Anna Laminite

Painting by Anna Laminits by Hans Burgkmair around 1502

Anna Laminit (* around 1480 in Augsburg ; † May 4, 1518 in Freiburg im Üechtland ) was a colorful personality of the late Middle Ages who, because of her alleged starvation, appearing as a false Saint Anna, and her contacts with well-known personalities of the time, multiplied Fraud and its tragic end has gone down in history.

CV and work

Origin and development

Coming from a family of craftsmen from Augsburg, she was already conspicuous as a teenager because of a relaxed way of life, pilloried by Kubelns (note: Kuppelei ) and other Buebereyen and driven out of the city with rods.

Probably due to earlier favors and connections she was able to return in 1497 to Augsburg and performed as a Beguine in a Seelhaus, a home for poor honest woman persons in the local St. Anna-Straße. In return for free board and lodging, attendance of the church services for the donors, their grave maintenance and the distribution of alms were expected. There she succumbed to the special flair of piety and veneration of saints in her environment. Soon Anna Laminit was strikingly celebrating the life of a beguines of charismatic piety. She wore only black and had divine revelations and visions from angels, especially from Saint Anne .

Hunger martyr and miraculous saint

Drawing Anna Laminits by Hans Holbein the Elder around 1511

Around this time she became a starvation martyr - possibly influenced by the model of Niklaus von Flüe . She said she did not eat any food and had not had any excretions in 14 years. In addition to charismatic revelations and healing miracles, from 1498 their absolute lack of food was in the foreground and established their reputation as living saints.

This reputation spread quickly. People from near and far sought her advice and help. Emperor Maximilian I and his second wife Bianca Maria Sforza were among her admirers , along with other high-ranking personalities . Their influence was so great that the latter organized a large-scale prayer procession through the entire Augsburg clergy and all the monks and nuns in the city. The highlight of this parade on June 7th, 1503 was the Queen herself with her entourage, all barefoot, in black penitential robes and with burning candles in their hands. Even Martin Luther visited Anna on his return journey from Rome in 1511.

Anna allowed herself to be richly rewarded with blessings and prayers and soon had amassed a considerable fortune, which was also lent against interest. Of the donations given to her for the poor and sick , she kept a few good tails .

According to tradition, Anna had a relationship with the wealthy Augsburg merchant Anton Welser , who gave birth to a son. For this, Welser paid 30 gulden maintenance annually, not knowing that this child had long since died. The fraud only came out when Welser wanted to send his son to school in Augsburg in 1518 and Anna instead sent her stepson out of her connection with the widower Hans Bachmann. Other sexual relationships with the pastor of the Holy Cross and her confessor also became known. As a result, doubts about Anna's holiness gradually arose.

Exposure and the end

She had already been convicted by Duchess Kunigunde of Austria (1465–1520), the sister of Maximilian I. This, herself very religious but skeptical of Anna's arts, had invited the false saint to the Püttrichkloster in Munich in 1512 and secretly with witnesses regarding her Foodlessness observed. Through an opening in the guest room one could see the starvation martyr eating food. Faced with this and with the excrement she had thrown away through the window, she was forced to eat and drink in front of the entire convent. With the request to improve, Anna was released.

But after she returned to Augsburg and continued to play the starvation martyr, she was expelled from the city again in 1514 at Kunigunde's instigation. Grace was again shown, she kept her fortune, and Anna was able to leave the city in a Welser carriage.

After a stopover with the Gray Sisters in Kempten, where she continued to appear as a starvation martyr, which was soon recognized as a hoax, she went to Kaufbeuren . Here she met the widowed crossbow maker Hans Bachmann, with whom she moved to Freiburg in Üechtland / Switzerland and married him on November 24, 1514.

The pretense of foodlessness was only part of their fraudulent machinations. She was finally arrested and charged in Freiburg (Friborg) for child suppression and alimony fraud to the disadvantage of her former lover Anton Welser. Her previous scams were also uncovered and the defendant admitted to it during three interrogations, apparently without torture. The death by cremation intended for such crimes was changed to drowning as a pardon. The court ordered that the executioner put Anna in a sack and hold it under water until the soul escapes from her body ( sacks ). The execution by drowning was carried out on May 5, 1518 on the Saane .

Her husband was also sentenced to death . As the tradition reports ... because of your conduct, you were the man to go, the woman to go.

Contemporary assessments

In Anna Laminit's hometown Augsburg, the town clerk and son-in-law Anton Welser's Konrad Peutinger ensured that her confessions were not circulated. This would have damaged the reputation of the city, the Welsers and his own.

Johannes Aventinus , the well-known chronicler and historian, later commented: "Not only the stupid people, the uneducated mob, believed this, but also our holy scholars, the new theology professors ..." trusted this false Saint Anna. Possibly this also referred to Martin Luther, who he knew.

If, in retrospect, Luther sees his trip to Rome of 1510/11 as a “chain of disappointed expectations”, the visit to Anna Laminit is one of them. He gave his meeting with her in one of his table talks in 1540 - by then he no longer remembered her name - to the best: When he came back through Augsburg in 1511, there was a "whore" there, called Jungfrau Ursel, who had pretended that she neither eat nor drink or have other physical needs. “But it was a lot of shitting with her,” said Luther's final comment. He now referred to Anna, whom he had previously worshiped, as ludibria diaboli (devil's deception ).

literature

• Friedrich Roth : The spiritual deceiver Anna Laminit von Augsburg (approx. 1480-1518) . In: Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 43 (1924), pp. 355-417 Commons
• Waltraud Pulz: Sober calculation - consuming passion. Food abstinence in the 16th century . Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 2007, ISBN 978-3-412-18406-3 , pp. 17-37 u. a. m . (also habilitation, University of Jena 2004).
• Sylvia Weigelt: “To be the pleasure and joy of men”. Women around Luther . Wartburg-Verlag, Weimar u. a. 2011, ISBN 978-3-86160-241-5 , pp. 26-33 .

Fiction

• Ursula Niehaus : The sacred play . Knaur, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-426-66257-1 .
• Ursula Niehaus: The herbal saint . Special edition. Galeria Kaufhof, Cologne 2011, ISBN 978-3-426-65296-1 .

Web links

• Representation of the Augsburg City Archives, 2019
• Augsburg city dictionary
• Depiction of Irene Koppensteiner ( Memento from February 19, 2005 in the Internet Archive )