The Writing on the Barn: Content and Materiality in Contested Documents of Northern German Towns (Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries)

Abstract

An investigation of urban uprisings of the late fourteenth and fifteenth century in Lübeck, Osnabrück, and Braunschweig provides insight into a very specific aspect of a text’s significance: the physical object it was written on. Members of the urban community who lacked formal representation and access to the institutions producing and preserving the texts fought not only over the content of a contract but also over access to the physical objects containing the legal document. This article interprets the urban conflicts centering around material objects as struggles for representation and control of public space, memory, and legislation, revealing differences in the conflicting groups’ understanding of how text and object were related.