Sabina Von Steinbach - Women Stonemasons

Women Stonemasons

Women were admitted to membership in the majority of the medieval craft guilds, but membership in a guild did not carry with it the right of being apprenticed, although it implied that a female member might share in all its benefits, pious and pecuniary, and in the event of her husband’s death (he being a master) might carry on his trade. This was easily done with the help of a managing journeyman and it is well known that provision was made for the journeyman's promptly acquiring the master’s rights by marrying such a widow. Stonemasons often traveled to distant sites for work that might be decades in construction and would naturally have taken their wives and children with them.

Von Steinbach's employment of his daughter Sabina among the Strasbourg stonemasons was not merely an irregularity perpetrated by a provincial lodge, lax in the proper guild observances. Until the capture of the city by France in 1681, the headquarters of the German stonemasons was in Strasbourg (even as late as 1760 the Strasbourg lodge still claimed tribute from the lodges of Germany). Indeed, American historian Albert Mackey, in his Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, cites the theory "which places the organization of the Order of Freemasonry at the building of the Cathedral of Strasbourg, in the year 1275."

Some contend that Sabina took over the contract on her father's job at Strasbourg after the master builder died and brought it to completion. Others maintain that she merely assisted her father. Still others maintain that Sabina completed the cathedral by herself, aided by "magic," when other stonemasons refused to work with her.