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Geheimnis und Verborgenes im Mittelalter: Funktion, Wirkung, und Spannungsfelder von okkultem Wissen, verborgenen Räumen und magischen Gegenständen

2022; Penn State University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/preternature.11.1.0183

2161-2196

Gwendolyne Knight,

Eurasian Exchange Networks

The anthology Geheimnis und Verborgenes im Mittelalter (“Mystery and the Hidden in the Middle Ages”) gathers a selection of the papers presented at the symposium of the Mediävistenverband (Medieval Association) held in Bonn, Germany, in 2017. It contains, nevertheless, thirty-five contributions (including the introduction), speaking to a broad variety of interpretations of its theme. The editors have divided the anthology thematically into five sections, and to prevent this review from becoming simply a list of chapters with one- or two-sentence summaries, I will focus on the broad trends of each section, including how the contributors have interpreted the theme of mystery (or secrecy) and the hidden. The language of the anthology is mainly German, with two articles as well as abstracts to all of the articles in English; titles of sections and articles will here be given in English, with all translations from German into English being my own. The point of translation, and the concept of mystery or secrecy (Geheimnis) is one that the editors indeed raise in their introduction: while the religious aspect remains deeply vital to the concept of mystery and revelation in the Middle Ages, broader concepts of secrecy, concealment, discovery, ways of knowing (or coming to know) appear in contexts less deeply rooted in the sacred, but no less culturally relevant.The first section, “Mysticism and the Church,” comprises nine articles of which two, those by Vicky Ziegler and Andreas Obenaus, discuss mystery and secrecy in the context not of the Christian Church but of Islam (“Secrets and Their Protection in Arabic Alchemy” and “The Secrets of the Atlantic and Their Exploration as Reflected in Medieval Arabic Sources,” respectively). Nevertheless, both articles—Ziegler in particular—highlight the tension between secrecy and openness that characterizes this section, albeit in different ways. Whereas Obenaus explores the mysteries of the Atlantic and the ways in which these were integrated into Arabic writing even as the Atlantic became, to some degree, a less mysterious place, Ziegler examines the alchemical search for the hidden and mysterious, as well as the sense of duty (or professional privilege) that led many alchemists to conceal their writings or make them otherwise unintelligible to the uninitiated. The themes that Ziegler takes up not only fit the broader theme of this section but also look ahead to the question of the exclusivity of knowledge presented later.The remaining chapters in this first section explore themes of mystery and secrecy from the perspective of Christian societies. On the one hand, the mystery of God, and the mystery of faith, play a central role within Christianity; subsequently, axes of secret-public and hidden-revealed, as described by Eugenio Riversi in “The ‘Discreet’ Communication of Revelation” (67), are not only critical elements of Christian identity, but are also constantly negotiated and often contingent parameters for proper belief and behavior. This is demonstrated aptly in Riversi's article, where her brother's support of the revelations of Elisabeth von Schönau is contrasted with his condemnation of the heretically secretive Cathars (as he characterizes them). On the other hand, however, this mysteriousness must be communicated somehow; the profoundly inaccessible must, in some way, be accessed. This tension is visible on an intimate level in the relationship between confessor and penitent: the characterization of penitence as a private ritual and personal reconciliation became central to the practice, yet, as Wendelin Koch writes in “The Ecclesiastical Penance” maintains an element of having been publicly carried out. In a more public, community setting, Heinz Sieburg's “Revelation of the Secret? Medieval Judgments of God as Sources of Knowledge and their Takedown in Middle High German Literature” addresses this tension: although these ordeals were seen as divine revelations of secret knowledge, their legitimacy was often, and increasingly, called into question—not least in literary representations, which exploited not only the questionable legitimacy of the ordeal but also the audience's own “secret” knowledge regarding whether a crime had been committed or not. The role of narrative in mysticism and mystery characterizes the remaining articles in this first section. Particularly prominent is Felix Prautzsch's “Mystery and the Revelation of Faith,” which examines the role that the mystery of the cross played in different versions of the legend of the apostle Andrew. Prautzsch highlights the importance of the community of the faithful and how the different versions of the legend reflect changes in Christianity's own relationship with its constituting mysteries by subtle changes in expressions of the tension between mystery and explanation. Relationships between the constitution of reality through language and image are further explored by Joanna Godlewicz-Adamiec and Paweł Pszczatowski in “Mystical Secrets between Language Creation and Pictoral Expression,” while Gerda Brunnlechner's “Stag-riders and Albanian Dogs as Keys to the Divine Plan of Creation?” focuses on Mecià de Viladestes' marine chart and the role that mysterious places could play in moral and spiritual understandings of the world. Mystical places, the language of concealment or access, and the role of narrative all come together in Manuel Schwembacher's (“The Earthly Paradise between Hiddenness and Immanence in ‘Il viaggio dei tre monaci al paradiso terrestre,’” which compares different versions of a journey to the earthy paradise—in theory a mystical, unreachable place, but under certain (narrative) conditions accessible to the monks who seek it.In the second section, three articles take up the theme of “Meaning and Function of Sacral Spaces and Objects.” This can involve the storage of holy vessels and the interpretation of these areas of concealment within the space of the church, as in Anne Schaich's “Holy Vessels under a Good Lock.” Alternatively, we have the objects themselves: the other two articles deal with matters of memory and re-finding concealed objects, some of which are so well hidden that they remain undiscovered for 450 years, as Wilfried E. Keil explains in “Hidden for Centuries: The Foundation Stone of the St. Mary Magdalen Chapel in Braunschweig.” In the case of Esther-Luisa Schuster's “The Secret Inventio of the Relics of Godehard and Bernward of Hildesheim in the 12th Century,” however, the secret finding and opening of a grave in the night before an official translation ceremony come into focus, particularly how the secrecy functions less as a means of keeping something from being known and more as a method to enhance the legitimacy of the whole translation within a recognized, meditative framework.The third section, “Codicological Contributions” also contains only three articles; nevertheless, they demonstrate many facets to secrecy, including the purposes of concealment. For example, Marco Heiles, in “Safe Secrets? About Bookbindings with Locks, and What They Hide,” argues that the “secret” part of bookbindings with locks was not only, or even primarily, rooted in their contents: the very fact that they were locked communicated importance, remarkableness, and claims of secrets within. The other articles examine different aspects of the paratextual spaces within and between manuscripts: Claudine Moulin's “To Conceal and to Show: Strategies of Paratextual ‘Anderssichtbarkeit’ in Medieval Manuscripts” explores the presence of encoded writing and other forms of graphical “otherness” as they appear in glosses and other marginal texts, while Claudia Wich-Reif, in “‘Marginalized’ Exegesis” examines different levels of information contained in Bible commentaries and biblical glosses, focusing on those that “hide” their information in some way and require decoding—either because they are difficult to see, or because they require knowledge of textual relationships for interpretation—and what these can reveal about the practice of knowledge acquisition in the Middle Ages.The largest and broadest section in this anthology falls under the theme of “Secrecy and Hiddenness as a Narrative Strategy in Literature.” Its twelve articles begin with a study of hiddenness in Old English and extend into the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, certain themes recur. Ursula Schaefer opens the section with an exploration of the semantic relationships between seeing and secrecy—or the lack of secrecy—in “The Hidden in Old English.” It is Dorothea Weltecke's contribution, however, that draws the religious concerns of the previous sections forward to the literary sphere, in “On the Three Rings: Religious Diversity and the Explosiveness of Hidden Truth.” In “In the Skin of the Other: The Play on Identity in ‘Salman and Morolf,’” Janina Dillig examines the problems that arise in a “culture of visibility” when a person masks or otherwise disguises themselves, making their identity a secret. Natacha Crocoll's “Manipulation and Secrecy: Hidden Places of Love in ‘La Celestina’” notes that discretion secrecy usually stands at the heart of courtly love, and the continued thwarting of both privacy and secrecy is used to parodic—even critical—effect in Fernando de Rojas's “Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea.” This interpretation of de Rojas's work is perhaps more genuinely evident in Grażyna Maria Bosy's study of the love poetry of the troubadours in “The celar Motif: Secrecy and the Hidden in the Love Poetry of the Troubadours.” Here, the secrecy of the love affair is critical to its success, but equally critical to the more erotic alba poetry is secrecy or discretion with regard to the enjoyment of the physical encounter after it has happened. The focus on space in Crocoll's article, on the other hand, picks up on themes introduced by Brunnlechner in the first section, and echoes Antonella Sciancalepore, whose “Out in the Wild: Imagining Public and Secret Identity Through Animals and Nature in Old French Literature” invites the reader into the forest and the court to consider the role of hiddenness in identity-creation and the tension between secret and public identities and ultimately explores the relationship between the broader concepts of secret and private as they relate to both space and individuals.Satu Heiland, in “The Secret Look into the Heart: Seeing and Sympathy in Hartmann von Aue's ‘Iwein’ and ‘Der arme Heinrich,’” also focuses strongly on space, using it almost as a proxy for hiddenness and secrecy. Heiland also picks up the strand of sight and how particular characters are affected by what they see while in a space of concealment. Birgit Zacke takes this concept a step further, examining those looking “With the Gaze of the Voyeur”—in this case, the viewers themselves. Naturally, in “Tristan,” the subject of Zacke's contribution, the very relationship between Tristan and Isolde is one that rests uneasily in secrecy; the Brussels manuscript Zacke investigates, however, is accompanied by images that break the fourth wall, making space for the viewer/reader to observe the relationship between Tristan and Isolde firsthand, as it were, thereby making the viewer a party to their secret. Overall, most of the articles in this literary section focus on secrets that are, in one way or another, personal: they either relate directly to a person's identity, or to the space an individual inhabits (i.e., private/concealed or public). Four of the articles examine mysterious or secretive relationships within families. Although the two that discuss Thüring von Ringoltingen's “Melusine” highlight different aspects of the tale, the secrecy surrounding Melusine and her family, as well as the consequences of these secrets, form the core of these analyses, as in Susanne Knaeble's “Shaping the Perception of a Merfaÿm's Secret: Who Sees What in Thüring von Ringoltingen's Melusine,” and Florian M. Schmid's “(In-)Scriptions and Pictures: Presentations of the Genealogical Secrets in Manuscripts and Incunabula of Thüring von Ringoltingen's ‘Melusine.’” Silvan Wagner combines the secrets within a family with the problems caused by a disguised identity in “The Secret of the Swan Knight,” while Anna Hollenbach concludes the section by considering the role of hidden knowledge in “The Ideal Image of the Good Mother” in Burkhard Zink's Augsburg chronicle.Hollenbach's article provides an excellent transition to the theme of the final section of the anthology, “Knowledge is Power: Secret-Keeping as a Structural Characteristic of Educational and Ruling Elites.” These elites, discussed across the final seven chapters, are drawn from a broad range of time, from antiquity to the Early Modern period. All, however, to a certain degree address the exclusivity of knowledge and who has the power to know and make publicly known certain secrets. Gerhard Wolf, in “‘The Truth Creates Displeasure and Therefore Shies Away from the Light’: The Early Modern Chronicler in Conflict between Scholarly Demands, Educational Intentions, and the Betrayal of Secrecy,” focuses on the problem of how chroniclers treat secrets and sensitive information in their writing. Angelika Kemper's “Puzzles: Hidden Meaning and Elite Claims in the ‘Dimetromachia’ of Heinrich Fischer Aquilonipolensis” also concerns humanistic principles but focuses on the exclusive manner of having and transmitting knowledge within the university sphere. Political secrets of various kinds provide the subject for four articles: Linda Dohmen examines accusations of infidelity in “The Secrets of the Queen,” while Cybele Crossetti de Almeida also discusses a sex scandal along with the role of secrets and rumors in “Luckard's Secret, or: Secret and Scandal among the Elite of Cologne.” Alheydis Plassmann and Maike Sach, on the other hand, focus on governmental secrets, either on behalf of the state, as in Sach's “State Secrets and Sensitive Knowledge at the Court of the Grand Princes,” or aimed against the ruler, as in Plassmann's “Secret Conspiracies against King John.” Nadine Metzger in “From Secret Drugs to General Good? Hiera Formulas in the Early Byzantine Pharmaceutical Industry” reminds one of Ziegler's secret alchemical writings, yet here the concern for secrecy appears to have been more for commercial gain then the protection of knowledge itself.The volume's various sections effectively demonstrate the haziness of the gradient between highly valued mystery and suspicious secrecy. It is within this gradient that occult knowledge and magic operate within a tension of their own. Overall, the approaches taken by the different authors vary greatly, with respect not only to their handling of the book's theme and their respective subject matters but also to presentation style. Many of the contributions are highly specialized, which can make for challenging reading. Consequently, it is difficult to assess the ideal or intended audience of such a book: a given scholar would most likely be interested in a limited number of articles, in which case the price seems rather unfortunate for those who do not have institutional access—although individual chapters are available on the de Gruyter website at the price of $42 each. Nevertheless, as a reflection of some of the current directions of medieval studies research in Germany, the anthology is an impressive collection.