Boris, Basel and Anna

21 October 2021

Three years ago, in 2018, an international research group led by the Natural History Museum Basel (Naturhistorisches Museum Basel) managed to identify a mummy as Anna Catharina Bischoff (1719-1787).

A team of scientists from various medical disciplines, art scholars, genealogists, historians, and archivists studied Switzerland’s best-preserved mummy in a project that lasted for years.

It was eventually possible to decipher the identity of the ‘Lady of the Barfüsser Church’, where she was first discovered in 1843, buried again, and rediscovered in 1975.

The fate of history was that the mummy was brought to the daylight when the Church was renovated to house the Museum of History of Basel (Historisches Museum Basel).

Anna Catharina Bischoff was born in Strasbourg in 1719 as a daughter of a Basler pastor, who was a pastor in Strassburg at the time of her birth. In 1739, she married the pastor Lucas Gernler in Wolfisheim near Strassbourg.

She was a mother of seven children. She spent the last years of her life, after the death of her husband in 1781, in Basel.

The exhibition in the Naturhistorisches Museum and the accompanying book portray the (forensic) work of the interdisciplinary research team.

It gives surprising insights into the fate and life of a woman and everyday life in Basel and Strasbourg in the eighteenth century. The team also reconstructed her clothes and the most likely cause of her death.

The search for the ancestors of Anna Catharina Bischoff also revealed astonishing facts. Anna is the great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother of Boris Johnson (1964), the current UK Prime Minister.

Anna was a descendent of Johann Froben (1466-1527), a printer-publisher and friend of Desiderius Erasmus (1460-1536). Erasmus is buried in Basel as well, in the Münster, the cathedral.

One of her daughters married the baron Christian Friedrich Pfeffel von Kriegelstein (1726-1807). The baron is part of a direct line of descendants through the lineage of Stanley Johnson (1940), the father of Boris.

The book of the exhibition reads like a well-written detective but is art history at its best. The book is only available in the German language.

Gerhard Hotz, Claudia Opitz-Blakhal (Eds.) Anna Catharina Bischoff. Die Mumie aus der Barfüsserkirche, Rekonstruktion einer Basler Frauenbiografie des 18. Jahrhunderts. Christoph Merian Verlag, Basel, 2021).

(Source: Naturhistorisches Museum Basel).