As early as 1976 Waldemar Schlögl pointed out that “diplomatic scholarship has hitherto treated wills with stepmotherly indifference”.1 An assessment that is, to some extent, still valid for the wills of noblewomen in the late medieval Empire. The absence of a comprehensive “synopsis of the extant wills of the nobility from the 13th to the 15th centuries”, called for by Alois Gerlich,2 contributes to this gap. This paper provides a corpus of noblewomen’s wills from the Holy Roman Empire between 1250 and 1520, compiled specifically for this study. It examines the testamentary practices reflected in the selected material, external and internal aspects of the documents, to serve as a first step towards further research and in-depth studies in this field. Historians have long focused on the wills of male rulers in the context of political and constitutional history. Although testaments of noblewomen constitute a central type of source for the study of this important social group, editions and analyses of these texts have long lagged far behind those of male rulers.3 Even if some wills of empresses, queens, and noblewomen have been published for the first time in earlier diplomatic collections or biographical studies, it is only recently that a significant number have been critically edited to modern standards.4 In addition to research interests, other factors that have contributed to the delayed attention given to noblewomen’s wills include the heterogeneity of their content and form, their interconnectedness with many 1 Schlögl 1976, p. 158; my translation. – I would like to thank Fabienne Füß for bibliographical assistance and Emma Miller-Hund for linguistic revision of this paper; full responsibility for any errors or inaccuracies lies with the author. 2 Gerlich 1984, p. 395; my translation. 3 See the research overviews in Guzzetti 2007; Kasten 2007; Antenhofer 2021, pp. 193–199; Hörmann 2023, p. 528; Zeiler 2023, pp. 21–27. 4 For information on the transmission and edition of the studied wills, see notes in Table 2. Henceforth cited numbers refer to Table 2. State of Research Introduction testaments of noblewomen in the holy roman empire 56
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