Text-Bilder und ihre Kontexte. Medialität und Materialität von Ein blatt-Holz- und Metallschnitten des 15. Jahrhunderts by Sabine Griese (review)

Sabina Griese’s Habilitationsschrift, a richly detailed exploration of single-leaf wood-cuts and metal engravings of the fifteenth century, was the recipient of the Zeno Karl Schindler Preis für deutsche Literaturwisssenschaft in 2009. Now published in book form, this is indeed a magnum opus: 450 pages, rich with footnotes, are followed by a fifty-seven-page appendix divided into eight sections (I: thematic overview of the pictorial contents; II–V: transcriptions of German and Latin texts discussed by Griese; VI: iconographic groupings of woodcuts or metal engravings that have to do with indulgences; VII: the “Leben Jesu [der Schwester Regula)]”; and VIII: a “Planetenkinder-Blockbuch” produced by the well-known Benedictine scribe and manuscript collector Gallus Kemli); a thirty-eight-page bibliography; thirty-six pages of indices of Manuscripts and Prints, Woodcuts and Metal Engravings, and Names and Things/Subjects; and finally, sixty-six color and black-and-white reproductions, mostly of single-leaf woodcuts but also including other media.

Given the wealth of material and the extensive research behind this book, to critique it is a daunting task. Yet at the same time, the book engages with various disciplines and will prove helpful to those studying the history of the book, medieval piety, art history, and media studies, to name just a few. It is with this broader audience in mind that this review is written.

Griese’s book concentrates on the emergence of what she calls the “Text-Picture” in the fifteenth century, a period marked by the simultaneous production and use of manuscripts and printed books. “Text-Pictures,” as Griese uses the term, are printed single-leaf woodcuts or metal engravings in which the picture is the dominant element, but both picture and text are cut into the wood or engraved into the metal (p. 20). The new medium is distinguished from Dürer’s graphics by the role that the texts play: they guide and support the ability of the pictures to speak (p. 44). Text-Bilder und ihre Kontexte is informed by painstaking attention to sources; the chronological parameters are pre-Reformation, from 1400 (approximately when xylography starts) to circa 1520 (when the Reformation introduced significant thematic shifts).

The questions Griese poses lead her to explore a variety of contexts including the literary, historical, iconographic, cultural, religious, and codicological; some of the questions she addresses are applicable to other periods in which new media have coexisted with traditional ones. For example, Griese’s careful attention to the fifteenth-century phenomenon of mass reproduction and its results—new modes of use, multiple systems of referents—should resonate with those studying the contemporary reproduction possibilities offered by the internet.

The book is divided into two main parts, each further divided into sections and subsections. Of the two main parts, the more extensive first part addresses the mediality of the pictures. Griese explores how these prints serve as abbreviated tokens (“Abbreviaturen”) of more extensive “cultural and devotional texts and [as tokens of] situations and of performative acts—in this way, assuming as medium an intermediate position between action and reception” (p. 29). Parallel to these broader contexts, the prints also serve as a medium of communication (“Kommunikationsmittel”); here Griese focuses on the relationship between a specific picture and its text, with a concentration on the “Sprachfähigkeit” (a term taken from Klaus Krüger’s work) of the pictures, and their possible users (p. 29).

A significant part of this first portion is dedicated to the themes of the roughly 800 single-leaf woodcuts and metal engravings that form the core of Griese’s work; the topics, in decreasing number of prints, are religious (over 675, the largest subgroup with Jesus as topic), pragmatic texts (e.g., medicine, memento mori, love; in total about 110), and didactic...