Meditations on the Incarnation, Passion, and Death of Jesus Christ (review)

With this translation, Lynne Tatlock introduces the astonishing Lower Austrian Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (1633-92) to a far wider audience than the German-language specialists who had known her before. Tatlock sums up the life of this woman who was anything but typical, even disregarding her high birth and her unconventional marriage to her tutor/half-uncle Hans Rudolf von Greiffenberg (d. 1677). She was highly learned, passionately devout after a teenage "conversion," and irrepressible, imagining that she might convert the emperor. She broke into print in 1662, with her Geistliche Sonnette/Lieder und Gedichte.

Von Greiffenberg was a literary unicum in her day. Throughout her life, until the delayed effects of the 1629 Edict of Restitution deprived her of her estates and compelled her to move to the friendly Lutheran circles of Nuremberg, she had been, to be sure, a heartfelt Lutheran but within an entirely Catholic environment. She could acquire Lutheran books but not hear Lutheran preaching or pastoral counsel. All around her was the cultural milieu—the devout servants, the shrines and other sacred art, the feast-day celebrations—of emotionally unrestrained Catholicism. As Tatlock observes in her introduction, von Greiffenberg may well have absorbed the features of local and Jesuit spirituality (24, 36).

For even though in the late-seventeenth century the baroque esthetic and Pietism declared their respective affinities for emotional demonstration as the mode of demonstrating conviction, von Greiffenberg's outpaces both these trends in her always imaginative and often fantastic sculpting of charged metaphors. Tatlock's truly significant achievement is her sensitive, cognizant rendering of this language into the most comparable English. She chooses long excerpts from two previously untranslated works, Des Allerheiligst- und Allerheilsamsten Leids und Sterbens Jesu Christi . . . (1672, 2nd ed. 1683); and Der Allerheiligsten Menschwerdung, Geburt und Jugend Jesu Christi . . . (1678). Both of these are indeed apt vehicles for conveying the creative intensity of this early modern writer. Exceptionally educated for a woman, or even for a man, of her day, von Greiffenberg lards her works with allusions to a range of classical, patristic, and medieval writers; and her familiarity with Scripture is unquestionable. At the same time, she has absorbed basic Lutheran precepts and knows how these differ from the Catholic. Yet her very topics, the Passion and Marian aspects of the Incarnation, and certainly the manner of her treatments, were not in the Lutheran style of her or the Reformers' days. Luther quickly influenced his followers away from dwelling at length on the suffering of Christ, and he discouraged concentration upon the Virgin in any setting. Von Greiffenberg violates both these principles and dramatizes her devotion in a fully Catholic manner. Her devotion is as erotically charged as that of any mystic. She proclaims, apropos of Jesus's head and side wounds:

I would not have ceased to suck on the loveliest of all heads [Christ's] until all of the thorns were pulled out, the little holes closed up, and all of the bloody drops in my mouth. Oh! Not until I was in His side, in His most loving heart, would I have drunk myself completely to death and suffered myself to be thereby struck dead. . . .

(p. 122)

Tatlock's version of von Greiffenberg's poetry is strikingly fine but less easily demonstrated in a brief review. Perhaps she should have translated Granatapfel, in its bejeweled context, as garnet (pp. 144, 151), but this is straining to identify some flaw. Overall, Tatlock is a surpassing artist in her rendition. She captures the wide range of this author's vocabulary in her own wealth of English, and she embodies her subject's constantly hyperbolic mode of expression in matching superlative forms.

Von Greiffenberg is proud of being a woman writer who may attract others to her work and through her to...