Mapping Landscapes of Care: Hospitals in the Cities of the Late Medieval Rhineland

The socio-spatial location of hospitals—including leper hospitals—in late medieval cities was a matter of concern to both the hospitals and their neighbors. The significance of these locations has also formed a topic of debate for contemporary scholars. In providing maps of urban hospitals and their possessions in the Rhineland, my poster makes possible a comparison of the developmental trajectories of late medieval hospitals. In so doing, it engages with historiographical debates on the role of hospitals in medieval cities. In Mainz, as in many other European cities in the thirteenth century, the hospital’s acquisition of institutional independence from the archbishop was associated with a move from the cathedral close to the periphery of the city. When the hospital sisters of this house, the Heilig Geist Spital, attempted to establish a new community on a central marketplace, members of the laity fought their efforts to occupy this location at a hub of urban trade. Mainz’s leper hospital, while located outside the walls, also appears to have managed a chapel with a second community inside the city. In Worms, both the civic hospital and the leper hospital were located outside the city gates, and were seen as landmarks defining periurban neighborhoods. The leper hospital of Speyer, unusually, was located in the very heart of the city, among its merchants and close to its cathedral. I will use my poster display to represent the locations of the hospitals of Mainz, Worms, and Speyer, and, where applicable, when these changed over time. Using evidence from charters and hospital account books, I have also mapped the property belonging to each of the four hospitals of Mainz. In ways affected by their social networks and by their spatial locations, each of these hospitals pursued policies of strategic consolidation. Mainz’s Heilig Geist Spital, managed under the auspices of the city council from 1244, held rights in many of the merchant neighborhoods of Mainz, but also possessed properties in numerous villages along the Rhine, which were regularly inspected by hospital officials.  The “new hospital” formed by the sisters of St. Agnes, in contrast, held tightly concentrated but diverse properties in a semi-agricultural neighborhood of the city. With orchards, gardens, and several workshops, the hospital could support itself, perhaps with an income supplemented at the discretion of the sisters. St. Barbara, a small pilgrim hostel and almshouse, was primarily supported by the wealth of Liebfrauen, the canonry of which its founder was a member. St. Georg, the city’s leper hospital, had almost all of its property concentrated within a 12-kilometer radius of the hospital, making the cultivation of relationships with their neighbors, tenants, and donors easier for the small community. Mapping the territory where hospitals had vested interests enables a better assessment of how they were embedded in the socioeconomic networks of their surrounding communities.