Von der Schrift zum Buch—vom Ich zum Autor. Zur Text- und Autorkonstitution in Überlieferung und Rezeption des ‘Fließenden Lichts der Gottheit’ Mechthilds von Magdeburg von Balázs J. Nemes (review)

This book is the published version of the author’s doctoral dissertation. Its main project is to articulate how and to what extent scholarship on Mechthild von Magdeburg’s Das fließende Licht der Gottheit—The Flowing Light of Divinity (13^th c.) rested first on assumptions made about Mechthild as a historical person and her agency as an author and second on scholars’ desire that she be a real historical person and author. Nemes points to numerous instances where a kind of wishful thinking is evident in the way that, for example, Hans Neumann made certain decisions when he was editing the first critical edition of Mechthild’s book (1990). Neumann made it his life’s work to publish this edition. Previously, scholars had to rely on Gall Morel’s out-of-print transcription published in 1869. Neumann’s contribution to the field of Mechthild studies is, if only for this reason, unparalleled. Neumann died before publishing his edition, which was then carefully prepared for publication by Gisela Vollmann-Profe, a scholar who also comes under fire in this book. Since many scholars accepted the decisions made by Neumann and Vollmann-Profe after the publication of the edition, this bias can also be detected in subsequent scholarship, even those works that acknowledge the uncertainty and in many cases unprovability of many of the claims made about Mechthild’s life and book.

Approximately two thirds of the 555-page opus (Chapters I and II, up to p. 307) is spent re-examining Neumann’s and others’ claims about things like Mechthild’s biography, theories about the genesis of the Middle High German book as we now have it, the relationship of the Middle High German version to the lost “original” (probably written in Middle Low or Central German), and the relationship of both of these to the Latin version. Nemes explores each of these claims and its validity, finding most of them wanting in some way, or, as he often puts it, “not unproblematic.” He does this by meticulously evaluating virtually all the evidence used to make the claims as well as all of the contradicting evidence one could possibly find. Indeed, this is the most thorough analysis of the editions and scholarship of any work that I have ever seen. For most readers, the level of detail will be overwhelming and probably confusing; for instance, there is no final summary of what can be said about Mechthild’s biography, only the problematization of what has been said. The book will be useful solely for an advanced-graduate and post-graduate medievalist audience already familiar with the Mechthild tradition and comfortable reading long lists of medieval Latin and Middle Low and Middle High German phrases together with copious footnotes (see, for example, 172–76). This attention to detail is truly impressive. Nemes is indefatigable and leaves no stone unturned in proving his points. In this regard, this book is unmatched.

If Nemes’s primary goal with the study is first to point out the flawed foundation and bias of much earlier scholarship, particularly with regard to notions of medieval authorship, the second goal is to discuss these notions anew in light of a more accurate understanding of the manuscript tradition. The real strength of the book lies in the latter aim—that is, the attention to the manuscript tradition. In researching the afterlife of the Latin translation of Mechthild’s book and its relation to the surviving German manuscripts, Nemes has made important and exciting discoveries about how the book was read and in what (monastic) contexts. To name one example, by exploring newly discovered manuscripts alongside medieval library lists, he finds that the Latin translation was compared in several cases to...