Abstract
‘W e are going to show you an image.”—“Wy willen ju eyn bilde W gheven.” This is how one of the late medieval northern German Easter plays introduces the viewer and listener to the performance. The play has been written down, as the manuscript tells us, in the year 1464 in Redentin, but it testifies to a much older tradition of religious drama.1 In a similar way, the guiding voice of the “proclamator” informs the viewer and listener at the beginning of a Passion play from Donaueschingen that the upcoming performance is to be seen as “a series of beautiful devotional images” [gar meng schön andächtig figur] that should be “contemplated” by the viewer.2 With these words, the play presents itself as a “figure,” as an “image” that has not only the function to stage the narrative “story” (geschieht) of the Gospel and to instruct the viewers, but also to produce the effect of a devotional image that should be “contemplated.”3
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Notes
Brigitta Schottmann, ed., Das Redentiner Osterspiel (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1975), p. 22
Eduard Hartl, ed., Donaueschinger Passionsspiel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966), p. 92. The terms used are sen or betrachten. The Donaueschinger play stresses schowen, betrachten, schwigen three times during the introductory lines spoken by the “proclamator.”
Cf. Bernard McGinn, ed. Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadetvijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete (New York: Continuum, 1994)
Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1995).
Bernard McGinn, “The Four Female Evangelists of the Thirteenth Century: The Invention of Authority,” in Deutsche Mystik im abendländischen Zusammenhang: Neu erschlossene Texte, neue methodische Ansätze, neue theoretische Konzepte, ed. Walter Haug and Wolfram Schneider-Lastin (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), pp. 175”94.
Cf. Bruce W Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); and Jeffrey Hamburger’s analysis in this volume of a sermon by Johannes Tauler and its references to visual material.
Hadewijch, The Complete Works, ed. Columba Hart (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), pp. 280–82.
Antje Knorr, ed., Villinger Passion: literarhistorische Einordnung und erstmalige Herausgabe des Urtextes und der Überarbeitungen (Göppingen: A. Kümmerle, 1976), p. 28,11.1–10.
Cf. Elisabeth Pinto-Mathieu, Marie-Madeleine dans la littérature du Moyen Age (Paris: Beauchesne, 1997)
Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).
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© 2005 Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel
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Largier, N. (2005). Scripture, Vision, Performance: Visionary Texts and Medieval Religious Drama. In: Starkey, K., Wenzel, H. (eds) Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05655-9_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05655-9_10
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