A Paper Trail from the Priestly Ordination to a Defective Latrine

Sometime after the 9th of June 1426, a canon from Klosterneuburg wrote a note in one of his manuscripts:

I was ordained to the priesthood on the day following Cathedra Petri, on ember Saturday in lent. The dominical letter was F.

I sang my first mass, on the day of St. Gertrude, on which occurred on the Sunday Judica.

In the same year, on the day of Primus and Felicianus I preached my first sermon titled: ‘A certain man prepared a great feast and called many.’

This sermon is followed by other sermons written in this very booklet with my own hand.

The day of the priest’s ordination was February 23rd, the Sunday Judica was March 17th almost one month later. His first sermon was preached on June 9th, the second Sunday after Trinity Sunday.

This first sermon also survives in this manuscript:

Unfortunately, the scribe of this sermon does not identify himself in this manuscript. While going through the sermon manuscripts from the first half of the 15th century, I could identify the hand in another manuscript – together with a name: Ambrosius Fütterer.

It turns out that Fütterer’s hand appears in more manuscripts from Klosterneuburg. For example, manuscript CCL 874, contains another text in his hand from 1426. In this case, it is a sermon from the Viennese theologian Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl on fols. 238r-244r. The manuscript is dated between 1426 and 1437 and contains the name of its main scribe: Ambrosius Fütterer.

While the hand looks very indistinct and typical for the early to mid 15th century, it has, for example, a very characteristic open ‘s’ used at the end of some words.

The exact same ‘s’ is found in the first sermon as well as in the autobiographical note.

And also in later texts, together with Ambrosius’ name, for example under this text with a colophon, that this book was written and put together by himself.

With the scribe identified, one can further investigate him. The historian and canon from Klosterneuburg Berthold Černík († 1962) noted in his article on the medieval book production from Klosterneuburg, that the Canon Ambrosius Fütterer contributed at least five manuscripts to the library.¹ Fütterer is responsible for even more manuscripts. He commissioned a copy of Johannes Herold’s sermon collection ‘Discipuli.’ The manuscripts are now found under the shelf mark CCL 459 and 460. Both were copied by a scribe named Johannes de Costen Poznanensis, possibly of Polish origin, though only CCL 459 contains Fütterer’s name too.

A search on the platform manuscripta.at reveals even more manuscripts containing Fütterers name.

Manuscript	Date	Record
CCL 459	1449	manuscripta.at
CCL 460	1448	manuscripta.at
CCL 496	1450–1460	manuscripta.at
CCL 814	~1439	manuscripta.at
CCL 873	1450–1457	manuscripta.at
CCL 874	1420–1430	manuscripta.at
CCL 876	1446–1459	manuscripta.at
CCL 877	1420–1466	manuscripta.at
CCL 904	1414–1442	manuscripta.at
CCL 926	1420–1445	manuscripta.at
CCL 1049	1440–1450	manuscripta.at

Fütterer was mainly interested in sermons and other pastoral texts. He collected these texts in his role as parish priest at the main church of the Klosterneuburg canonry, which also served as the parish churches of the city. It can be assumed that his audience was not only the monastic community, but also the population of the city as well as the nuns from the women’s convent. At least one sermon for them at the occasion of the veiling of a new nun survives.

As Fütterer was the parish priest, his duties also included administrative tasks. These are documented in the account book Rb 5/1², now preserved in the Archives of Klosterneuburg. Fütterer died on the 7th of October 1466.³

This account book contains probably the last reference to Fütterer. After his death, the canon Thomas Harder⁴ took over the office of parish priest. One of the first things Harder had to spend money on, was the latrine in the parish priest’s house:

Ambrosius Fütterer initially appears to have been reluctant to add his name to texts he copied. However, in later manuscripts, he routinely added his name. His writings primarily concern pastoral care, but the account book also provides insight into his more pragmatic writing. Through the extensive collection of the Klosterneuburg library it is possible to trace his career from its beginning to his death and beyond.

Bibliography

• Černík, Berthold. ‘Das Schrift- und Buchwesen im Stifte Klosterneuburg während des 15. Jahrhunderts’. Jahrbuch des Stiftes Klosterneuburg, 1913, 97–176.
• Fuchs, Adalbert Franz. ‘Monumenta Necrologica Claustroneoburgensia’. In MGH Necrol. 5. 1913.
• Soukup, Pavel. ‘Crusade, Politics, and Pastoral Care in the Klosterneuburg Sermons of 1467’. Austrian History Yearbook, 13 January 2025, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0067237824000766.
• Soukup, Pavel. ‘Magister Thomas Harder und Klosterneuburgs hussitische Nachbarschaft’. In Gotteskrieger. Der Kampf um den rechten Glauben rund um Wien im 15. Jahrhundert, edited by Maria Theisen. Klosterneuburg, 2022.

1. CCL 837, 874, 876, 877 and 926. Černík, ‘Das Schrift- und Buchwesen im Stifte Klosterneuburg während des 15. Jahrhunderts’, 115. ↩︎
2. https://manuscripta.at/hs_detail.php?ID=1601 ↩︎
3. Fuchs, ‘Monumenta Necrologica Claustroneoburgensia’, 62. ↩︎
4. Soukup, ‘Magister Thomas Harder und Klosterneuburgs hussitische Nachbarschaft’; Soukup, ‘Crusade, Politics, and Pastoral Care in the Klosterneuburg Sermons of 1467’. ↩︎