Speckled across the southern shores of the Baltic Sea is a curiously conforming series of monumental Brick Gothic (Backsteingotik) churches, essentially unrecognized in English-speaking scholarship. These monumental, late medieval structures, with their tall spires and basilica plans, welcomed mercantile traders of the Hanse—a powerfully polycentric network of free German cities—to a city’s bustling ports. My dissertation argues that the Brick Gothic forms permeating the shores of the Baltic Sea provide visual evidence of alliances and power struggles, possibly acting on and ultimately affecting the inner organization of the Hanse. Despite the plenitude of brick structures seen in northern Europe today, almost no brick buildings were constructed north of the Alps from the 6th to the 12th century. Yet Brick Gothic proliferated in the 13th century, at the exact moment the Hanse burst into the consciousness of the late medieval imagination; a portable and standardized material, brick was brought to the north at a time of maritime commercial revolution. My research questions how Brick Gothic became the flagship, the uniting element, for this loose-knit trade confederation. In addition, I am interested in what we can learn about the Hanse by focusing on brick, such a modest building material.

The Robert H. and Clarice Smith Fellowship afforded me the opportunity to travel to Lübeck, the self-proclaimed capital of the Hanse, to take detailed notes on the formal elements of Brick Gothic structures in the region, particularly the Wendish District in northern Germany. From there, I compared the long construction history of several Brick Gothic edifices in known Hanse port cities—such as Saint Mary’s Church in Lübeck, Saint Nicholas’s Church in Wismar, and Saint Mary’s Church in Rostock—to documents related to trade in the region. By pairing trade with architecture, my dissertation demonstrates that building design can elucidate the unspoken and undocumented struggles of nascent late medieval cities engaged in long-distance trade with their previously separate or unknown neighbors.

Although there is much debate surrounding the definition of the Hanse, there is a vague consensus that it was a loose network of merchants and towns committed to resolving conflicts among themselves to optimize trade. An example of this commitment is a declaration from 1259 wherein three Hanseatic cities—Lübeck, Wismar, and Rostock, all in the Wendish District—agreed to outlaw piracy and punish those who abet it. By 1276 the success of such alliances had led to the enforcement of Bergen’s law, the right of German exporters to buy, live, or rent in Norway, which ultimately granted unique and expanding trade privileges to merchants of the Wendish District. Almost immediately after the enforcement of Bergen’s law, cities of the Wendish District began constructing monumental Brick Gothic edifices, each with strikingly similar dimensions and choir structures. 

As the cities of this northern region grew and trade in the region increased, alterations were made to the churches’ designs. In 1291 a vicarage was donated for the choir of Saint Mary’s Church in Lübeck, indicating that the pillars of the inner choir were already in place for the vicar’s use, with the entire choir completed by 1304. Notably, at the end of the 14th century, Saint Nicholas’s in Wismar altered its choir to mirror that of Saint Mary’s in Lübeck. While some cities like Wismar modified their structures, others began to construct new edifices, often imitating those of their neighbors. For example, the Schwerin Cathedral in the Wendish District has almost the same basic dimensions in its inner choir as Saint Mary’s in Rostock, differing by just 5 to 10 centimeters. By imitating and changing designs, the large Brick Gothic churches in this region architecturally positioned themselves as both competitors and allies with their trade neighbors. Within the Hanse network in the late Middle Ages, Brick Gothic churches were not only monuments to religion but also, as the tallest structures in the city, to regional interconnectivity spurred by successful and cooperative commerce.

University of California, Los Angeles
Robert H. and Clarice Smith Fellow, 2024–2025

Abigail Berry will return to the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, for fall 2025 to finish her dissertation.