Abstract

Ever since Chiffoleau's seminal study, medieval testaments have been seen as a privileged source by researchers of medieval social structure and “mentality“. The article builds on this tradition, using the evidence of 15^th-century testaments from the North German city of Lüneburg, insofar as it inquires into the social constellations within which testaments were made, and how these constellations made an impact on testamentary practice. However, it also asks how testamentary practice itself shaped social constellations, most notably through the highly idiosyncratic institution of testamentary executors.

The article sets out with a sketch of the legal context of testamentary practice. Here, the ambiguities of an underformalised legal environment are emphasized in order to claim that the form of the testament has significant structural advantages over what 19^th- and early 20^th-century legal history constructed as the so-called “deutschrechtliche” law of inheritance. The second part deals with the institution of the testamentary executors. In line with the general argument, the point is made that the choice and empowerment of this group of people not so much articulates, or reproduces, pre-existent social ties (e. g. kinship), but rather installs an innovative social order of its own, reflecting, balancing and sublating competing relationships in a figure of perpetual office to ensure the testament's durability.

The following main section addresses the social realization of this institution. It can be shown that groups of testamentary executors, some of which “survive“ for centuries, generate long-term patterns of cooperation interacting with other forms of organisation, but at the same time distinct and irreducible. The specialization and concentration of executing offices points towards a form of organization based on trust rather than on a structure of claims and counterclaims. The autonomy and strength of this model (closely related, in form and function, to cooperation patterns in guilds and confraternities) for late medieval urban society can be shown to the extent that the cooperation of testamentary executors can, in cases of conflict, not only successfully counter such contravening claims (e. g. of family and kin), but also, paradoxically, the relevant testament itself (e. g. by undercutting the testator's intentions in favour of the executors' goals).