Text and Simultext: Borrowing Claudian in Seventeenth‐Century Germany (A Case from the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft)

Abstract

The Latin political pamphlet Aulaea Romana (Roman Tapestries), written by an anonymous member of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft in 1642, provides a unique textual model of what may be called ‘simultext’. This study belongs to a current trend in early modern German narrative theory to discover and investigate ‘intertextual’ strategies employed by early modern German writers. In simultexts, the referential technique differs from that in rhetorical texts, which are read as existing in a linear‐chronological relationship (‘Nacheinander’). The simultext arrangement blurs traditional genre boundaries by setting texts in a vertical simultaneous relationship (‘Nebeneinander’), which causes them to be read in a manner ordinarily reserved for visual artifacts. Borrowings from Claudian – one of the most‐quoted ancient authorities in the Renaissance – constitute the first level of reference throughout Aulaea Romana. His high visibility in this work from the Reformed court at Anhalt‐Kö then suggests that German scholars (such as Caspar von Barth, editor of Claudian’s works) had been successful in their appropriation of the pagan Claudian as a new (Protestant) Christian authority for an age in crisis.