Spielformen des Lyrischen im späten Mittelalter

That the “lyrical” can be “played” with, as presented in the title of the present volume, is something that seems at first quite clear, at the very least at the level of vocabulary—music is “played” on instruments, for example, in a (metaphorical?) connection between the concept of play and the performance or production of art adopted in many different languages. But, following the broad observation of Johan Huizinga in his pioneering study of Homo Ludens (1938), it can be rather difficult to pin down rationales for why exactly this connection exists, and how the concepts of play and music complement and intersect. In their forward to the present volume, the editors acknowledge the debates around this issue, particularly around the nominally antithetical idea of “seriousness,” and emphasize simultaneity and ambiguity: “Ernst und Spiel . . . stehen auf den zwei Seiten einer Medaille, und gelegentlich ist kaum entscheidbar, welche der beiden Seiten im Einzelfall einschlägig ist, was ja auch zu heftigen Diskussionen in der Forschung geführt hat” (Seriousness and play . . . are two sides of the same coin, and sometimes it is difficult to decide which of the two sides is relevant in a given case, which has also led to vigorous discussions in research, p. IX). The play that late medieval poetry enacts with traditional and inherited concepts—a play which the editors note is always linked to questions of form—also always involves a certain solemnity. Faithful reproductions, aesthetically-productive recastings, demarcations, and parodies, and explicit and implicit rejections all occur with recognition of the significance of the material being accessed and manipulated. The goal of this collected volume of essays is to highlight this synthetic aspect of the late medieval German poetic tradition: it is neither entirely old nor entirely new, but rather “ein Amalgam, das auf funktional-gesellschaftliche, ästhetische und literaturgeschichtliche Wandlungsprozesse hin ausgerichtet ist” (an amalgam which is oriented towards functional-social, aesthetic and literary-historical processes of transformation, p. IX).The essays in this collection are grouped under four headings, each devoted to a play with different formal aspects of late medieval German lyric poetry. The first features articles investigating poets’ playfulness with textuality, language, and semantics, opening with a strong piece by Cordula Kropik on “discordances” in anonymous love lyric from the fifteenth century. Through an analysis of the “song book” tradition, Kropik challenges earlier scholarship in its conception of the “disruption” (Zerrüttung) of texts, the idea that complete or finished texts must stand at the beginning of the tradition. Rather, the same lyrical piece is recognizable as such despite significant variations of word choice that appear between manuscript transmissions: “Was den ‚Text‘ als ‚Text‘ definiert, ist . . . weniger seine ‚Haltbarkeit‘ als seine Wiedererkennbarkeit” (What defines the ‘text’ as a ‘text’ is . . . less its ‘durability’ than its recognizability, pp. 9–10), representing a textuality distinguished not by identity, but by identifiability. Sophie Marshall similarly interrogates the concreteness of lyric texts with respect to blurred boundaries: songs by the poet Muskatblut, transmitted elsewhere as separate units, are blended together in the Cologne “Muskatblut-Handschrift a” both formally and thematically, playfully creating new song complexes. Ingrid Bennewitz continues the focus on manuscripts, using the stanza fragments transmitted in the relatively recently discovered Handschrift S (the “Sankt Pauler Fragment”) to both confirm and question editorial and scholastic assumptions about the poet Neidhart, especially about the existence and nature of “extension types” (Erweiterungstypen) of Neidhart's songs. We then transition from tradition-play to word-play: Claudia Lauer challenges the conception of the highly learned poet Frauenlob as a “dunklen” and opaque author by investigating his use of hapax legomena, arguing convincingly that they are not as cryptic as they appear, and rather represent, quite paradoxically, ad hoc constructions aimed to semasiologically or onomasiologically generate clarity, transparency, and precision. Rounding off the section, Beate Kellner analyzes two examples of Middle High German lyric: first the understudied body of spiritual Tageslieder, which reshuffle the terms and settings of secular erotic “dawn-songs” towards spiritual ends, and the “Kindheitslied” of the poet Der Wilde Alexander, which features a remarkable polysemy, “ein beinahe unentflechtbares Ineinander von literalem Sinn und allegorischem Zweitsinn” (an almost inextricable interweaving of literal meaning and allegorical secondary meaning, p. 105), in which forces of retrospection and nostalgia blend to create multiple subtle layers of meaning.The second section groups articles discussing play in the context of aesthetics and form. Johannes Janota opens with a grand but essential question: why was medieval lyric poetry, including those pieces dealing with complex theological, political, and natural philosophical topics, sung? The proposed origin (although one not necessarily applicable to all genres and song-types) is with the liturgy, where the artificial, artful, and especially “festlich” nature of spiritual songs acted as the model for secular and courtly performance. Wolfgang Beck moves from the general to the specific, investigating the use of rhyme in the works of Konrad von Würzburg, one of the most prolific authors and poets of his day. Central to Beck's investigation is the limitations of rhyming poetry: the poetic form demands the use of certain word-endings in rhyme position; “das sprachliche Material verweigert bestimmte Kombinationen und erzwingt dadurch andere” (the linguistic material denies certain combinations and thereby compels others, p. 134). This necessitates a remarkable linguistic creativity on the part of composers like Konrad. Manuel Braun turns to large data analysis, identifying the constellations of aesthetically-significant terminology surrounding the use and promotion of the concept of milte (roughly: “generosity”), which function, in distinct historical contexts, to establish milte as a social norm and reinforce its validity in the public/poetic sphere. Florian Kragl also examines norms by zeroing in on the presence of elision in medieval German lyric. What emerges is a remarkably idiosyncratic and decentralized view of the freedoms and restrictions of poetic composition: stark differences between written forms and sound forms of songs suggest that the formal principles of poetic composition are highly contingent on both historical context and individual author preference, paving the way for a “methodical-theoretical flexibility” (methodisch-theoretische Flexibilität, p. 187) in future academic investigations of medieval prosody.The next eight chapters attend to traditions of genre and discourse. The first two articles by Jens Haustein and Holger Runow form a thematic pair dealing with a collection of urban authors of the late medieval Meisterlied genre: Albrecht Lesch and Konrad Harder as a possibly close-connected duo (Runow playfully refers to this relationship as the first “Meistersinger-WG [Wohngemeinschaft],” p. 197), and the Nürnberger poet Fritz Kettner of a generation later. The overarching focus of these two pieces is on the productive reception of tradition and motifs, particularly in Harder's (Haustein) and Lesch's (Runow) inheritances from Frauenlob. Freimut Löser also invokes Frauenlob in his reevaluation of the enigmatic Granum sinapis—a text whose sophisticated theology and poetics may have required some familiarity with that talented creator. Questions of authorship (Meister Eckhart?), genre (song or prayer?), and tradition (the Latin and German hymn traditions?) are foregrounded here. The next two pieces also form a thematic pair on the incorporation of politics into poetry. Johannes Rettelbach confronts three political strophes in Frauenlob's Würgendrüsselton (strophes IX:12, 13, and 16 in the Göttinger-Ausgabe edited by Karl Stackmann) as the work of an imitator, interpreting their references to a conflict between Ludwig the Bavarian and Pope John XXII occurring around a decade after Frauenlob's death. Karina Kellermann on the other hand examines a handful of examples of political poetry displaying “internal criticism” (interne Kritik, p. 255) of individual kings; these texts act as examples of political journalism not only by drawing audience attention to social grievances, but also by doing so through the creation of different models of reality, established through various “strategies of factualization” (Strategien der Faktualisierung, p. 275) such as dates, names, eyewitness accounts, and the incorporation of literary sources into unique interweavings of fact and fiction. In the next piece, Urban Küsters tackles a unique phenomenon beginning at the end of the fourteenth century (and common in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) of poets naming their beloveds, first with simple initials (e.g., “liebste E”) and later with full proper names. Küsters identifies in these examples “das poetische Spiel mit den Signifikanten” (the poetic play with the signifiers, p. 277): the staged communication of love in these texts reflects processes of memory preservation and legal authentication, adopting the terms and phrases of legal and documentary discourse to poetically create contracts of love, demonstrating yet another opportunity for the playful blending of genres. Sonja Kerth instead focuses on the physicality of love by exploring “body signs” as sites of play. Close readings of the appearance of physical impairments (sight, mobility, and old age/infirmity) in the works of Oswald von Wolkenstein, among others, reveal how descriptions of individual bodies were used to present an “exceptional self” (Ausnahme-Ich); impairment is “künstlerisch inszeniert und mit Bedeutung aufgeladen, die spektakuläre Pointen und Akte der Sinnstifung hervorbringt” (artistically staged and loaded with meaning, which produces spectacular payoffs and acts of meaning-making, p. 338). Wernfried Hofmeister also discusses Oswald, bringing expertise from his complete translation of Oswald's corpus published in 1989/2011 into his examination of the religious components of the songs. In particular, Hofmeister identifies how Oswald, in his songs concerning the Eucharist, takes on a “priest-like singer role” (priesterähnliche Sängerrolle, p. 341) through liturgical and grammatical play in the first person, as part of a rhetorical strategy to heighten the communication of spiritual meaning to his audience. Finally, Eva Rothenberger sketches the intellectual history of the immaculate conception of Mary, and how it appears in the songs of Hans Folz. Thoroughly engaged with the theological discourse of his day, Folz treats the immaculate conception in his poems differently over time: early works use analogies and parables to rationally conceive of the theological event, while later works see Folz give up such logical apologetics and instead emphasize the miraculous aspect, the celebration of the unexplainable.The final and shortest section turns to authorship, specifically the play concerned with self-thematization. Dorothea Klein expertly walks the reader through the medieval German manifestation of the Italian Renaissance “Paragone,” in its debate between the highest form of art. Here, the debate is between lyric song versus instrumental music, where the Sangspruchdichter offer a wide variety of arguments in favor of singing from moral, religious, aesthetic, and even pragmatic directions (it takes time to learn an instrument!). Tobias Bulang grounds his investigation in the autographical song manuscripts produced by Michel Beheim, particularly the ordering of songs and strophes in the Zugweiseton in manuscript A (Heidelberg, UB, Cod. Pal. Germ. 312). Bulang's examination of Beheim's bold self-insertion into salvation-historical and cosmogonical texts (his “Ich-Ostentation”), and of the semantic potential of reading the secular poems of the collection through the lens of the spiritual texts which surround them in the manuscript, is an excellent contribution to the discussion of the late medieval conception of authorship. Rounding off the entire volume is Judith Lange's engagement with the fictitious naming of authors in late medieval Meisterlieder. Lange identifies three forms of this fictitious naming: (i) as first-person roleplay related to content (e.g., the lyric-I paints himself as the poet Regenbogen engaged in debate with his famous opponent Frauenlob); (ii) as first-person roleplay unrelated to content (e.g., pretending to be poet X for flattery or authority); or (iii) as third-person external or self-references (e.g., “name-dropping” a known master to assert validity of argument, or to affirm a connection to genre). Like many of the essays included in the present volume, this final piece convincingly demonstrates the sheer diversity, flexibility, and masterful creativity of late medieval texts, authors, forms, and approaches.An index of persons, works, and manuscripts is provided at the end, leaving little in the way of formal desiderata. Some contributions feature modern German translations of their poetic citations, but a reader would certainly need a knowledge of Middle High German/Early New High German to follow complete arguments. Overall, a thoroughly significant and illuminating contribution to the field of medieval poetics.