The Book of Emperors: A Translation of the Middle High German Kaiserchronik trans. and ed. by Henry A. Myers (review)

The twelfth-century Kaiserchronik (“imperial chronicle”)—a Middle High German verse chronicle of some 17,280-odd lines in its fullest extant version—is one of the major historical, cultural, and literary sources of the central Middle Ages. It presents a history of the Roman Empire through biographies of individual emperors and, reflecting the ideology of its time, views the Western empire as the continuation of the ancient Roman Empire. Little of certainty, however, is known about the work’s origins—despite the efforts of scholars such as Edward Schröder, Ferdinand Urbanek, and Edmund Stengel to make various claims on its behalf.

Myers’s translation is the first into English, and so the Kaiserchronik will now be readily available to English-speaking students of history and literature. But although the increased accessibility of the Kaiserchronik is to be welcomed, Myers’s work leaves much to be desired. The introduction lacks adequate grounding in the historiography of medieval Germany, medieval kingship, or medieval historical writing—a significant problem that manifests itself in frequent errors, both of detail and of concept. For example, the claim that the chronicler Frutolf of Michelsberg (d. 1103) was “a partisan of the interests of the Church against Emperor Henry IV” (p. 5) leads one to wonder whether Myers ever read Frutolf at all, whereas to characterize St. Peter’s in Rome as a “Cathedral” (p. 15) betrays a worrying lack of attention to institutional and historical detail. Carelessness in detail begets inaccuracy in dealing with larger concepts, which is all too evident in Myers’s handling of the Investiture Contest. His claim that supporters of Henry IV demanded an “independent secular sphere” and insisted “upon the primacy of the empire at the expense of the church” (p. 16) is anachronistic. Henry repeatedly justified his actions in terms of the ideology of sacral kingship, the imperial duty to reform the Church, and hopes for cooperation between regnum and sacerdotium. These are not isolated examples, and Myers’s capricious handling of the evidence is a constant distraction throughout the introduction.

The reader will find that the translation itself presents many missed opportunities. Myers has chosen not to render his translation in verse and prefaces each imperial biography with an historical summary of his own. These summaries are general and unreliable, as well as being virtually devoid of citation to relevant scholarly literature. The translation is also entirely without annotation: no effort has been made to help the reader by identifying the rich array of biblical and literary allusions, or any of the references to historical or fictional characters. The reader will find, too, that elements of the translation are problematic. A case in point is the choice invariably to translate munster as “cathedral.” When Myers applies this to the church of St. Stephen in Bamberg (ain munster zêran, line 16,230), he shows that he has paid insufficient attention to the historical details of what he was translating, as St. Stephen’s is a canonry and Bamberg’s actual cathedral is dedicated to Ss. Peter and George. “Church” here might have been better.

In conclusion, Myers’s translation of the Kaiserchronik is unfortunately vitiated by its unscholarly nature and frequent lack of attention to detail. It will not be nearly as useful as it could have been in introducing the text’s literary and historical world, and in many respects is liable to lead the unsuspecting reader into error.