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This article analyses the new meaning persecutions of heretics acquired in later medieval towns during the 1390s, as German free and imperial cities struggled for a greater political autonomy. During the last decade of the fourteenth century, Waldensian heretical communities throughout the German lands became targeted in a chain of inquisitions; a number of these trials took place in South German cities. The context, course and outcome of the anti-Waldensian inquisition in Augsburg (1393), examined here as a case-study, represents the changing perception of heretical communities during the 1390s. Throughout the decade, urban anti-heretical trials emphasized the inherently violent and anti-social nature of the religiously deviant; heretics were habitually portrayed not only as bad Christians, but also as bad citizens. This understanding of heresy and heretics contrasted sharply with the growing city-centric self-consciousness among the urban elites, which stressed crucial connections between the political and religious aspects of urban life. The inquisition, catalyzed by the arrival of an itinerant inquisitor, became a focal point for the contest of political authorities between the participants. As a result, Augsburg's Waldensian community was instrumentalized in the contest between the internal (secular) and the external (ecclesiastical) authorities over the right to persecute religious heterodoxy, and ultimately over the definition of an urban other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While documentary evidence widely attests to polyphonic music in South German monasteries and convents in the decades around 1600, the musical repertory of nunneries is largely elusive and few musical sources have come to light that can be traced to a specific religious house. This article suggests that a set of three partbooks of tricinia, kept today in the Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg (Tonkunst Schletterer 543 and 544) and in the Bischöfliche Zentralbibliothek Regensburg (b.259–67), may have originated in a Franciscan convent. The majority of the 251 short settings are based on texts attributed to the Franciscan St Bonaventure, while others take up imagery particularly relevant to religious women. The stylistic features, leaning towards traditional three-part polyphony, the systematic ordering and the frequent word painting are consistent with compositional tendencies in the early 17th century. This musical source is contextualized in the sphere of convent music in the ‘Age of Confessionalization’ on the one hand and the practice of tricinia singing— usually associated with Protestant Latin schools—on the other. Two potential places of provenance tentatively emerge for the partbooks: the convent of the Poor Clares in Regensburg or—more likely—the Franciscan Tertiaries of Maria Stern in Augsburg, where a rich musical culture unfolded in the first decades of the 17th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]