Abstract

Heraldic Orgies and Social Advancement. Or: Where Actually Is “Top“ in the Late-Medieval City

One of the key concepts of Max Weber’s “The City“ was that in northwestern Europe landed nobility and urban patricians were clearly distinguished; for Weber, this was indeed the main reason to locate the occidental city in the north rather than in the Mediterranean. It has often been tought that tournament books and armorials produced this very difference – to display inherited status (in the case of ancient families) or to claim status (in the case of social climbers). The article looks at one of the largest, most sumptuous and, at the same time, most widely spread armorials of medieval Europe, that of Konrad Grünenberg (d. 1494). He himself has often been quoted as a paradigmatic social climber, as he left his guild to join the society of the local nobility “Zur Katz“ and issued a sumptuous armorial. Yet this armorial, while containing over 2000 coat-of-arms mainly from the southwest of the Empire, does not mention any single member of the “Katz“. Instead, it praises the tournament societies of the “Vier Länder“, of which Grünenberg was not a member, and highlights tournaments in which Grünenberg never participated. This, I argue, indicates that armorials (and related documents, like tournament books) were not only about status already gained – as Grünenberg ignored the Katz society he was a member of in his armorial – or to be gained – as he himself produced the arguments for why he could not join the society he praised in his armorial. Instead, already for contemporaries they served to discuss the social order in a more abstract way; it was not only members (or would-be members) of the respective social groups who knew and reproduced its social codes.

Grünenberg’s armorial is part and parcel of a new discussion of origins and kinship, namely patrilineal kinship that took place in all social milieux. Not only did much of this happen in cities, in Konstanz it was the guilds (and not the nobility) that first insisted on patrilineal descent as a proof of status. The growing social importance of kinship around 1500, and in particular the leading role of cities and urban institutions in this process, runs counter to received narratives that equate modernity with the decline of kinship.