Otfrids Evangelienbuch in der frühen Neuzeit. Studien zu den Anfängen der deutschen Philologie (review)

Norbert Kössinger's Otfrids Evangelienbuch in der frühen Neuzeit, a doctoral dissertation accepted by the University of Munich, contains seven main chapters and a long appendix of edited and (partially) translated source materials. The overarching concern of the book is stated in its first sentence: "Dieses Buch beschäftigt sich mit der Wiederentdeckung und Erforschung des Evangelienbuchs Otfrids von Weißenburg vom Ende des 15. bis zum ersten Drittel des 19. Jahrhunderts." The starting point of Kössinger's investigation is the Liber de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis by Johannes Trithemius, which was completed in 1494. This catalogue (re)introduced Otfrid's name and work to literary history by providing a few biographical lines about the monk along with a list of nine titles attributed to his hand. Though somewhat problematic, the list generally corresponds to various sections comprising the Evangelienbuch. The decision of where to end the investigation was more subjective, but it was made on good grounds. As his outer limit, Kössinger chose Karl Lachmann's "Otfried (Otfrid)," a contribution to the Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste that was published in 1836. It is this entry that delineated many of the issues about the Evangelienbuch that concern us to the present day—its sources, its relation to the Heliand, and so forth. The nineteenth-century blossoming of comparative philology and textual criticism is often understood as a sort of scientific revolution, a clean break from the past, but this is clearly not the case (see Sebastiano Timparano's The Origins of Lachmann's Methods, for instance). By examining the treatment of the Evangelienbuch in the hands of early modern intellectuals, Kössinger has aimed to reveal continuities instead of fissures in the history of Germanic philology, and he is right to have done so. He is also right to point out that our conception of the "birth" of modern philology was largely forged by the immediate academic successors of such scholars as Lachmann and Grimm.

The second chapter of the book, "Spurensuche und Spurensicherung: Die Wiederentdeckung der Handschriften von Otfrids Evangelienbuch," presents a survey of the often circuitous paths that the extant medieval sources of the Evangelienbuch have traversed throughout history. In addition to the Codex Vindobonensis 2687, the Codex Germanicus Monacensis 14, and the Codex Palatinus Latinus 52, there are also the fragments from the so-called Codex Discissus. Kössinger provides a thorough "chronology of rediscoveries" for each of these cases, and he concludes the chapter with a discussion of lost and misidentified manuscripts. "Arbeiten mit den Handschriften: Kodexgebundene Otfridrezeption," the third chapter, concerns some unprinted or sparsely archived early modern transcriptions, textual studies, and catalogue descriptions of these medieval documents. The author discusses the background, sources, purpose, and accuracy of the copies (or partial copies) of the Evangelienbuch attributed to Achill Pirmin Gasser (ca. 1560), Johann Philipp Schmid (ca. 1700), and Gottfried Bessel (ca. 1725); he evaluates the philological methods of two brief critical commentaries on the text of the poem—both of some value "für eine (noch zu schreibende) Geschichte der (alt-)germanischen Textkritik" (p. 105)—namely Marquard Freher's "Emendationes et castigationes" (1631) and Frederick Rostgaard's "Emendationes" (1720); and he concludes the chapter with a survey of the earliest descriptions of the manuscripts recorded in library catalogues. Chief among the latter is Peter Lambeck's Commentarii de Augustissima Bibliotheca Cæsarea Vindobonensi (1669), the second volume of which contains, after a brief description of the Vienna manuscript, a long polemical commentary on the poem directed against the Protestant interpretations of Matthias Flacius, who had been responsible for the editio princeps of the work.

Flacius and his edition are the topic of the fourth chapter, which consists of two main sections: "Otfrid und die protestantische Kirchengeschichtsschreibung" and "Die Ausgabe des Evangelienbuchs (Basel 1571)." At the heart of the first section is an evaluation...