they state, were impressionable, gullible, and able to believe in any and all kinds of wonders. The Thuringian chronicler Konrad Stolle, for instance, wrote that when pilgrims on the way to Wilsnack were asked why they were journeying to the shrine they responded that they had to go "there where there was a great miracle. Chroniclers and contemporary critics reported that when people heard of miracles a sudden, uncontrollable desire to visit the wondrous place would simply seize them. In Bavaria, although the cult of the saints was increasing to new heights of popularity in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, pilgrimage was at the same time a source of controversy for ecclesiastical officials.

Sanctity could multiply in ways unacceptable to the "official" Church, and spontaneous wonder-working could develop previously insignificant places into popular destinations. Unnd die frawen trugen sie mete unnd wusten ouch nicht, was das heilige blud was, unnd wusten ouch nicht, was sie taten.

The charge was legion. See Arnold, Niklashausen , pp. You do not have JavaScript enabled. Please enable JavaScript to access the full features of the site or access our non-JavaScript page. Previous Article Next Article. Journal of the Chemical Society, Abstracts. Index of authors' names. The first page of this article is displayed as the abstract. Back to tab navigation Download options Please wait Index of authors' names J.

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