The Council of Constance, the Reformation, and the Reform of Imperial Law in a Contemporary Augsburg Sammelband

RICHENTAL, Ulrich. Das Concilium. So zuo Constantz gehalten ist worden […]. Augsburg, Heinrich Steiner, 1536. Bound with four major legal and judicial ordinances printed between 1531 and 1535, including the first edition of the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina of Emperor Charles V.

An extraordinary contemporary sammelband uniting one of the great illustrated chronicles of late medieval Europe with four foundational legal texts of the Holy Roman Empire, all preserved in a massive contemporary pigskin binding and assembled at the very moment when the constitutional, religious, and judicial order of Germany stood in transformation.

At the centre of the volume stands Heinrich Steiner’s richly illustrated second edition of Ulrich Richental’s famous Chronicle of the Council of Constance, accompanied here by the first edition of the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina of Charles V together with three further court ordinances printed between 1531 and 1535. The collection forms not merely a library convenience but a coherent intellectual and political statement about reform in Church and Empire during the age of the Reformation.

Edition & Physical Description

Large folio sammelband comprising Richental’s Chronicle together with four separately printed legal works.

The Richental chronicle alone contains 42 almost full-page woodcut illustrations, three additional half-page illustrations, more than 1,100 coats of arms, ornamental borders, and numerous decorative initials, much of the material coloured by a contemporary hand. Approximately 480 heraldic devices are coloured, while the colouring of the larger illustrations continues through roughly the first two-thirds of the chronicle.

Bound in a substantial contemporary pigskin binding over wooden boards with blind-tooled decoration, old manuscript spine title, and brass clasps. The binding is closely associated stylistically with South German workshop traditions, very likely Augsburg itself.

The Council of Constance Reimagined for the Reformation Era

Ulrich Richental’s chronicle of the Council of Constance was among the most influential historical works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Unlike theological accounts written for ecclesiastical audiences, Richental’s chronicle presented the council as a vast public spectacle observed by an engaged layman fascinated equally by diplomacy, ceremony, heraldry, urban life, political conflict, and the visual theatre of empire. Richental himself, a citizen of Constance, assembled his material from diaries, official records, eyewitness reports, and direct observation.

The original chronicle documented the Council of Constance (1414–1418), whose major outcomes included the condemnation and execution of Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague and the ending of the Great Schism through the election of Pope Martin V. Yet by the sixteenth century the work had acquired entirely new meaning.

For readers in the age of Luther, the council represented not simply medieval church history but the unresolved crisis of reform itself. The themes of ecclesiastical corruption, conciliar authority, imperial legitimacy, heresy, reform, and anti-Roman sentiment all returned with renewed urgency during the Reformation.

Jörg Breu, Luther, and Charles V

The present 1536 Augsburg edition is particularly remarkable because it subtly transforms the medieval chronicle into a contemporary Reformation document.

Although Heinrich Steiner modernized the language only lightly, the illustrations were entirely recut after designs by Jörg Breu the Elder on the basis of the older compositional models. These new woodcuts introduce unmistakable visual parallels between the fifteenth-century council and the political-religious tensions of the 1530s.

Most strikingly, Emperor Sigismund and Pope John XXIII are visually transformed into recognizable analogues of Charles V and Pope Paul III, who at precisely this moment were discussing the possibility of a new universal council. Jan Hus, meanwhile, is depicted with unmistakably Lutheran physiognomy and gestures derived from traditional images of the suffering Christ.

The illustrations therefore operate not merely as historical reconstruction but as political intervention.

As Gisela Wacker argued, the edition sought actively to mobilize public opinion in favour of reformist forces within the Empire. This political context becomes especially meaningful in Augsburg itself, where the Reformation had effectively been introduced by majority decision of the city council only two years earlier, in 1534.

The Four Legal Codes

The accompanying legal texts transform the sammelband into an even more ambitious statement about imperial reform.

Foremost among them is the first edition of the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina of Charles V, the first comprehensive criminal code of the Holy Roman Empire and one of the most important legal documents in German history. Issued after the Reichstage of Augsburg and Regensburg, the Carolina sought to standardize criminal procedure across the Empire and to restrain the arbitrary fragmentation of medieval legal practice.

The remaining legal works complement this project from different juridical traditions:

• the Worms municipal legal statutes rooted partly in Roman law and urban legal reform;

• the Bamberg criminal ordinance of 1508, itself one of the major precursors to the Carolina;

• and the regulations of the Imperial Court at Rottweil, one of the last surviving imperial tribunals independent of territorial princely authority.

Together, the five works form a coherent documentary archive of imperial constitutional transformation during the early Reformation period.

Colouring and Intended Audience

The unfinished yet extensive contemporary colouring provides an unusually revealing clue regarding the original owner.

Nearly all major narrative illustrations were coloured, but only a minority of the more than 1,100 heraldic shields received colour. Since heraldic colouring would have been essential for aristocratic genealogical use, the selective colouring strongly suggests that the first owner was not a nobleman primarily interested in heraldry, but rather a politically engaged civic official or administrator within Augsburg itself.

The volume appears therefore to have been assembled for practical political and juridical use rather than purely antiquarian collecting.

Later Provenance

An important later owner was Franz Ferdinand von Mayersfeld de Löwenkron, Austrian Hofsekretär and official connected to the ecclesiastical property reforms of Emperor Joseph II in Vienna. His ownership creates an intriguing second historical layer, linking the reform debates of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the Josephine state reforms of the late eighteenth century.

Literature

BM STC German 729; Dodgson II, no. 8; Ebert 5083; Feger; Graesse II, 246; Muther 1109; Neufforge 465; VD16 R 2202; Wacker. For the accompanying legal texts: Radbruch; Roth; Schottenloher; VD16 B 262; VD16 D 765; VD16 D 1071; VD16 W 4388.

For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 47:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume I