The Beguines of Cologne: A Social History of Urban Piety (13th-15th Centuries)

• Applicant: Dr. Letha Böhringer
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 491803989

The project focuses on the largest 'beguine colony’ in Europe in the late Middle Ages. In Cologne, over 2000 beguines are known to have lived a life of piety and celibacy outside the monasteries. This continuation application relates solely to the position of scientific employee. During the digital indexing of the source material, it became apparent that it would be advantagous for the usability of the web presentation to integrate two additional topographical components into the database. The initial application had a prosopographical focus (proportion of women from the patrician 'dynasties'; families of an urban "middle class" that are prominent in the data; indigent women as recipients of alms and donations), and there seemed to be little overlap between this data and the information from the list of urban convents. However, during the indexing of the data so many points of contact were identified (houses which were inhabited by beguines and later became convents) that the prosopo-graphical and topographical information of the convent list must be included in the database and in the web presentation in order to enable queries across all texts for topographical data as well. In addition to the list of convents, vectorized maps which were created on the basis of a reconstruction of medieval Cologne from the 19th century and already available to the project, are to be integrated into the web presentation in such a way that the distribution of beguine dwellings and convents in the city and thus the formation of urban spaces by beguines are visualized. The overall aim is to enhance and the database on the beguines in Cologne by adding more data and creating dynamic geo-visual access to the content. The project promises great added value not only for the object of research here, the characteristics of the beguine way of life in Cologne, but also for subsequent research questions on the history of the city and the processing of the shrine books as a whole.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants