Virgils Aeneis, travestirt. (Textbibliothek 3) by Aloys Blumauer, Wynfrid Kriegleder

Abstract

35? Reviews these chapters will now need to be read alongside the latter,unless the relevant sections are themselves revised when the complete biography is issued. There are twowholly new pieces: a brief revisionist account of the circumstances that led to the papal visit toVienna in 1781, which makes original use of the reports of the papal nuncio of the day; and a full-length essay on the suppression of the Jesuits in theHabsburg lands in the early 1770s. This latter is particularly revealing in the case it develops for Joseph as a leader of the Catholic Enlightenment, determined to purify the Church in the cause of reform, rather than its nemesis. This contention might on the face of it seem paradoxical, given Joseph's notorious reputation as the scourge of themonastic orders, but as Beales has shown in his monograph Prosperity and Plunder (2003, written at the same time as many of these essays) the experience of European Catholic monasteries and state churches in the pre-revolutionary era was a complex one, where the interactions between Church and government gave meaning and intellectual substance to the term Catholic Enlightenment in Central Europe, rather than responding passively to purely Erastian state intervention. There are parallels to be drawn here between the case Beales makes for the positive ideological motivations and energizing consequences of Josephist ecclesiastical reform and the classic analysis by Robert Evans of the interaction between dynasty, state and church in shaping the Counter-Reformation in Habsburg domains. This line of analysis suggests too that Beales's second volume on the decade 1781-90 will be most radical in itsreassessment ofJoseph's dealings with the Church and indownplaying his connections with thephilosophes, in favour of a variety of enlightened despotism owing more to local intellectual priorities. In a final essay on Joseph II and Josephism', the author moves beyond the reign itself to offer some preliminary conclusions on the Emperor's legacy. He shows that the reaction to the Emperor's reforms was more mixed and varied than supposed, both at the time and in later decades, with radicals and conservatives competing to legitimate themselves by claiming his authority. Where Joseph's reforms failed, it was not somuch because the proposals lacked their supporters, but through an obsessive concern with uniformity of application that continually fought against the diverse administrative character of the Monarchy's own provinces, thereby arousing a host of unnecessary opponents. London School of Economics and Political Science T. J.Hochstrasser Virgik Aeneis, travestirt.By Aloys Blumauer. Ed. by Wynfrid Kriegleder. (Textbibliothek 3). Vienna: Edition Praesens. 2005. 312 pp. 27,20. isbn 3.7069-0347-4. Aloys Blumauer's travesty of the Aeneid was once a well-known book. It was praised byWieland, who in 1783 published part of it in the TeutscherMerkur, disparaged by Goethe and Schiller, the latter condemning Blumauer's 'filthy wit' in Uber naive und sentimentalischeDichtung, and mentioned approvingly in Hegel's ?sthetik as mocking the imaginative weakness with which Virgil portrays the gods. Its popularity is attested by themany nineteenth-century editions that AUSTRIAN STUDIES, I4, 20 6 351 still turn up second-hand. Since there has been no new edition since 1910, however, it isgood tohave thisgreat comic textmade available again by Wynfrid Kriegleder, who has already made accessible an important mock epic with his edition of Joseph Franz von Ratschky's Melchior Striegel (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1991). Two features of Blumauer's travestyare particularly striking.One is itsextreme physicality. Sometimes thisbecomes scatological, as with the description of Zeus on his 'Leibstuhl' (Book I, stanza 26). Prudish readers should remember that scatology is a generic feature ofmock-epic, itshigh (or low) point inGerman literature being the episode in Deutschland. Ein Winterm?rchen where Heine's traveller sees and smells the future in Hammonia's chamber-pot. Elsewhere Blumauer can be disarmingly childlike, as in the description of Elysium, where the soil is chocolate, thewater caf?-au-lait, the snow is ice-cream and the mountains are topped with icing sugar. The other prominent feature, and one liable to puzzle modern readers, is Blumauer's obsessive anti-clericalism. Priests, monks, Jesuits, saints, the cult of theVirgin Mary, feast-days...