Rulman Merswin was a financier in fourteenth-century Strasbourg who underwent a profound religious conversion during the Black Death, and became an author of mystical and visionary works in German. He invested his capital to found a new religious house in his city, an urban commandery of the Knights Hospitaller, which he established to provide the possibility of formal retreat from the world for the devout laity of Strasbourg – at least, for those with financial means. That foundation, known as the Grüner Wörth, was an anchor point in a thoroughgoing reform of the Hospitallers in late medieval Germany, and became a noted centre of learning and intellectual life: it was here in 1514 that Erasmus met Sebastian Brant. Its library formed the core of the Strasbourg city library that was catastrophically destroyed during the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, but its archive survives, and allows the exploration of the lives, literary interests, and motives of those – Hospitaller religious brethren and Strasbourgeois laity (men, women, even married couples) alike – who sought to follow in Rulman’s footsteps and enter the Grüner Wörth.
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