Lexikon der antiken Gestalten in den deutschen Texten des Mittelalters by Manfred Kern , Alfred Ebenbauer (review)

Abstract

542 Reviews lugathmende, hassesheisse Pest selbstsiichtiger Umwalzungswuth' of contemporary life. Graff offered his readers just the German text extracted from Notker's origi? nal Latin-German compilation, which contains a complete Latin text as well as the translation and Latin and German commentary material. Subsequent editions by Hattemer (1848-49), Piper (1882), Sehrt and Starck (1933-34), and Tax (1986-90) have reverted to the form in which the work is preserved in the single complete manuscript of Notker's Consolatio, each attempting a slightly differentcompromise between a totally diplomatic rendering of Codex Sangallensis 825 and a reconstruc? tion of what Notker may originally have written (or intended to write), and each of them necessarily therein guided by their own conception of Notker's 'ideal language'. Evelyn Firchow's edition takes the story one step further,for it is the firstedition whose goal has been to provide a text which is essentially a 'typographic facsimile' of the original, recording the page layout as well as the spellings, punctuation, accents, word division, erasures ofthe German and Latin text exactly as they are to be found in the manuscript. The text occupies pp. 4-271 of vol. 1,following the pagination ofthe manuscript (as in Tax's edition). In addition she provides a parallel text ofthe Zurich fragment (four pages), Latin prologues, and an extensive set of computer-generated concordances and word lists (the latter amounting to some 1,496 pages). Firchow's conception fulfilsthe requirements of modern Notker scholarship much better than that of any of her predecessors. On the other hand Tax's much more modest edition in three slim volumes of the Altdeutsche Textbibliothek extends a warmer invitation to readers than these three massive volumes, which come at a price that few libraries in the English-speaking world and no private scholars will be able to afford.What they fail to provide, which was also a failing of previous editions, is an invitation to read the German-Latin text in the context of Boethius's original and the medieval commentary tradition on that original, a project that has now been splendidly achieved in Christine Hehle's recent book Boethius in St. Gallen (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 2002). Why do the editions of Notker's Consolatio refrain from providing cross-references to the book and prosa/metrum numbering of the original? St Edmund Hall, Oxford Nigel F. Palmer Lexikon der antiken Gestalten in den deutschen Texten des Mittelalters. Ed. by Manfred Kern and Alfred Ebenbauer, assisted by Silvia Kramer-Seifert. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. 2003. xcii +722 pp. ?158. ISBN 3-11-016257-1. The reception ofclassical culture in the Middle Ages has become a popular fieldof ex? ploration in all the medieval disciplines, with many recent studies tracing continuities ofthought in political philosophy, rhetoric, cosmology, and historiography, or focusing on translation and textual transmission. Though medieval writers had an ambiguous attitude towards their pagan predecessors, they were intensely interested in what they thought of as a golden age, an ambivalence which Manfred Kern sees typified in the naming of the thirteenth-century Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. Perhaps the most obvious expression of this for the reader of medieval vernacular literature is the frequent reference to famous personalities from Greek or Roman an? tiquity who appear in a contemporary guise in courtly novels, love songs, and histories, the motifs being mutated and modified in much the way that we observe also in the far larger repertoire ofbiblical material. For the German Middle Ages at least, a definitive reference work now provides a long-awaited overview of this large body of material. The Lexikon der antiken Gestalten arises out of a long-standing project led by Al? fred Ebenbauer in Vienna, but is in fact edited and written mainly by Kern, with a minority of articles by Silvia Kramer-Seifert. The lengthy and excellent introduction MLR, 100.2, 2005 543 by Kern draws together recurring patterns of reception; foran initial orientation, this is as convenient as any essay currently in print. The complex and varying relationship between the ancient and medieval worlds is explored, with interesting observations on the importance of Alexander and Virgil, and on the...