Prosopography and Memoria: Collective and Individual Identities in the Commemoration of the Dead in Colmar

The Dominican convent of Unterlinden in Colmar, France, was established in the first half of the thirteenth century as the first Dominican community in the town, predating the men’s community there by several decades. This convent has been noted for its large collection of extant medieval sources, especially liturgical books. Although scholars have examined many of the Latin and vernacular manuscripts which were copied and translated by the nuns and subsequently circulated outside the convent, the rich collection of liturgical manuscripts which were used within the convent walls remains largely unresearched. In the context of a medieval religious community whose members used liturgical books daily to guide the central unifying pursuits of their lives, these manuscripts hold strong potential for information about their users.

This paper will present a collective biography of Unterlinden as evidenced in the nuns’ manuscripts for the commemoration of the dead. In the form of community registers, liturgical calendars, and donation records, these books contain lists and descriptions of the community deceased, providing nearly five centuries of convent history and identifying information about its community members. Through a prosopographical analysis of these manuscripts, one can gain new insight into the demographic makeup of the community including geographic origins, socioeconomic backgrounds of individuals, family and social networks, and regional patterns of wealth. These manuscripts were used and adapted consistently for nearly five centuries of history, change, and reform. As such, they provide particularly valuable sources for a study which stretches from medieval to early modern. I will contrast the priorities of the nuns seen from the thirteenth and fourteenth century manuscript intrusions against those in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in order to present new insights into the collective and individual identities which the Unterlinden nuns expressed through their liturgical commemorations.