Mechthild von Magdeburg: 'Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit'. Nach der Einsiedler Handschrift in kritischem Vergleich mit der gesamten Uberlieferung, 2 vols

Medium Aevum, Spring, 1996 by Timothy McFarland

ed. Hans Neumann, prepared for the press by Gisela Vollmann-Profe, 2 vols, Munchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters 100-i (Munich: Artemis, 1990-3). Vol. I: xxviii 314 pp.; I plate; ISBN 3-7608-3400-0. DM 89. Vol. II: xvi 334 pp.; I plate; 3 tables; ISBN 3-484-89101-7. DM 98.

This long-awaited edinon of Mechthild von Magdeburg represents the life-work of Hans Neumann. The text of the revelations of the great thirteenth-century beguine mystic occupied him continuously from his dismissal on racial grounds during the Third Reich until his death after a long illness in February 1990, shortly before the appearance of the first of these volumes. During his last years, and in full cooperation with him, Gisela Vollmann-Profe assumed active responsibility for completing the edition and seeing it through the press. In praising the editorial quality of the final result, it is difficult to distinguish between his immense experience with the text, her care and fidelity to his intentions, and the high editorial standards of the Munich series in which it has appeared.

It is assumed that Mechthild wrote or dictated her revelations in her native Low German vernacular between 1250 and 1283. This original version has not survived, but there is an early Latin translation of the first six of her seven books, and an Upper German version of the whole, which is preserved complete solely in an Einsiedeln manuscript (MS Einsidlensis 277) of the late fourteenth century. The Einsiedeln librarian Gall Morel produced in 1869 a faulty edition of this manuscript which has remained until now the only complete published version of the text. Since then other manuscripts of fragments of this version have come to light, all of them dependent upon the original Upper German translation produced in Basel around 1350, but insufficient to permit a critical edition of the Basel version, let alone of the Low German original. The Einsiedeln MS remains, therefore, the basis of Neumann's as it was of Morel's edition.

As well as providing a text based on this manuscript, with a very full critical apparatus drawing on all the available High German and Latin evidence, it was the editor's intention, as elucidated in Vollmann-Profe's `Prologomena' (I, xi-xxvii), to give as complete an impression of the putative Low German original as possible. The textual commentary which occupies the first half of the second volume serves this purpose, as well as justifying editorial practice, and is exclusively linguistic in character. The Latin translation, seen as being closer to the Low German original than the High German manuscripts, is frequently called upon to confirm the original readings and is therefore cited extensively in both the apparatus and the commentary.

In the presentation of the text the most important innovation concerns the problem presented by Mechthild's distinctive use of language, which ranges from prose to verse and embraces many intermediate stages between the two. While some passages, fewer than in earlier editions, are still printed as verse, the editors prefer in most cases to have recourse to the use of spaced printing (Sperrdruck) to indicate the `colon rhymes' which Mechthild frequently employs at the end of phrases, clauses and sentences. This initially disconcerting device does justice to the varying rhythmical and rhyme patterns of the text, and draws the reader's attention to rhymes which the editor has detected as existing in the lost Low German original, but which have been obscured in the High German version.

In addition to the text, the first volume presents us in the `Prologomena' with a full account of the manuscript tradition and the editorial principles, as well as a list of all the manuscripts. The second volume, in addition to the commentary, contains very detailed investigations of the four most important of these, embracing the Colmar, Wurzburg and Budapest fragments as well as the Einsiedeln MS itself. It also includes the final chapter of Neumann's unpublished Habilitationsschrift of 1946 on the question of language and style in Mechthild. Vollmann-Profe has furthermore provided a synoptic table of the entire manuscript material, a bibliography and a register.

This immensely thorough edition of Mechthild's great book is entirely dedicated in its apparatus, commentary and investigations to the justification and clarification of the text itself. As such it may disappoint readers who had hoped to benefit from Neumann's immense knowledge of the literary, theological and biographical aspects of Das flieBende Licht der Gottheit. But as it stands it provides the entirely reliable and indispensable basis for all further work. For most readers the principal requirement is now an edition with a translation, a literary and theological commentary, and a glossary. This is now genuinely possible for the first time, thanks to Neumann. And for the first time translators will be able to set to work with the confident assumption that the text in front of them is as reliable as could possibly be expected.