Abstract

In his 1506 autobiography Odeporicon, the German cleric Johannes Butzbach recalled an event of his early adulthood involving his mother Margarethe and a coin. When she refused to relinquish a particular florin to finance the young man's education, she was savagely beaten by her second husband. This unexamined anecdote, and in particular the extreme measures Margarethe took to protect her coin, can be explained through careful analysis of the Butzbach family dynamics and the way that coins were used to symbolize social bonds, including betrothal and marriage, in late medieval Germany. Margarethe Butzbach's resistance to transitioning her florin from ‘lucky penny’ to mere payment alerts us to the potentially contradictory nature of coins as objects both individual and interchangeable.

Keywords: Johannes Butzbach, Odeporicon, marriage, betrothal, property, coin

[T]ook no little joy in the prospect [of my schooling], and prepared some money for my departure, and having given me five florins, he demanded from my mother a sixth, which he knew she still cherished as her most precious coin from my father's bride gift and the one with which she became betrothed to him. When she refused to produce it – having decided to give me another in its place without his knowing – there was a great fight between them, which resulted in awful blows against my mother and pulling of her hair. At the sight of this I dropped my bags and, throwing down the rest of the money, I, along with our brother and sister, came to our mother's aid against your father. But once I had pulled our mother out from under his feet, I left the house weeping and wailing and vowing that I would no longer seek to enter the schools, nor go back to the monastery. As soon as he had calmed down from his rage and come to himself, unable to bear the biting guilt of remorse, he ran through town looking for me and then anxiously begged me not to abandon my purpose, but instead to forgive him his misconduct, which had only resulted from his attempting to help me.