Boris Johnson, 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) successfully identified 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 daylight when the Church was renovated to house the Basel History Museum (Historisches Museum Basel).

Anna Catharina Bischoff was born in Strasbourg in 1719 as the 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 offers surprising insights into the fate and life of a woman, as well as everyday life in Basel and Strasbourg during the eighteenth century. The team also reconstructed her clothes and the most likely cause of her death.

The search for Anna Catharina Bischoff’s ancestors 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 descendant of Johann Froben (1466-1527), a printer-publisher and friend of Desiderius Erasmus (1460-1536). Erasmus is also buried in Basel, 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), Boris’s father.

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

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).