Into Zwettl Abbey We Venture

Cloisters, wells, and much, much "more"

This is a follow-up posting to accompany the below foray into rural Lower Austria:

Near Zwettl, an Old Monastery is Found

It shows details from the interior of Zwettl Abbey, mostly because I like them, but there’s also another reason (to be explained below the images).

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Take a step into the mediaeval cloisters, courtesy of this postcard mailed in 1956.

It still looks like this—an image from 1959.

Among the main features of the cloisters is this well, which adorns a postcard from 1934 (above); another nice thing are—the bright colours of spring (below), as seen on a postcard from 1956.

And here’s a bit more text for the extra-curious: you see, back in 2013, on a cold and windy January afternoon, I made my way into the vaults of the Abbey. I met with the archivist who permitted me to take many photographs of archival records.

I didn’t find what I set up to find (fiscal and other taxation-related materials from around 1700), but I found something else: hand-written and later also printed wanted notes, or Steckbriefe, from the 1750s, 1770s, and 1810s.

Serendipity, once again, struck.

I took many pictures, two of which I’m reproducing here—above, you can see a circulaire from 1756, and below, a couple of printed wanted notes from 1813.

Here’s from the wanted from from the left side, which concerns a prison-break that occurred on 18 November 1813. While being transferred to the county court, two female robbers were freed by two unknown men, with the latter described thus:

One “around 28, of middling figure but great strength with a broad, pale face, dark brown hair, and a pointed nose” wearing a “butcher’s apron”

The other was “tall and slim, age 22…a round and reddish face, a broad nose, and a military-style haircut” who, “according to other information, [was] a knacker’s son of Pinggau, near Friedberg, Styria, who every once in a while likes to dress like a woman”

I’ll stop here—and would like to offer an intriguing Sunday posting: I asked one of my friends who’s also an artist to sketch some of these fugitives for me.

So we sat down one day after Christmas in 2014, I read a few wanted notes to him, and he started sketching. “The hardest thing about this”, he told me, “is the fact that I’ve got all these other images of wanted fugitives in my mind already”.

See here, for instance, for the Yale Wanted Poster Archive, or here for cartoonist James Gilray’s “People”. We know next to nothing about rural vagrants, deserters, and criminals from the 18th century, and given the high levels of details—esp. clothing—these sources are wonderful. (Also, Wikipedia doesn’t have manuscript wanted posters from before the 1820s, which is also a “nice to have” add-on.)

I’ve been using these sketches every now and then at conferences, and I’ll share some of them tomorrow.