<i>Frauenlob's Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet and his Masterpiece</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Frauenlob's Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet and his Masterpiece Ann Marie Rasmussen Frauenlob's Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet and his Masterpiece. By Barbara Newman, with the critical text by Karl Stackmann and a musical performance on CD by the Ensemble Sequentia directed by Barbara Thornton and Benjamin Bagby. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Pp. xxi + 242. $25. Why Song of Songs? Barbara Newman's choice of title for this brilliantly successful and ambitious book indicates the vast potential reach of its object of study, the erotically charged German-language praise-song to the Virgin Mary, the Marienleich, by the poet Heinrich von Meissen known as Frauenlob (c. 1260–1317), while placing the Marienleich in a context that was formative for its composition and medieval reception. Far from being a modern "marketing ploy," the title yields to a key medieval witness, the fourteenth-century manuscript Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. Vind. 2701, which ends its copy of this work (with music) with the colophon "Expliciunt cantica canticorum vrowenlobiz." I would like to note that the terminology available to me as a reviewer to describe a project such as this is inadequate. No term (Book? Study? Monograph? Project? Translation? Edition? Recording?) encompasses the many disparate scholarly [End Page 276] elements that are so elegantly united in Newman's work. The high quality of the study makes it more than a translation and edition, whose virtuosity in turn make it more than a monograph. And what about the accompanying CD? If there were such a thing as a "compilation monograph," this is it. This book contains: Karl Stackmann's edition of the original text of Frauenlob's artistic masterpiece, his erudite, ornate, difficult, and beautiful Marienleich, a poem of praise to the Virgin Mary written in a "demanding, virtuosic genre akin to the Latin sequence" (p. ix) that is more than five hundred lines long; Newman's sensitive English translation of the Marienleich into formal English verse, a superb achievement in its own right; a brilliant monograph in five chapters, of which more below; Newman's commentary on the poem, which deftly helps one make sense of this ferociously learned, highly allusive work; a complete scholarly apparatus, consisting of a glossary of technical terms, list of abbreviations, bibliography, and three indices (index of Marienleich citations, index of biblical citations, and a general index); seven illustrations; and its crowning glory, a CD of a performance of the Marienleich by the noted ensemble, Sequentia, reconstructed from fragmentary manuscript remains and performed in the 1980s, recorded in 1990, remastered in 1999, and released here for the first time. Even masterpieces have historical lives and so can pass away. Today Frauenlob's work is unknown outside of the limited circles of German medieval studies scholarship. Newman makes the case that Frauenlob's Marienleich represents a neglected masterpiece of medieval European literature, on par with Petrarch's work, for example. Frauenlob's Song of Songs can be understood as an attempt to back this claim with evidence that is accessible, in English, to a larger scholarly audience. Yet the goal of recovery alone, laudable though it is, would not be enough to give this study its remarkable heft and promise of durability. Newman also makes the case that Frauenlob's Marienleich is an artistic masterpiece that bears witness to the historically distinct religious culture of late medieval Christianity, whose vibrant and tumultuously heterodox forms of belief and worship were uniquely shaped by a devotion to the feminine divine. Frauenlob's Song of Songs clearly overlaps with and elucidates Newman's recent work in God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (2002), for the Marienleich neatly illustrates Newman's claims. Two-thirds of this text of self-revelation are spoken by the Virgin herself, a highly unusual choice for Marian verse that makes the Marienleich a daring example of "woman's song" (a text written by a man in the first-person voice of a woman). Further, the Marienleich systematically conflates erotic and spiritual love. Its refusal to separate the sensual and sacred, which is simultaneously orthodox and radically innovative, poses theological and...