Historic Interiors

Monastic seclusion

Room from Zurich’s Fraumünster Abbey with tiled stove, 1489

The convents, monasteries and abbeys of the Middle Ages were remote from the hubbub of the marketplace, places of seclusion and contemplation. The first mention of a convent with church in Zurich comes in the late 9th century. The powerful Fraumünster Abbey offered noble young women the liberty to develop their spiritual and artistic abilities. Katharina von Zimmern, the last abbess of the convent, was also the ruler of Zurich. She had taken the vow in 1491 at the age of 13, and handed over the convent to the city of Zurich in 1524, abdicating in the face of the Reformation.

The three rooms from the Fraumünster Abbey preserved here are a testament to the institution’s wealth. The ceiling of the antechamber is decorated with foliage, banners – and a warning: “He who slanders women does not know what his mother did for him. Women must be praised, whether sincerely or not.”

Mediaeval urban development

Room from Mellingen town hall, now in the canton of Argovia, 1467

Around 1400, a dense network of mostly small cities began to grow up in what we now call the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Basel, with a population of 11,000, and Zurich, with 5,000 inhabitants, were among the largest of these. By way of comparison: the population of Paris at the time numbered 150,000. The cities enjoyed certain commercial liberties, the consequences of their local and trans-regional economic ties. They were able to free themselves ever more resolutely from the princes who ruled the territories around them and to achieve legal and political autonomy by way of the privileges accorded them as cities.

The town hall of Mellingen (now in the canton of Argovia) in the year 1465 is an example of the increasing self-confidence of such conglomerations. The little town of Mellingen was in the process of taking over more and more of its own administration, and had grown wealthy thanks to the bridge tolls it levied and the traffic that passed through it.

Go to the Hallwil Collection