This volume prints the foundation books and related materials of four of the most important fraternities in late medieval Lübeck: the fraternities of the Holy Sacrament, St Anthony's and St Leonard's, based in the Dominican friary of St Mary's in the north of the city, and the fraternity of the Holy Sacrament and St Maurice's, based in the Franciscan friary of St Catherine's in the city's centre. The large parchment codices kept by the fraternity stewards recorded endowments, testamentary gifts and the giving of alms, but also listed their members – both living and deceased – for reasons of joint prayer and to record payment of membership fees, preserving a valuable prosopographical resource in the process. The materials published for the first time in this volume offer a compelling window into the operation of fraternities as both spiritual associations and – as the editor puts it – ‘deeply political organs’ (p. 44), shedding light on how the urban elites of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Lübeck utilized ostensibly religious organizations for purposes of political networking and advancement, to exchange valuable commercial information and strike trade deals, and to secure favourable marriage partners for themselves and their kin.

The volume is divided into four sections. The first introduces the three fraternities based in St Mary's, surveying their foundation, incomes and membership, the latter often including significant numbers of women. All three were based in the so-called ‘castle church’ (borchkercken) of Lübeck (hence the fraternities’ appellation tor Borch or ‘zur Burg’ in modern German, i.e. ‘at the castle’), a term whose origin lay in the fact that St Mary's was built on the site of a former castle erected by the counts of Schauenburg to control the city, but which was seized by the civic commune in the early 1200s and handed over to the Dominicans soon thereafter. There were around 70 fraternities in late medieval Lübeck, but Jahnke argues that the three ‘in the castle’ were perhaps the most prestigious, forming the focus of the mercantile and ruling elite. Among their members were an array of leading long-distance traders, merchants and councillors, as well as captains of the city guard, the master of the civic wine cellar and the city apothecary. More humble citizens are rarely seen, with the fraternity of St Anthony's even banning the entry of craftsman and ecclesiastics, probably to preserve its elite character. As well as illuminating religious life and pious activity within Lübeck, the records analysed by Jahnke point to the broader economic activities of the fraternities. The fraternity of the Holy Sacrament's foundation book record not just their investment in liturgical paraphernalia and provision for civic processions, for example, but also their purchase of several villages in the rural hinterland during the fifteenth century, with the income derived from the settlements dedicated to purchasing food for Lübeck's poor. The detailed membership lists in the foundation books that follow in the second section reveal that many of Lübeck's elite belonged to all three of these fraternities, underlining how the religious associations ‘at the castle’ connected the city's leading figures for prayer, processions and socializing.

The third and fourth sections of the volume focus on the fraternity of the Holy Sacrament and St Maurice's in St Catherine's, with the former outlining its foundation and basic features and the latter printing the content of three parchment codices recording the association's membership and accounts. The value of this fraternity's materials, as Jahnke argues, lies in the fact that it was composed largely of members drawn from the ‘middle class’ of Lübeck, offering insights into the everyday life of more ‘humble’ men and women for whom sources ordinarily do not survive (p. 259). Rather than wealthy merchants and councillors, the membership lists in this section record the names of cooks, bakers, scribes and tanners, among other tradesmen, usefully broadening the volume's focus beyond the civic elite in the process. The relative difference in wealth between membership of this fraternity at St Catherine's and those in the ‘castle church’ is made clear by the fees charged to their members for communal feasts and the pay they could offer to the servants who prepared it. St Anthony's, for example, paid the cook they hired to prepare their members’ food between 13 and 14 shillings and charged individual brothers 5 shillings to attend each feast in the later 1400s, while the fraternity at St Catherine's paid their cook a measly 4 shillings and charged around 2 shillings or less for each brother at the communal meal. Not all the membership at St Catherine's were as well behaved as the stewards probably hoped, with fines for late payment of fees and other misdemeanours appearing frequently, lending the records reproduced in this section plenty of character. The case of the two men fined half a pound of wax each for drinking too much beer and talking during the presentation of the host remind readers today that people did not just join fraternities to engage in collective prayer, but to socialize, converse and drink beer (p. 292).

The materials printed in this volume have remained inaccessible for decades, with the bulk of Lübeck's fraternity records only returned to the city archive in the 1990s, after being forcibly dispersed in the wake of World War II to repositories as far afield as the DDR, the Soviet Union and Armenia. Jahnke has, therefore, produced a valuable edition of rich and fascinating sources that shed light on various aspects of urban life, piety and community, coupled with helpful critical introductions to the fraternities and a thorough index. This volume does not just make Lübeck's fraternities accessible to a new generation of scholars, but sets an example for future studies to follow.