5 - “For all miserable persons”: Small and Extra-Urban Hospitals

Summary

Abstract

This chapter examines small hospitals in the central Rhineland, concluding that, no less than more prominent institutions, such hospitals were integrated in their communities as religious houses. This chapter takes on both small and ephemeral hospitals in urban environments, and hospitals which flourished outside cities. The infrastructure of urban bureaucracy appears to have been a crucial factor in assuring the survival of medieval hospital records. The scattered and fragmentary evidence from extra-urban hospitals in the central Rhine region, however, offers glimpses of active and prosperous houses integrated with their communities, understood and functioning in similar ways to their urban counterparts.

Keywords: medieval hospitals, canon law, leper hospitals, medieval poverty

The leper hospital of Spangenberg is known to us only through a single record, of the mid-fourteenth century. In this document Conrad, a priest of the hospital, makes a will in favor of the hospital and its sick, in terms revealing much about the hospital's functions. Conrad sets, for “the comfort and health of his soul,” a sum designated for alms, to be distributed by the hospital master. Some of these alms are to be generally distributed, while twelve sick, permanently resident in the hospital, are to be given eggs and herrings. Notably, Conrad specifies that no one except these twelve sick—not even the hospital master or a hospital priest—is to receive these alms, echoing the prescriptions of the Council of Vienne. These prescriptions are witnessed both by the hospital master and by members of the council of Spangenberg. The case of Spangenberg provides an extreme example of the paradox of the small hospital: characterized by a fleeting and fragmentary presence in the documentary record, such institutions nevertheless appear as thriving institutions, useful to their communities and acknowledged within them as providing both therapeutic and spiritual services.

Hospitals Beyond Cities

Hospitals have often been spoken of as institutions that helped to define medieval cities, and contributed to their centrality. But what of hospitals that boasted no such institutional influence? Small medieval hospitals and those located outside urban centers have received comparatively little scholarly attention. Their omission distorts the picture of how medieval hospitals were part of communities and networks. Where nonurban hospitals have been studied, it has usually been in connection to pilgrimage routes.