Foundation Stories: The Heroes of Viennese Monasticism

Abstract

Foundation stories, those tales of how monastic institutions came to be, provide a combination of biography and civic history that appealed to authors of a variety of genres. With their strongly profiled protagonists and their answers to the question of how a given institution got its start, they were incorporated into nearly every genre that touched on the Viennese monastic experience, often to the exclusion of discussions of contemporaneous monastic practices. By the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the outlines of Viennese foundation stories were well known and broadly circulated. For women’s convents in particular, the details of medieval foundation became one of the “standard facts,” part of a convent’s identity to be referenced by historian and casual traveler alike. Such stories attest directly to the persistence of the medieval, for in them, authors explore ways in which the implications of past actions extend into the present day. Through the coupling of building location and historical narrative, the past generosity of a noble ancestor was shown to have a real and tangible impact on the structure of the present-day city. In a similar way, these stories provided a locus for a narrativized conflation of past and ongoing presence for monasti-cism, in general, and women’s religious institutions, in particular, in the story of what makes Vienna special. The actions of past urban leaders seemingly reached forward inescapably to the present-day standing of the Haupt- und Residenzstadt; the monasteries the leaders founded were the visible legacy of the city’s (purportedly inevitable) choice as pride-of-place.