Süeze stimme, süezer sang. Funktionen von stimmlichem Klang in Viten und Offenbarungen des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts

Abstract

As a religion of revelation, Christianity has always had to mediate between the spoken and the written word. This conflict can be found in the private revelations and lives of religious women of the later Middle Ages. This paper focuses on the role sound, voice and song play in texts from Cistercian and Dominican monasteries of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It argues that the texts’ aesthetic achievements reside not only in their visual, metaphorical quality but also in the way they try to preserve the voices’ sound in the text. A text such as Mechthild’s ₻Flowing light of the Godhead₫ subtly reflects on the difficulties in differentiating between the spoken and the sung word, and insists on the lack of sound in the written text. The lives of nuns collected in the Dominican ›sister-books‹ use incidents of heavenly and angelic sounds, as well as choir and private song, as a means of narrative emplotment. Heavenly sound and song can be read as signs of future death; moreover, they open up symbolic spaces in order to mediate between heaven and earth, in order to lead the soul to heaven. The nun’s performance of songs could indicate an aesthetic quality of ›sweetness‹ (sueze) that is reflected in Christ as well as in the lives of the nuns themselves. Furthermore, the time structure of the songs may also serve as an epiphany of timeless heavenly life, in the process, both rounding out and transgressing the narrative structure of the vita.