Literatur der Zisterzienserinnen. Edition und Untersuchung einer Wienhäuser Legendenhandschrift by Tanja Mattern (review)

This extensive work, a dissertation from the University of Cologne, basically consists of two large sections. The first, Chapters 1–4, offers the first edition and thorough analysis of a fragmentary Low German verse collection of saints’ lives in an early fourteenth-century manuscript from the library of the former Cistercian nunnery Wienhausen near Celle, which has hitherto received little attention. The manuscript, Handschrift 3 of the present-day Lutheran convent, contains chapters on church dedication; the assumption of Mary; the birth of Mary; and the lives of Mary Magdalene, Cecilia, Lucy, Agnes, and Agatha (incomplete), all translations from Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea; as well as two chapters on the mass, based on William Durandus’s Rationale Divinorum officiorum and Innocent III’s De sacro altaris. The manuscript is of special interest to German medieval literary scholarship, because comparatively little is left of northern German religious works of the Middle Ages due to the dominance of Lutheranism in that area and its effects on monastic libraries.

After a general introduction, great effort is made to give a meticulous description of the manuscript and an analysis of its language, resulting in the conclusion that the texts as well as the manuscript originated in the general area of Wienhausen. The edition is based on a transcription, in which abbreviations are resolved and modern punctuation is used. The extensive, critical apparatus and commentary below the edited text, where sources are documented and possible translations of difficult and obscure words, phrases, and sentences are offered, are especially helpful. Following the edition, the texts are systematically analyzed, beginning with an extensive and very informative comparison with their Latin sources. Mattern shows that the Wienhauser Legendar, which contains some of the very earliest translations of the Legenda aurea in German, has a clear organization aimed at readers in a nunnery. The initial chapters on church dedication, explications of the canonical hours, and elucidations of the mass deal with basic elements of the liturgy and are followed by the lives of early female saints, which offer specific models of veneration for a female monastic community. The texts were not written specifically for nuns, but for “men and women” as well as for “uneducated people” (vngelarte lute), but Mattern makes a good case for the use of the manuscript as reading matter for the Wienhausen sisters in the privacy of their cells.

The legends in the manuscript could very possibly have been taken from a complete Low German verse adaptation of the Legenda aurea. Unfortunately, Mattern was only made aware of the discovery of the fragments in Zeitz, Stiftsbibliothek, Frgm. Ms. Perg. Germ. 144, after her book was ready for printing (see Christoph Fasbender, “Die Zeitzer ‘Legenda aurea’: Fragmente einer unbekannten niederdeutschen Versübertragung,” Niederdeutsches Jahrbuch 131 [2008], pp. 7–17). It is truly a shame that Mattern was not able to analyze and compare the Zeitzer fragments with the Wienhauser texts, which are both dated to the early fourteenth century, as parts of a verse legendary in competition with Low German adaptations of the highly popular Verspassional. The likely possibility that the Legenda aurea was first translated into the vernacular in Northern Germany is actually somewhat sensational.

In the second section of the book, beginning with Chapter 5, Mattern starts with a somewhat tedious discussion of the genres of the texts; in the case of the Legenda aurea, she basically sums up earlier scholarship on the other German and Dutch translations. One small correction: Barbara Fleith’s dating of the compilation of the Latin Legenda aurea to around 1260 (Studien zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der lateinischen Legenda Aurea [1991], p. 15), which unfortunately has become an established fact in scholarship, is based on a clear error in the dating of a manuscript by Fleith (see my review of her book in Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch [1994], pp.164–168). There are no manuscripts of the Legenda aurea from...