1In 359, Duke Rudolf IV of Austria commissioned the expansion of the Church of St. Stephen in Vienna. When the ducal crypt was completed in 1362, Duke Friedrich III, Rudolf’s younger brother and co-regent, had unexpectedly died. This death “was probably a deeply moving experience for Rudolf, which made him aware of his own finitude”, as Michael Mitterauer stated in 2018 at the beginning of his study “On the Portrait of Duke Rudolf IV of Austria”. Behind the noble ruler’s gesture of legitimation, Mitterauer traced the lifeworld of medieval people with characteristic sensitivity. Even if the modern reader is able to put himself in Rudolf’s emotional world for a moment: the historian was always concerned with capturing the person in his historical environment.
Individual objects as well as complex economic, social, political and mental structures and, last but not least, diverse personal relationships provide an insight into this environment. The three-quarter length portrait that Rudolf had made for his tomb by an Italian master, and the gold-silk shroud with an Arabic blessing in which his body was wrapped after his sudden death in Milan, originally made for a ruler of the Mongolian dynasty of the Ilkhane, served to document the complexity of the sepulchral and memorial culture of late medieval Europe. At the same time, the historian created a panorama of the network of relationships between the ruler and his relatives, dependents, and subjects on the one hand, and his competitors and business partners on the other, extending beyond Europe. This past world was thus described in all its density without losing sight of its organizing principles.
“So that it doesn’t get lost”
On August 18, Michael Mitterauer died in his native city of Vienna at the age of eighty-six. From 1959 he worked, from 1971 as an associate professor, from 1973 as a full professor and since 2003 as an emeritus professor at the Institute for Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna. Together with Alfred Hoffmann, who was appointed in 1961, Michael Mitterauer introduced a new phase in the history of the Vienna Institute, which Alfons Dopsch founded in 1922 as a seminar for economic and cultural history. The funding of temporary projects by third-party donors opened up opportunities that have made it one of the world’s leading research centers in the field of social history and historical anthropology.
In an essay, Michael Mitterauer warned against the romantic notion that Duke Rudolf IV might have had his shroud in his luggage because of the memory of the plague. “The representative gold-silk fabric with which he was buried in 1365 in the ducal crypt he had donated in St. Stephen was certainly only tailored to his preserved body after his unexpected death in Milan.”
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Bild: Dommuseum St. Stephen
The decisive factors were Mitterauer’s commitment and his own work in the field of family social history and his interest in oral history and autobiographical sources. The founding of the journal “Historical Anthropology” in 1993 with like-minded colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen and other international institutions was important for the integration of these research directions and their profiling in the German-speaking area and beyond.
In the “Documentation of Life-World Records” brought into being by Mitterauer, life memories and personal testimonies of the “little people” are collected. “So that it doesn’t get lost” is the name of the series of books that emerged from this documentation. It reads like a defiant answer to “The world we have lost”, the classic sketch of society in England before the Industrial Revolution, in which Peter Laslett formulated decisive approaches for a new type of family history in 1965. Mitterauer saw Laslett’s merit as being based on the refutation of the assumption that the industrial revolution was accompanied by a reduction in household size.
interest in everyday life
Nowhere was Mitterauer’s attention to continuity more evident than in his numerous and authoritative contributions to family social history. Mitterauer made a decisive contribution to the understanding of European kinship structures by proving that ecclesiastical constraints were less aimed at stabilizing kinship groups than at protecting monogamous marriages for religious reasons. He identified this particular development as one of those peculiarities that, through their accumulation, have given European history its character, as he demonstrated in his bestseller “Why Europe?” from 2003, for which he was awarded the Historical College Prize in 2004.
His attention to deep continuity and his interest in everyday life brought Michael Mitterauer close to the historians of the French “Annales” school. While the latter put cross-regional developments at the center of their work, Mitterauer placed great value on regional differentiation. However, the difference becomes clearer when looking at the mentalities. Where the “Annales” historians ask about the worldview of past people, Mitterauer dealt with the question of what a phenomenon like the pilgrimage to Santiago means for today’s existential problems. The answer to that is beyond the competence of the historian, he admitted; but the insight remains: “A pilgrimage means a journey through life.”