Frauenlob’s Song of Songs: A Medieval Poet and His Masterpiece (review)

This book is a generous gift from the pen of scholar-poet Barbara Newman. A gift of scholarly devotion to the memory of the once famous Frauenlob, the praiser of our Lady and of ladies, known otherwise to his contemporaries as Heinrich von Meissen (1260–1318), it seeks to rescue him and his remarkable writings from oblivion. A gift to the memory of the late musician Barbara Thornton, it celebrates the devoted efforts of modern performers to make the minstrel songs of the Middle Ages heard anew. A festive gift of poetic translation, it accurately captures the spirit and content of Frauenlob’s compositions in a winning manner that bridges the gap between his time and our own. If Frauenlob “speaks for [Mary], placing a torrent of first-person discourse in her mouth” (94), Newman speaks for them both.

Prefatory essays introduce English readers to the German poet and his work, noting that “anglo-saxon scholarship on this master is non-existent” (x). Newman provides on facing pages the critical German text (as edited by Karl Stackmann) and her poetic translation of each of the twenty strophes of Frauenlob’s Marienleich, a title that A. E. Kroeger translated in 1877 as Lay of Our Lady, but which Newman calls his Song of Songs, thus underscoring both Frauenlob’s Biblical inspiration and the veiled referents of his text, which names neither Mary nor Jesus explicitly. At the end of the book, Newman provides a detailed, strophe-by-strophe commentary that interprets the imagery of the Marienleich, points to Frauenlob’s models and sources, decodes his often cryptic allusions, and calls attention to word-plays and other stylistic features lost in the translation. The scholarly apparatus includes a bibliography, an index, and a useful glossary of technical terms. Inside the back cover of the book can be found the recording on CD of the 1990 performance by Sequentia of Frauenlob’s Marienleich—a performance directed by Barbara Thornton and Benjamin Bagby and released for the first time in North America. In the book itself, between the poetic text and translation and the closing commentaries are five wonderfully erudite, illustrated chapters that sketch the background behind the poem.

Chapter One, “The Performer, His Public, and His Peers,” provides an intriguing sketch of the world in which Frauenlob lived and worked. One of the Spruchdichter, Frauenlob belonged to a company of professional, traveling poet-minstrels, whom Newman describes as “the German vernacular theologians of their age,” because they chose to dwell in their poetry on such topics as “the Trinity, the Incarnation, the glories of the Virgin, the marvels of nature, and other philosophical and religious themes” (51). An acknowledged meister, Frauenlob was “both a master craftsman and a wise teacher” (51), notorious for his “widely recognized ambitions and the distinctiveness of his style” (61), and the reputed founder in Mainz of the first singing school. Newman paints a picture of the ambitions that set Frauenlob in a real (and subsequently fictionalized) contest with his archrival Regenbogen, who (so Newman, following Johannes Rettelbach, suggests) parodied Frauenlob, with the result that a “boasting poem” was wrongly attributed to him. Newman thus defends Frauenlob from the charge of a vaunting hubris, but she acknowledges, nonetheless, that the “praiser of ladies” was well aware of his own exceptional gifts. Frauenlob’s “only eulogy for another poet,” that composed for Konrad of Würzburg (+1287), actually praises in his art the features of Frauenlob’s own (56).

Chapter Two, “Frauenlob’s Canon,” describes the surviving works of Frauen-lob: the debate poem, Minne und Welt, in which the respective claims of Love and the World are presented in a way that actually explores “a polarity, a relationship of mutual dependence” between them (74); the three leichs (the Minneleich, the Kreuzleich, and the...