Mimetic bodies: repetition, replication, and simulation in the marriage charter of Empress Theophanu

Abstract

As an object and as a collection of text and images, the marriage charter of Empress Theophanu (Wolfenbüttel, Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv, 6 Urk 11) relies on replication, repetition, and doubling to reinforce the meanings relayed in its text and to enhance its function as a legal document. This article argues that the charter’s remarkable illusionism functioned as a kind of visual rhetoric that was entirely in tune with the terms of the golden text that stretches across its surface. Such a powerful coalescence between text and image was especially well suited to the visualization and propagation of imperial authority, and it girded expectations of Theophanu’s obedience at the political, social, and physical levels. Framed in terms that name and foreground God-the-craftsman’s creation of humankind as the originary mimetic act, creation becomes a template for the order of the Ottonian court. The marriage charter was thus a call to Theophanu and Otto II to internalize both biblical and Platonic models of creation in the interest of preserving and perpetuating the Saxon imperial line, which was, at the time of the charter’s presentation, but ten years young. In explicating the various ways in which the marriage charter’s images and text hinge on themes of repetition and replication, this article will make a case for the political stakes of mimesis.