Crossroads of Identity: The Late Medieval Evolutions of a Hospital Community

The community of Heilig Kreuz, outside Mainz, Germany, has long been something of a historiographical enigma. Its first internal records, dating to the mid-15th century, testify to the presence of a canonry "at the church of the Blessed Virgin in the fields outside the walls of Mainz." In the scant scholarship on Heilig Kreuz, it has been characterized as replacing an earlier, informal community of lepers on the same site. In this paper I argue that, rather, the changing institutional form of the community was an attempt to guarantee continuity of care for the vulnerable. The codex containing the "customs and oaths" of the house testifies to a process of formalizing religious observance and affirming religious status that can be seen in other leper hospitals in the region throughout the later 15th century. The oaths for canons and clerks pledging "service to the persons residing there," in a formula resembling that of many hospital rules concerning service of the sick, and the fact that the statutes were recorded "to avoid perils" that might otherwise befall the community, can be understood in the context of the efforts of the archbishops of Mainz to exercise more direct control over the city's hospitals.