Contested Hierarchies

Abstract

Early modern cities often harbored several different religious communities. To date, few studies of religion and history have focused on the ranking of religious communities in premodern cities with special regard to social order and the concept of heterarchy. This article focuses on a conflict of precedence between the monasteries of Kreuzlingen and Petershausen in the 17th and 18th centuries, relating especially to religious processions in the city of Constance. Efforts by courts to rank the monasteries displayed hierarchical as well as heterarchical elements. The spatial conditions of the processions made it necessary that monastic communities processed successively. This gave the impression of a clear hierarchical monastic order in the city and stimulated competition between the different communities. However, as this article argues, based on an analysis of lawsuits and related materials, in practice a clear ranking could not be achieved. Courts made contradictory decisions regarding the ranking. The monasteries derived their authority from different conflicting sources such as constitutional status, customary rights, institutional history, and religious lifestyle. Urbanity helped create the need for monasteries to compete with each other and at the same time contributed to a situation characterized by both hierarchy and heterarchy simultaneously.