(b ?Freiburg, c1390; d Strasbourg, 31 March 1460). German-Swiss poet and musician. Although his patronymic refers to Laufenburg (formerly Laufenberg) on the Upper Rhine, east of Rheinfelden, it is never used to indicate his place of origin in the extant archival material. Instead, the acrostics in the didactic poems Regimen and Spiegel menschlichen Heils provide the information that Laufenberg was ‘von frybvrg ein priester’ and ‘ein priest von fribvrg’, which possibly indicates that he came from Freiburg im Breisgau. An entry in the Heidelberg University matriculation records of 20 December 1417 mentions a ‘Heinricus Loffenburg de Rapperswil cler. Constanc. Dyoc.’; this could of course refer to another man, but the town name has also been corrected to ‘Rupperswil’, which is close to the town of Zofingen, where Laufenberg was dean of the collegiate foundation of St Mauritius in 1433 and 1434. However, he had previously been in Freiburg, where the records mention him as capellanus and viceplebanus in 1421, and he bought a house there in 1424. He was probably in Zofingen between about 1430 and 1440: he is documented as absent from his benefice at Freiburg Cathedral from 1436 to 1438, and he is not mentioned again as ‘Heinrich ze Friburg Dechan’ until 1441. He resigned from the office of dean in 1445 and left Freiburg to enter the monastery of the Knights Hospitaller in Strasbourg, a favourite retreat of highly esteemed clerics in their old age. He died there, according to the monastery's necrology, on 31 March 1460.
Laufenberg's literary work consists primarily of two large didactic poems in rhyming couplets, the Regimen of 1429 (a work of about 6000 lines on the subject of health; ed. H.H. Menge, Göppingen, 1976) and the Spiegel menschlichen Heils of 1437 (a translation in about 15,000 lines of the Speculum humanae salvationis). He also wrote a Buch der Figuren (a collection of Marian prefigurations, c15, 370 lines; 1441), a small group of discourses in rhyming couplets and some prose (a didactic dialogue between a father confessor and a female penitent). Of these works only the Regimen has been preserved complete, since it was widely distributed in the 15th century; there are seven extant manuscripts and an incunabulum. The other works were preserved as unica in the library of the Hospitallers in Strasbourg, including the rhymed discourses and the prose work, copied in the same manuscript as Laufenberg's songs, about 120 in all. This manuscript (shelfmark B.121) was transferred to the Bibliothèque de la ville, Strasbourg, at the time of secularization, but was destroyed by fire in 1870.
The songs, the texts of which were edited by Wackernagel before the manuscript was lost, were copied with their melodies in more or less chronological order (many of the songs were dated in the manuscript). Otherwise the transmission pattern of the songs was small and scattered. While a number of the songs in the manuscript bear the ascriptions ‘heinrich’ or merely ‘h’, there are also songs by other authors such as the Monk of Salzburg and Heinrich von Mügeln. The presence of the Monk of Salzburg's songs, along with the contrafactum of a two-voice song, Wolauf, lieben gesellen vnuerczait/Seit willikommen her Martein by the Monk or one of his circle (Wackernagel, 54*; cf C. März: Die weltlichen Lieder des Mönchs von Salzburg, Tübingen, 1999, pp.34–54, 497–501) and Laufenberg's translation of popular hymns and sequences into German, suggests that he was inspired by the older poet. The contrafactum texts, Woluff mit andaht alle cristenheit and Bis wilkommen, Maria, maget rein, were entered some distance apart in the songbook F-Sm B.121, so that in the circumstances polyphonic performance seems somewhat unlikely. No edition of the melodies has appeared, but Wachinger (1979) indicated sources for 17 of the melodies (also mentioning a facsimile of Wackernagel's copies of the melodies, preserved as F-Sn 2371).
The frequently raised question of whether Heinrich Laufenberg was the same man as Heinricus de Libero Castro, a composer included in F-Sm 222 (also lost), is difficult to answer. First, it is striking that the manuscript, the oldest part of which can be traced back to Zofingen, and which finally ended up in the monastery of the Knights Hospitaller, travelled the same way as Laufenberg. It may be that Laufenberg either drew up the codex himself or acquired it at an early date. He repeatedly mentioned his origin as ‘von Freiburg’, which is easily equated with its latinized form ‘de Libero Castro’; Heinricus de Libero Castro is represented in the manuscript by a series of pieces for several voices in simple polyphony but using relatively complex notation. Although the only evidence for Heinrich Laufenberg's engagement with polyphonic composition is his contrafactum of the hymn to St Martin mentioned above, it does not seem out of the question that Heinrich Laufenberg and Henricus de Castro were the same man, but the issue remains unresolved.
H.F. Massmann: ‘Heinrich von Loufenberg’, Anzeiger für Kunde des teutschen Mittelalters, i (1832), cols.41–8
P. Wackernagel, ed.: Das deutsche Kirchenlied von den ältesten Zeit bis zu Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts, ii (Leipzig, 1867/R), nos.701–98 [most extensive edn of texts]
E.R. Müller: Heinrich Laufenberg: eine litterar-historische Untersuchung (Berlin, 1888)
L. Denecke: ‘Laufenberg, Heinrich’, Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. W. Stammler and K. Langosch (Berlin, 1933–55)
B. Wachinger: ‘Laufenberg, Heinrich’, Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. K. Ruh and others (Berlin, 2/1977–)
B. Wachinger: ‘Notizen zu den Liedern Heinrich Laufenbergs’, Medium aevum deutsch: Beiträge zur deutschen Literatur des hohen und späten Mittelalters: Festschrift für K. Ruh zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. D. Huschenbett and others (Tübingen, 1979), 349–85
L. Welker: ‘Heinrich Laufenberg in Zofingen: Musik in der spätmittelalterlichen Schweiz’, Schweizer Jb für Musikwissenschaft, new ser., xi (1991), 67–77
LORENZ WELKER