The primary reception of the works of Notker the German.

The primary reception of the works of Notker the German. In a book devoted to the question whether German narrative poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was meant for the reader or the listener M.G. Scholz uses the phrase "primary reception" in a way dictated by the special conditions of medieval literature; for, whereas in the case of modern literature its reception can normally be assumed to be by reading, the earlier period poses this preliminary question, seen by Scholz as a choice between reading and hearing. In this article I use the concept "primary reception" in the same sense and for the same reason, applying it to the works of Notker the German, a monastic teacher at St. Gallen who died in 1022. From this concentration on an author earlier than the period surveyed by Scholz there follow two advantages. Scholz nowhere discusses at length the chronological question when reception by ear may have given way to reception by eye (nor is his chosen method at all adequate to answering this question), but none the less suggests, tentatively but without a display of evidence, the period around 1200 as the possible date for this vital change. By looking at the position with an author active two hundred years before this suggested date I hope to provide something of the chronological dimension absent from Scholz's book. The choice of Notker may also help to remedy another deficiency in Scholz's approach, his readiness in practice to assume that, if a work was not meant for oral recital to an assembled audience, it must have been addressed to the individual reader. Nowhere is the intermediate possibility that a work may have been intended both for recital and for reading taken into practical account, which is precisely what can be shown in the case of Notker. In what follows we shall have to take account of the special conditions in which Notker worked as a teacher in a monastery school and which obviously cannot be equated with those of the poets discussed by Scholz. If the great part of the surviving works translated and commented by Notker falls within the trivium, the more elementary level of monastic instruction, this is readily understandable since it was precisely on this level that the greatest need for translation and explanation existed. Even so, Notker's method implies that he was far from dealing with mere beginners for, quite apart from the intellectual level of the argument in works by Boethius or Aristotle with which he deals, his mixed language, a conflation of German with Latin key-terms which are used even in the vernacular translation and commentary, presupposes that his pupils understood or were being trained to understand and acquire these technical Latin terms. This mixed language may well have been in common use in the classroom, but Notker's novelty, which we also encounter with Williram's exegesis of the Song of Songs,6 lay in transferring it from the classroom to parchment. By 58 D.H, Greer. using the vernacular at all Notker consults the needs of his pupils, as is suggested by the words written above the first line of the Latin commemorative poem in the Liber benedictionum of Ekkehart IV (Teutonice propter caritatem discipulorum plures libros exponens).Q All of Notker's activity as a translator and commentator, described by himself at length in his letter to Bishop Hugo of Sitten, was devoted to this pedagogic goal at St. Gallen, so that, in considering how he himself anticipated the reception of his works, we need make no distinction between them, but may regard them as all destined for the same classroom situation in his monastery. In considering the internal evidence of Notker's works for the light it throws on whether he anticipated readers or listeners (or both) we obviously have to confine ourselves to what he himself says. In other words, passages which he has simply translated from his Latin source or taken over from the commentary he is following (in so far as this can be established) have to be ignored, however significant they may be on another level for Notker's pedagogic interests. By focussing...