“Christus und die minnende Seele”: An Analysis of Circulation, Text, and Iconography by Amy Gebauer (review)

This volume, a revision of the author’s doctoral dissertation under the direction of Werner Williams-Krapp at the University of Augsburg, introduces the reader to and analyzes the late medieval verse dialogue “Christus und die minnende Seele,” its contents, circulation, and reception. The mystical work is in the form of a dialogue between Christ and a soul, and it follows the soul’s journey to mystical union with Christ. The dialogue was reproduced in manuscripts and printed books and variously consists of text and image paired in a series of 20–24 individual scenes. The volume analyzes a collection of eight manuscripts, four single-leaf prints, and one early printed book. Amy Gebauer has thus brought together for the first time a set of documents that have heretofore neither singly nor collectively been given adequate scholarly attention; her presentation of the texts meets the highest professional standards and so makes the texts more accessible to scholars in a wider range of disciplines for further study; and her analysis demonstrates the broader significance of the dialogue, especially as she situates the documents in the rich and diverse contexts of their production and use.

The author is to be commended for the meticulous archival and librarious research that undergirds the identification and presention of the volume’s thirteen principal source documents. Although she uncovered no previously unknown manuscripts or long-lost incunable, Gebauer’s identification of these thirteen editions of “Christus und die minnende Seele” as a body of documents worth collective analysis is an accomplishment that ought not be overlooked. As she correctly, if perhaps too modestly, remarks in her Introduction, she has indeed coherently fashioned “as a unit” a set of documents, their texts and images, that the two most eminent twentieth-century historians of mysticism, Bernard McGinn and Kurt Ruh, inexplicably did not examine in their own studies in any sustained way.

The essential complement to the solid research is the lucid analysis, especially insofar as Gebauer places the documents in the contexts of their production and reception. Throughout the volume Gebauer signals the reader as to the broader themes, issues, and controversies that bear on the documents. Her contextualizing efforts enhance the significance of dialogue. For example, Gebauer meticulously associates her sources with the broader issues of reform and mysticism, two themes attracting considerable scholarly attention among historians of the late Middle Ages and early modern periods today. She deftly incorporates the latest research regarding the relationship of male to female religious orders, monastic (Carthusian) to mendicant (Dominican) spirituality, and religious to lay devotional practices. Gebauer builds on two widely accepted impressions of late medieval mysticism: that it was influential among certain reforming strains from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century and that it proved a uniquely attractive form of religious expression for women of a particular class and so can be fruitfully exploited for the study of medieval women’s history.

There are additional “formal” issues that Gebauer’s dissertation addresses in noteworthy ways and that are related to the “überlieferungsgeschichtliche Methode” she refers to in the Introduction and derives from such well-known scholars as J. Hamburger, H. Keller, H. Rosenfeld, and above all her dissertation director. The overarching contribution of her volume in this regard is related to her decision (and ability) to analyze in tandem characteristics that an older historiographical model left separate. What I have in mind here is her decision to include analysis of documents that were by origin both manuscript and print, that conjoined both text and image, and that encompassed both prose and poetry. Full literatures have developed around the analysis of each individual element in these pairings; and many historical researchers with all the warrant of the most distinguished historiographical precedent have become expert in one or the other aspect of the pairings—but not both. Gebauer, however, moves nimbly between each in her analysis...