David A. Wells (review)

Abstract

MLRy 100.3, 2005 855 his tact is best seen as a successful stratagem, to produce precisely the sense of an irreconcilable dichotomy. San Roman's essay thus opens up a more interesting ques? tion about the rhetoric of tact, but draws back from furtherinvestigation. Likewise, Henry Ettinghausen's description of the way in which seventeenthcentury Spanish new sources extolled Spanish might, disparaged the Turkish infidel, and generally served as a mechanism of social control (no great revelations there, I feel) rather misses a trick when he passes almost silently over the observation that the Crown would use these pamphlets also as 'a semi-official kite-flying exercise', testing reactions to proposals and so establishing 'a dialectical relationship between government and public opinion' (p. 239). Ettinghausen's missed opportunity is per? haps symptomatic of the way in which a collection that sets out to be so ambitious in the ends suffersfrom its own lack of assertiveness. University of British Columbia Jon Beasley-Murray The Central Franconian Rhyming Bible ('Mittelfrankische Reimbibel'): An Early Twelfth-Century German Verse Homiliary. A Thematic and Exegetical Commen? tary with the Text and a Translation into English. By David A. Wells. (Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur, 155) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2004. xvi + 359 pp. ?90. ISBN 90-420-0860-1. This well-conceived and attractively presented volume constitutes a definitive guide to the so-called Central Franconian Rhyming Bible, a fragmentary Early Middle High German work thought to date fromthe firsthalf ofthe twelfthcentury. To supplement the text itself (which is essentially that of Friedrich Maurer's edition of 1964, with a few emendations based on more recent scholarship), David Wells offersan accurate and carefully nuanced translation into English, as well as an admirable section-bysection commentary. The commentary is particularly valuable, not only because ofthe way in which it elucidates this particular literarywork, but also because itconstitutes a thesaurus of information on early medieval theological traditions, exegetical practices, and spiritual commonplaces; the breadth of scholarship on display will be of potential benefit to all scholars working on Middle High German religious literature. The detailed introductory and concluding sections provide a careful assessment of this text in its literary,liturgical, and theological context, and make particularly good use of recent developments in sermon studies. The Central Franconian Rhyming Bible includes select episodes from the Old Tes? tament (mostly from Genesis and Exodus); certain incidents from the life of Christ; and a few hagiographical narratives (including accounts of the Inventio Crucis and the Exaltatio Crucis). In its presentation of this material, the work is characterized by a certain ambiguity in genre, a feature which is compounded by its fragmentary sta? tus. Although earlier scholars believed that the surviving fragments might represent a religious epic encompassing the whole of salvation history from the Creation to the Last Judgement, this view has been superseded, and the work is now thought to have stronger generic connections with the sermon (or collection of sermons) than with the epic, or with other forms of comprehensive biblical narrative. As Wells points out, even the use of the term 'Bible' in the title is something of a misnomer, since the work is 'primarily a sequence of homiletic narratives more familiar from analogous texts in prose' (p. 3). With respect to the ordering of the material, Wells draws particular attention to the tension between the anonymous poet's narrative mode, which would appear to favour the presentation of episodes on the basis of their historical sequence, and the liturgical framework attaching to the homiletic source material. Wells suggests that this unresolved tension between the historical and liturgical approaches is the 856 Reviews most serious indicator of the poet's 'literary ineptitude and lack of control' (p. 276), but also notes that the body of vernacular homiletic material on which this poet was drawing is unlikely to have been available in a particularly coherent or well-structured form. By way of contrast, Wells draws on the Old English homiletic corpus of i^Elfric of Eynsham, which has been organized by 'a single tidy mind' (p. 266). However, although Wells makes no claims for any particular aesthetic merits in this text, he clearly communicates enthusiasm...