| Titre | Un monument à soi-même. Les élites urbaines et leurs écrits mémoriels à Augsbourg (1400-1520) | |
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| Auteur | Dominique Adrian | |
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Revue | Revue historique |
| Numéro | no 710, avril 2024 | |
| Page | 201-236 | |
| Résumé |
Écrits familiaux et production historique d'Augsbourg sont bien connus et largement étudiés. L'historiographie en donne pourtant une image déformée, centrée sur l'identification de l'individu à sa ville et sur l'exaltation de valeurs familiales. Pour mieux comprendre la manière dont les citadins augsbourgeois, riches et moins riches, utilisaient l'écrit pour exprimer leur identité, il est nécessaire d'entreprendre un vaste parcours à travers leur production écrite, en évoquant les sources les mieux connues, mais en les éclairant par beaucoup d'autres textes peu connus voire entièrement inédits (une chronique familiale féminine notamment), sans se préoccuper de frontières de genre trop restrictives. En choisissant de mettre en avant titres ou fortune, de raconter l'histoire lointaine ou proche de sa ville, de parler de sa famille (moins abondamment et plus tardivement que dans bien des villes), les Augsbourgeois du xve siècle ont pu choisir dans un vaste champ des possibles la trace qu'ils voulaient laisser de leur passage sur terre. L'individu y est plus présent qu'on ne pourrait s'y attendre et la littérature familiale n'y apparaît comme signe d'une ambition élitaire que tardivement, à la fin du siècle, beaucoup plus modestement qu'à Francfort ou Nuremberg. Source : Éditeur (via Cairn.info) |
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| Résumé anglais |
In fifteenth-century Augsburg, the urban elites rarely wrote their family history, unlike their peers in Frankfurt or Nuremberg. They did, however, make extensive use of the written word : the abundance of historical production in the city is well known, often interpreted as a way for their authors to base their identity on identification with their city. To grasp all the memorial strategies of city dwellers, however, one must go significantly beyond the scope of the texts commonly considered in this field. There were indeed family writings in Augsburg after 1450, but they were not exclusively produced by the elites: alongside the wealthy Walther or Gossembrot, the wife of a small administrative employee produced a short family chronicle which was continued by her son, which shows that the influence of aristocratic models was not necessary here and that the patrician and merchant elites were not necessarily the forerunners. The uses of history itself are far from being reduced to a unitary civic ideology : the position of Hector Mülich, for whom the narrative of ancient times is not enough, is quite different from that of Sigmund Gossembrot, a patrician for whom antiquity is the best guarantee of nobility – the study of two armorials, that of Mülich and that of a brother of Sigmund Gossembrot, confirms this discrepancy. The asserted neutrality of Mülich's account, who is only present in his text as a warrant for certain events, is a significant personal choice, not the pure expression of a collective identity. The next generation, by contrast, uses this seemingly neutral substrate to develop a new, directly and explicitly political use of history, as an affirmation of social distinction. In addition to these civic and household motifs, however, other themes are also present, which give the individual a much greater significance than is usually assumed. From the merchant and patrician Hans Rem, who described his prodigious enrichment in the second half of the fourteenth century in a text known only indirectly, to the collector of orders Sebastian Ilsung, or to Jörg Rephon, who carefully inventoried all the kingdoms he had visited, there is no uniform way of recording one's merits and honours. Pilgrimage accounts, in that they do not put their author in the foreground and even less so their own experience, are diametrically opposed to this self-centered perspective, but they also contribute to exposing their authors, both for the prestige that the visit to the holy places gave them and for the elevation proper to the genre of the pilgrimage account itself. The most original of these memorial strategies is certainly that of Peter Egen/von Argon, a major figure in urban life from the 1430s to his exile in 1450: not only did he have the history of the Trojan origins of his city written down and used as the subject of a series of frescoes in his urban palace, but he also ordered the production of two unusual volumes, both of which listed Peter Egen's landholdings and seigneurial rights in the city and its surroundings. In these volumes, he kept alive the memory of his father, around Saint Anthony's Hospital that he had founded, but he presented himself above all as a landlord, underlining both the fiefs held from prestigious lords and the properly seigneurial rights (justice…) that he held over entire villages. The material aspect of the volumes themselves shows that they are indeed a strategy of prestige and not simple management instruments. Split between personal and family identity, between a broad vision of the man of the world and identification with the city, the memorial strategies of the citizens of Augsburg thus go far beyond the stereotypes attached to the “medieval bourgeois”, or even to the “medieval man”; their very diversity shows the extent of the possible choices, while at the same time demonstrating that these memorial constructions were not the prerogative of the merchant or patrician elites, who were themselves very far from being united by a common culture. Source : Éditeur (via Cairn.info) |
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| Article en ligne | https://shs.cairn.info/revue-historique-2024-2-page-201?lang=fr (accès réservé) |
