The Relic List of St. Thiébaud in Thann, in German, manuscript on vellum [Alsace-Lorraine (Thann), 1499]

a bifolium, each leaf 310mm. by 100mm., up to 34 lines in red in ornamental script with flowing cadels, partly erased mid-seventeenth-century notes at end of text, some small stains, pin holes and discolouration to outermost sides, else excellent condition

provenance

This list is not in Alsatian dialect, but is in eastern Oberdeutsch, suggesting it is a contemporary record of the reorganisation of the relic collection of the church of St. Thiébaud's, Thann, made in the retinue of a visiting ecclesiastical dignitary or secular overlord (Thann came under the dominion of the Habsburgs in the fifteenth century):  "Laus deo 1499" at foot in main hand, and contemporary scribble "Theobaldi" at head. The collegiate church of St. Thiébaud was built in 1332, and was continuously added to up until the early sixteenth century. It is one of the most ornate Gothic churches of the Upper Rhine.

text

This manuscript records a significant event in the history of Thann, otherwise apparently forgotten. It lists the relics of the church, and records their reorganisation in 1458, in which three lay curators, named Johannes Schürer, Michael Feyrlin and Conrad Weyssman, collected together the relics from their monstrances (some 14 bones, 2 teeth , 3 pieces of cloth and 3 fragments of the Holy Cross) and set them out with labels on a specially constructed 'tafel' (perhaps a porphyry tablet with recesses cut into it). In the early Middle Ages relics were frequently hidden from sight – the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 decreeing that they were not to be displayed outside their containers, for fear of losing their potency. Only in the later Middle Ages were relics brought out and displayed publicly.

Among the relics here is a tooth of the exceedingly uncommon local saint, Aurelia. She accompanied St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins in their journey down the Rhine, but fell ill at Strasbourg, and having stayed behind was deprived of martyrdom. Only a tiny handful of sources record her veneration, including a fourteenth-century Strasbourg chronicle, the Prayer Book of Ursula Begerin (Bern, Burger Bibl., cod. 801, c.1480), and a now destroyed seventeenth-century inventory of the Carthusians of Molsheim, which lists the only other known relic (M. Barth, 'Reliquien aus elsässischen Kirchen und Klöstern', Archiv für elsässissche Kirchengeschichte, 10, 1935, p.110). The present manuscript will be noted in the discussion of her cult in the forthcoming commentary volume by Nigel F. Palmer and Jeffrey F. Hamburger accompanying the facsimile of the Prayer Book of Ursula Begerin.