19 - Writing History to Make History: Johannes Meyer's Chronicles of Reform

Summary

A fifteenth-century manuscript from the Dominican convent of Adelhausen in southern Germany bears a brief account of the convent's history from the time of its founding to the Observant reform, so called because of the insistence on strict observance of the Order's Rule and Constitution. After copies of the letters and bulls establishing the convent and incorporating it into the Dominican Order, the narrative begins by referring the reader to another chronicle. ‘Das andechtig selig geistlich leben der heiligen swestern des wirdigen closters’ (‘The devout, blessed, spiritual life of the holy sisters of the worthy convent’) was recorded in the early fourteenth century by Adelhausen's prioress Anna von Munzingen. This text, however, concerns the aftermath of the nuns’ descent into disorder and disobedience. From such remarkable holiness the convent had fallen so far that in 1410 God sent a fire that burned the convent to the ground as punishment for their willfulness. After begging for the means to restore their grounds and staying for years as guests in the convents of St Katherine and Klingental, the Adelhausen sisters finally went home. Yet the years spent in exile had made them used to commerce with the outside world, and upon their return to the rebuilt convent, the sisters failed to rebuild a spiritual life. Even after a divine admonition as extreme as the fire of 1410, the nuns persisted in their fallen way of life for another fifty years. The convent was not reformed until 1465, when a priest of the Dominican Order brought nuns out of Observant convents in Alsace and Basel to teach their sisters in the three Freiburg convents to live in enclosure and observe the Rule as devoutly as their fourteenth-century predecessors had done.

The story of Adelhausen's fall and reform is preserved in an autograph manuscript written at the convent by the reforming priest himself a little more than fifteen years after the reform and re-enclosure. Johannes Meyer (1422– 1485) had spent the years after 1465 serving as confessor and reforming other Dominican convents throughout southwestern Germany and Alsace before returning to Adelhausen as confessor in 1482. Despite the fact that Meyer was not only present but also responsible for the events of 1465, he does not name himself and speaks only of ‘ein priester unsers orden’ (‘a priest of our order’).