Primary Contributors:
Cultures of Knowledge
Caritas Pirckheimer. c. 1670. Copper engraving, 7.8 by 9.8 cm. (Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, StadtAN E 17/II No. 2181)
Caritas Pirckheimer (1467–1532)
Born Barbara Pirckheimer in 1467 in Eichstätt, Caritas Pirckheimer was the eldest of twelve surviving children of Johannes Pirckheimer, a lawyer and member of a prominent Nuremberg family. Johannes ensured that each of his children received a good education: eight of his nine daughters, including Barbara, joined religious orders (the only route that was available for women to continue their education), and his sole surviving son, Willibald, became one of the foremost humanists of his generation.
Following the family’s return to Nuremberg, Pirckheimer joined the convent of St Clara (Klarissenkloster St. Klara) in the city at the age of twelve. Here, she showed an outstanding ability in Latin and was allowed to take her vows early, adopting the name Caritas. During the 1490s, it is likely that she authored or edited a Chronicle of the Order of the Poor Clares and the convent; she also began a decade-long correspondence with the humanist Sixtus Tucher, the cousin of her friend and mentor at the convent, Apollonia Tucher.
In 1503, Pirckheimer was elected abbess, and for the next two decades she presided over a period of relative stability. This changed, however, with the advent of the Reformation and its formal acceptance in the city of Nuremberg in 1525. Although the monasteries within the city were dissolved, under Caritas’s leadership the convent of St Clara resisted. Her fierce opposition is documented in her Denkwürdigkeiten, a chronicle of the years 1524–8, which records, through a combination of first-person narrative, letters, and other documents, her dealings with the city and various high-ranking personages as she fought to keep the convent open. She succeeded to the extent that the incumbent nuns were allowed to remain in the convent, although novices could no longer be accepted.
During the period of her abbacy, Pirckheimer maintained correspondence with a number of prominent figures. She corresponded regularly with her brother Willibald and, through her own erudition and his connections, acquired a reputation as one of the most learned women of her age, earning the admiration of well-known humanists such as Conrad Celtis and Christoph Scheurl. Pirckheimer served as abbess until her death in 1532.
Partners and Additional Contributors
EMLO Digital Fellow Sara Joswig compiled the metadata for the letters of Caritas Pirckheimer in August 2024 from the edition of correspondence edited by Josef Pfanner (Landshut, 1966). Descriptions of Caritas’s correspondence with her brother Willibald will be contributed to this catalogue in the spring of 2025 by Dr Christoph Kudella.
Key Bibliographic Source(s)
Briefe von, an und über Caritas Pirckheimer (aus den Jahren 1498–1530), ed. Josef Pfanner (Landshut: Solanus-Druck, 1966).
Contents
Josef Pfanner’s edition of Caritas Pirckheimer’s correspondence includes 102 surviving letters to or from Caritas (alongside several others that concern her) written between 1498 and 1525. The largest number of letters (thirty-two) are from the humanist and theologian Sixtus Tucher, with whom she shared a decade-long correspondence about matters of theology and personal faith. Only one side of this correspondence survives: Tucher’s letters to Pirckheimer. Written originally in Latin, they are were published in a German translation by Tucher’s nephew Christoph Scheurl (Peypus, 1515). Caritas corresponded regularly in Latin with her brother Willibald about scholarly and personal matters, and with other humanists such as Christoph Scheurl and Conrad Celtis. Her correspondence with Anton Tucher, in German, is of a more mundane character, and several German letters survive in addition between her and Caspar Nützel, the convent’s guardian (‘Pfleger’), which primarily concern official matters relating to the convent.
Further resources
Bibliography
Joanne King Grafe, ‘Caritas Pirckheimer: Sixteenth Century Chronicler’, PhD dissertation, Fordham University (1997).
Paul A. MacKenzie, ‘Introduction: The Life and Times of Caritas Pirckheimer of Nürnberg’, in Paul A. MacKenzie, tr., Caritas Pirckheimer: A Journal of the Reformation Years, 1524–1528 (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2006).
Sixtus Tucher, Viertzig Sendbriefe: aus dem Latein, in das Teutsch gezogen …, ed. Christoph Scheurl (Nuremberg: Peypus, 1515).
Charlotte Woodford, ‘Caritas Pirckheimer’s (1467–1532) Denkwürdigkeiten in the Context of Convent Historiography’, in Charlotte Woodford, Nuns as Historians in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Launch letters from, to, or mentioning Caritas Pirckheimer