„zů gedechtnisse irer selen“.

Hardly any other genre of sources provides historians with as much information about the medieval contemporaries’ concept of the afterlife as wills. At the intersection of material and spiritual concerns, the testators had to make elementary decisions for their relatives’ financial support, as well as their own pursuit of salvation. The late medieval testamentary tradition in the city of Worms shows that the testators applied quite individual strategies in the distribution of their goods in the area of tension between the need for provision of their own families and the endowment of the clergy. The law of inheritance offered a certain degree of tolerance for the testators’ own decisions. The specific distribution of goods to trustworthy persons and (spiritual) institutions, allowed the creation of an individual and self-determined