The urban house before 1300
German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
Art History
Final Report Abstract
The project "The House in the City before 1300" dealt with the secular urban residential house. In the project, building archaeology, art history, medieval archaeology, urban history, restoration sciences as well as medieval German studies were combined, findings from these were compared with each other, adapted and new insights were gained. The "medieval city" is a new legal and building form whose beginning can be found around 1100. At the beginning there is the granting of new rights, such as the right of freehold, which allows to own, change, sell and bequeath an estate. The new legal space of the "city" is separated out externally with a fortification; internally, the constructional design is structured and planned. This includes water engineering measures, the creation of a regular street grid and the division of the city space into approximately equal plots. The city of the 12th and 13th centuries is a planned city that incorporates older structures. On the plots, the structure of the buildings is surprisingly similar throughout the German-speaking countries, although material and construction-related differences and locally typical forms often blur this sameness: in the first phase, it is a "living under many roofs": the heatable living part is small, located at the back of the plot (in some regions called "Kemenate") and always built in combination with at least one other, larger building that houses trade, crafts, storage and the preparation of food. In a later phase, which, depending on the region, began as late as the 13th century or as late as the 14th, sometimes even as late as the 16th century, all functions were combined in one large house: "living under one roof". In the same change from "living under many roofs" to "living under one roof", there was also a change in the design of the interiors. In an almost complete survey of all known architectural finish and paintings in urban secular buildings before 1350, it was possible to show that polychrome room designs only emerged with the transition to the later phase. In particular, a type of room comes into play that is new to the urban dwelling house in this late phase: the upper floor hall. Both the hall and the “Kemenate” (bower) are known as room types of aristocratic complexes. Their functions can be determined by consulting the narrative poems of the 12th, 13th and early 14th centuries, in which the two rooms are used as places of action in a variety of ways. As in the motifs of the wall paintings, there are tendencies in urban housing to adopt motifs of aristocratic architecture that have existed for a long time. In the case of the profane wall paintings, the aspects related to landlord or host („wirt“) and house, which can be found in aristocratic buildings both in castles and those close to the city, are adopted in the town house and, especially from about 1300, adapted by a wide range of urban elites to their respective situations in urban society. The project has succeeded in summarising the results of a concentration on the smallest spatial features of urban profane building before 1300/1350 and to show its general development.
Publications
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Private Badestuben am Haus in der Stadt vor 1300 – neue Erkenntnisse durch Neuinterpretation, in: Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt 4 (2021), S. 585-604
Iris Nießen & Barbara Perlich
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900 Jahre alter Dielenboden, in: Die Denkmalpflege 2 (2022)
Thomas Nitz
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Zum wohlversorgten Haus und seinem Hausrat in den profanen Wandmalereien des 14.-16. Jahrhunderts, in: Im Bild gefangen! Manifestation von Gedankenwelten – ein interdisziplinärer Diskurs. Tagung Produktion, Verwendung und kulturelle Bedeutung rheinischer Keramik mit Bildsprache und Symbolik in der frühen Neuzeit, hg. von Michael Schmauder und Marion Roehmer (Bonner Beiträge zur Vorund Frühgeschichtlichen Archäologie, Bd. 25), Bonn 2022, S. 11-36
Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck
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Formale und mentale Konzepte der Stadt in der frühen profanen Malerei, in: Mentale Konzepte der Stadt in Bild- und Textmedien der Vormoderne, hg. von Margit Dahm und Timo Felber (Roots Studies, 03), Leiden 2023, S. 269-294
Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck
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Formale und mentale Konzepte der Stadt in der frühen profanen Malerei, in: Mentale Konzepte der Stadt in Bild- und Textmedien der Vormoderne, hg. von Margit Dahm und Timo Felber (Roots Studies, Bd. 3), Leiden 2023, S. 269-294
Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck
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wan diu borch was sô getân, / daz siz allez mite betwank. Städtische Inszenierung als Aspekt der Figurenzeichnung von Herrscherinnen im Eneasroman Heinrichs von Veldeke und im Parzival Wolframs von Eschenbach, in: Mentale Konzepte der Stadt in Bild- und Textmedien der Vormoderne, hg. von M. Dahm, T. Felber (Roots Studies, 03), Leiden 2023, S. 193-216
Anna Katharina Nachtsheim
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Zur Genese der Stube. Eine neue Zusammenfassung wort- und sachgeschichtlicher Befunde, in: Bericht über die Tagung des Arbeitskreises für Hausforschung in Goslar vom 3.-6. Oktober 2019
Barbara Perlich
