Illuminating the epic: the Kassel Willehalm Codex and the landgraves of Hesse in the early fourteenth century 9780295975917

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (page vi)
PREFACE (page x)
INTRODUCTION Codex and Contents (page 1)
I Patron and Manuscript (page 15)
II Images and Epic (page 31)
III Court and Context (page 53)
CONCLUSION (page 82)
APPENDIXES
I Simplified Genealogical Table (page 88)
II The Codicological Structure of the Kassel Codex (page 89)
III Proportional Relationships of Image and Text in the Sections of the Kassel Manuscript and Comparison with Vienna MS 2670 (page 95)
IV The Images of the Kassel Codex and Related Manuscripts: Comparative Table of Rubrics and Painter's Directions (page 96)
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY (page 152)
ILLUSTRATIONS (page 161)
INDEX (page 240)

Citation preview

Illuminating the Epic

College Art Association

Monograph on the Fine Arts, LIV |

| Editor, Robert S. Nelson

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The central conflict is the battle between Christians and pagans for the city of Orange, the capital of Willehalm’s territories. Responsible for this conflict and dependent

on its outcome is the marriage of Willehalm to Arabel, daughter of one, and former wife of the other, pagan leader. The Arabel traces the story of their meeting. Willehalm, disinherited by his father, joins Charlemagne’s armies and, after the king’s death, remains ,

in the service of his son and heir Louis.”° In a battle with the pagans, Willehalm races | ahead of the Christian army, is captured, and is transported back to the palace of King Tybalt. Some years later Tybalt departs again on campaign, leaving the prisoner in the care of his wife, the Queen Arabel. During the king’s absence, Willehalm teaches Arabel about Christianity, converts her, and convinces her to sail back to France with him. On their arrival, Willehalm’s family and King Louis greet them ceremoniously, Arabel is baptized with the name Gyburg, and she and Willehalm marry. After a prologue, which sets a religious tone, the Willehalm proper opens with a short summary of the hero’s early life.*” For the medieval reader or listener familiar with the previous text, the new material commenced with the arrival of the pagan army to rescue Arabel and avenge her departure. In this battle Willehalm’s nephew Vivianz distinguishes himself, but he is fatally wounded and dies in the hero’s arms. Willehalm fights bravely himself, killing numerous highly placed pagans, but the armies of Terramer, Gyburg’s father, succeed in ringing Orange. Willehalm decides that he must enlist the king’s help and leaves

5

Introduction

Gyburg to protect the city. Neither the king nor his courtiers receive the hero enthusiastically at court and only with great difficulty does Willehalm succeed in securing aid. At this

juncture, the introduction of Rennewart, a young giant working at court as a kitchen helper in spite of his highborn pagan status, provides comic relief. Ten days later the Christian relief armies assemble under Willehalm’s command and ride to relieve Gyburg . and save Orange. Gyburg recognizes Rennewart as her brother and, in the second major battle, he plays a major role in defeating the pagans, who flee toward their boats. At the end of the Willehalm, Rennewart is missing.”®

At the beginning of the Rennewart text, we see the young giant chasing after the pagans to continue the fight. On his return to Orange, he is baptized and knighted and, with Willehalm’s help, woos and marries Alyze, the daughter of Willehalm’s sister and King Louis. Rennewart emerges victorious from a subsequent battle with the pagan enemy, and the pagan king converts with his troops. Alyze dies in childbirth, and merchants steal the baby Malifer and sell him to Terramer, the father of Gyburg. Minor adventures occupy Rennewart until the next major battle in which Terramer again surrounds Orange, this time with the help of Malifer, whom the Christians ultimately recognize and receive. Rennewart enters a monastery but is released to help against the next lengthy but unsuccessful invasion of the pagans. Rennewart returns to the cloister, while Malifer sails overseas to fight the pagans on their own soil. In the first of a repeated series of conquests, Malifer defeats his grandfather, who pays him homage. Malifer’s triumphs continue as he vanquishes the king of Morocco and claims his crown. The king’s son converts to Christianity and accompanies Malifer on further, uniformly victorious quests against both pagan kings and giants. Malifer meets and marries Penthesilea, and their son Johann accompanies his father on additional campaigns against the pagans. After thirty-three thousand lines, the story returns definitively to Willehalm and Gyburg,

taking up the events of the end of their lives. They both enter cloisters, although yet another pagan invasion necessitates Willehalm’s return to military life to help the king defend Paris. In return, the king helps Willehalm build a monastery as directed by an angel in a vision. Willehalm and the bishop translate Gyburg’s bones to the new cloister, where Willehalm is also buried on his death. Most of the preserved manuscripts transmit all three poems together in spite of their widely varying literary quality and different dates and authors.”® Thus the subject matter rather than literary taste seems to have been the driving force in the commission of |

these manuscripts.*° Whatever the reason, two different kinds of evidence attest to the | widespread fascination with the Willehalm material in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. First, some seventy preserved manuscripts and fragments reveal that the Willehalm trilogy enjoyed a popularity challenged only by Hartmann von Aue’s Ywein and Wolfram’s own Parzival.** Second, Heinrich von Miinchen inserted long passages from all three of the Willehalm trilogy texts into his Weltchronik, providing additional exposure for the story. Heinrich’s reuse of the Willehalm material also attests to its considerable popularity.

The inclusion of the Willehalm story in Heinrich’s compendium of world history helps to characterize further the reception of this material in the thirteenth and 6

Codex and Contents

fourteenth centuries. Medieval readers and listeners perceived the Willehalm epic, like

the Roland story, as history and biography, as a factual recounting of actual events in the past.37 The Willehalm trilogy also had a role, like the Ywein and the Parzival, as courtly adventure, but as history it suggested parallels between the past and the present. In this

capacity it may also have served a prescriptive function, indicating solutions for the present and near future.* Recent criticism reads the literary adaptation of Saint William’s life as a response to

historical events in twelfth-century France. The hero, a strong and independent prince who assumes kingly duties and royal power from his weak and unwilling king, reminded noble listeners of themselves as they struggled with the inabilities and political difficulties of Louis VII.34 Scholars of German literature see Landgrave Hermann’s interest in the

William story in much the same terms as the French attraction to this material in the twelfth century. Perceived as history, the epic lent itself to parallels with the present, and _ Hermann found a particularly apt model in the story’s hero. It seems likely that Wolfram’s transformations of his French source corresponded to Hermann’s view of the ideal relationship between the self-conscious, independent German princes and a comparatively weak king.35 Certainly the concerns expressed in the story harmonized with those of the patrons who commissioned the composition and copying of courtly literature.

The perception of the Willehalm texts as history helps explain not only their popularity, but also their provision with elaborate illumination programs. Extensive cycles

of framed images in full color with lavish use of gold made their way into numerous liturgical and devotional books, but among works in the vernacular, only selected texts received such special treatment: works concerned with the history of salvation, such as the

— Weltchronik, and related works in the fields of imperial history or law.*° In a sense, the |

it illustrates. |

Willehalm’s elaborate image cycle claims the authenticity of historical truth for the story

The lavish illumination programs that decorate several of the thirteenth- and

fourteenth-century Willehalm manuscripts also mark a second important feature in the reception of these texts. Although only one other Willehalm manuscript from this period

apart from the Kassel codex can be associated with a specific known patron or early | owner, the format and quality of Willehalm manuscripts reveal their production for an elevated class of patrons for use at their courts.3” Like the initial appeal of the Willehalm subject matter to Landgrave Hermann—his identification with the noble hero of the text and his sympathy for the feudal relationships it describes—later commissions of Willehalm manuscripts also transparently reflected princely self-consciousness.

, Art and Politics at the Hessian Court , The Hessian landgraves claimed for themselves an illustrious past. Heinrich II and his father and grandfather, the first lords of an independent Hesse, were descended not only

, from the recent and popular saint, Elizabeth (d. 1231), but also from the powerful land-

_

Introduction

, graves of Thuringia (see Appendix 1). We have already encountered Hermann, the patron of Wolfram von Eschenbach; his sons also made their mark on contemporary history: _ Ludwig, Saint Elizabeth’s husband, who died on Crusade in 1227 and was widely regard-

ed as a saint; Heinrich Raspe, who was elected anti-king in 1246; and Konrad, High Master of the Teutonic Order from 1239 until his premature death in 1240.The death of Heinrich Raspe in 1247 extinguished the male line, and the Thuringian territories became the object of an extended three-way struggle.The archbishop of Mainz claimed parts of the territory, while both Albrecht, margrave of Meissen, the son of the landgraves’ sister, and Heinrich, the son of Elizabeth’s daughter and Heinrich, duke of Brabant, claimed the entire Thuringian inheritance as next of kin. The settlement finally reached in 1263 divided the landgraviate, with Albrecht receiving Thuringia proper and Heinrich I establishing himself in the western part of the former territory as the ~ new landgrave of Hesse.3* The exclusion of the archbishop left unsatisfied claims that would crop up at irregular intervals into the fourteenth century. Heinrich located his capital at Marburg, where his grandmother had founded her hospital about 1228. His widely scattered territories, sprinkled throughout with hold-

ings of the archibishop and lesser local nobles, extended largely to the northeast. In Marburg, Heinrich set about establishing a proper court for himself. He enlarged the pre-existing castle, adding on a Gothic chapel and an unusually large knights’ hall. While these structures served practical purposes, they also served “representational” functions, making visible the family’s status, especially in relation to their illustrious past, and providing a setting befitting their newly established position.39 With his promotion in 1292 to the Reichsftirstenstand, the group of princes closest to the king, Heinrich reached a high point in his political career and achieved outward approbation of his standing commensurate with his high birth and his role in the affairs of the realm. Yet at the same time as Heinrich went about establishing the new landgraviate as a political force, he also set the stage for future problems. As early as 1294 he announced his intention to divide Hesse between the sons of his first and second marriages.*° The former, Heinrich the Younger and Otto, actively expressed their displeasure with this arrangement, and in 1296 King Adolph of Nassau intervened, declaring himself in support of Heinrich I’s decision. Marburg lay in Upper Hesse, the area intended for Heinrich the Younger but which fell to Otto after his brother’s premature death in 1298. After an unsuc-

cessful attempt to reunite Hesse by force, Otto lived in peace with his half brother Johann | until the latter’s death without male issue in 1311. In Otto’s subsequent reunification of

, Hesse, he had to contend with the archbishop, who claimed that Lower Hesse reverted to him on Johann’s death. Periods of active strife in the 1310s and 1320s finally gave way to a tentative peace only after Otto’s death and the accession of Heinrich I in 1328. Like his father, Otto too used art both for representational purposes—to create an

appropriate courtly environment—and for the expression of specific political ideas. Whereas his father had turned to architecture, Otto erected a series of tombs for family members, thereby founding a family necropolis at the church dedicated to their ancestress. Above and beyond the tombs’ roles as dynastic symbols, they also carried explicit 8

, Codex and Contents messages 1n response to the inheritance struggle that occupied Otto throughout most of his tenure. In neither of these aspects was the Hessian landgraves’ interest 1n art unique;

other nobles too saw art not only as a way to enhance their court and create a fitting setting for their rule, but also as a vehicle to communicate more pointed political statements.“" Indeed, in a kind of friendly competition, many of these lords commissioned works of art precisely because their neighbors and peers did.*? What is striking about the landgraves’ projects, however, 1s their scale and the eloquence with which their ideas are expressed.*3

The consideration of both the historical and artistic contexts will further illuminate our study of Heinrich II’s commission of the Willehalm Codex. By the time he succeeded

| his father, the family had established a pattern of patronage as well as an understanding of

the ways in which works of art could both reflect and reshape important events. Heinrich , , Il’s interest in the Willehalm text in the early 1330s may have first arisen for any number of reasons. The historical material or the political relationships it expresses may account for his initial attraction to the saint’s story. Likewise, the tradition of the trilogy’s lavish illumination may have suggested this manuscript as the cornerstone of the landgrave’s Kunstpolitik. Two other factors also help in assessing Heinrich’s personal interest in his commission. First,

Heinrich was the great-great-great-grandson of Landgrave Hermann, who had commissioned the first German version of the William material. Although no textual or figural elements within the manuscript allude to this fact, 1t seems likely that Heinrich knew of his famous ancestor and of his political and artistic achievements.** Heinrich II may have intended his manuscript commission, then, at least in part, as a family tribute. Second, Heinrich perceived himself as a descendant of Saint William.** Although no firm indications

mark this familial relationship within the pages of the manuscript, the very commission of , a text of the saint’s life may itself reflect this knowledge. A possible genealogical motivation

for Heinrich’s commission would also suggest family pride as an important factor in the ! manuscript’s final form. Certainly the attention and expense lavished on the codex indicate

, the special role intended for it at Heinrich II’s court.

Overview In the pages that follow, Heinrich’s special interest in his commission and his expression of that interest in artistic form are traced more fully. The first two chapters focus on the

manuscript itself, while the third concentrates on the artistic and political milieux in which and for which the codex was conceived and designed. Since the patron appears on the opening text folio, the first chapter is devoted to Heinrich’s presence in the manuscript. The striking character of the owner’s image on the incipit page finds a parallel in the insistent wording of the final inscription. The structured framing of the life of the saint by two notices of ownership associates the patron inti-

mately with both the manuscript and the text it contains and serves as a statement of

| his lively personal interest in this codex. 9

Introduction

The second chapter studies the illuminations that accompany the epic narrative.

, An investigation of the miniatures’ distribution in the codex reveals that changes in their frequency, size, and placement stress certain text passages and directs further examination to three of the most strongly emphasized. Comparisons with the text and with the subjects and iconographies of images in other nearly contemporary manuscripts illustrate how the illuminations of Heinrich’s manuscript provide a specific reading of the text. This reading highlights themes of undeserved disinheritance and the mutual respon-

, sibilities of the king and his vassals and, at the end of the manuscript, details the saintly episodes of Willehalm’s old age. These themes are all related to important recent episodes in the Hessian landgraves’ history.

The third chapter situates Heinrich’s manuscript in the context of the other important artistic commissions at the Hessian court. The additions to the hilltop castle at Marburg suggest that the family had developed a conscious Kunstpolitik by the end of the thirteenth century. In the next generation, the erection of the dynastic necropolis in the church of the family saint and the iconographies of the tombs stress issues of lineage and

legitimization that relate to the landgraves’ political concerns of the late 1320s. The Willehalm manuscript tunes the messages of these earlier family programs more finely and

provides one more elegant attribute of a self-conscious and well-appointed court. The

, second part of chapter 3 examines the documentary evidence of the patron’s relationships to religious and royal authorities in an attempt to relate the manuscript more firmly to Heinrich II’s political, territorial, and financial concerns in the early 1330s. The Willehalm Codex made for Heinrich II in 1334 outdoes contemporary sec-

ular manuscripts in the scale of its planned illumination cycle and the quality of its images, the outward marks of the patron’s grand intentions for his book. It is also unusual for both the clarity with which it names the patron and the explicit association of the patron with his commission and with its perpetual preservation at his court. These fea-

tures might seem to isolate the Kassel manuscript from other contemporary productions. This first impression is deceptive, however, for rich comparative material allows the study of Heinrich’s book in wide-ranging contexts that cannot often be identified for other medieval manuscripts. On the one hand, earlier commissions for the Hessian landgraves and documents that record their political, religious, and familial concerns allow a clear definition of the family’s Kunstpolitik and enable an understanding of the Kassel manuscript in the setting for which it was produced. On the other hand, several other nearly contemporary Willehalm manuscripts, some with lengthy illumination cycles of their own, permit closer analysis of the special features of Heinrich’s codex. Yet none of the Willehalm manuscripts that predate the production of the Kassel codex in 1334 were made for known patrons; thus the contexts for their commission and use remain obscure.

While the Kassel Willehalm manuscript still presents itself as the striking object that Heinrich intended, it has in addition the potential to illuminate the production and function of works of art at small courts in late medieval Germany.

IO

Notes

Notes to Introduction

1. The folios have been trimmed and vary slightly in Kunstwissenschaftliche Beitrage August Schmarsow gewidmet, ed.

size from 40.8 to 41.3 cm in length and from 28.5 to 29 Heinrich Weizsacker, Kunstgeschichtliche Monographien, cm in width. After the manuscript’s return to Kassel in 1. Betheft, Leipzig, 1907, 73-94; Ernst Berger, Quellen und } 1972, its previous early-17th-century binding, which is still Technik der Fresko-, Oel- und Tempera-Malerei des Mittelalters preserved at the Landesbibliothek, was replaced with a von der byzantinischen Zeit bis einschliesslich der Erfindung der

wood board binding. Oelmalerei durch die Briider van Eyck, Beitrage zur 2. Peter Jorg Becker, Handschriften und Friihdrucke mittel- Entwicklungsgeschichte der Maltechnik, m1, 2nd ed., 1912;

hochdeutscher Epen: Eneide, Tristrant, Tristan, Evec, Iwein, Parzival, repr. Walluf bei Wiesbaden, 1973, 213—IS. | Willehalm, Jtingerer Titurel, Nibelungenlied und ihre Reproduktion 8. Kautzsch, “Beitrag,” 82. On the text of the full-page und Rezeption im spateren Mittelalter und in der friihen Neuzeit, inscriptions in the Fritzlar manuscripts and the problems

University of Trier, 1976; Wiesbaden, 1977, 102. in using them to localize the Kassel manuscript, see chap. 1. 3. The exceptions to the regular gathering structure are 9. Robert Freyhan, Die Illustrationen zum Casseler in the first and last quires, a quaternion and sexternion Willehalm-Codex: Ein Beispiel englischen Einflusses in der respectively, and in the second quire, which was given an rheinischen Malerei des XIV. Jahrhunderts, Marburg, 1927.

additional folio before the lettering of the text. In her type- 10. Preyhan’s decision to publish not only the images,

script draft of the catalogue entry for this manuscript, but the entire page on which each miniature occurs, in Birgitt Hilberg accurately notes the manuscript’s gathering combination with the use of actual measurements (or very

structure as follows: nearly), allows the reader an excellent feeling for the qual-

: ity of the+ manuscript itself. It also insists on the Iv’ + (vt+r)? 19v7 + (v—2)7?7 + (v—4)?3 + (v—2)73" + ; ;clear

rela-

avs + (y=2)259 rrVv3 + (v3) + v86-+ (yr_2) 396 tionship between the text and the images, although

Freyhan himself plays down the directness of this relationThis information does not appear in the final, published ver- ship (Ilustrationen, 13), and reinforces the importance of the

sion of the catalogue (Hartmut Broszinski, Kasseler illuminated book as a Gesamtkunstwerk where these two Handschriftenschatze, Kassel, 1985). 1 would like to thank Dr. _ elements work together complementing and completing

Broszinski for sharing the typescript with me before its pub- one another. .

lication. 11. For another, related example of the tendency to For a more detailed examination of the manuscript’s legitimize the creation of an elegant Gothic style in codicology, including the location of folios removed after Germany by relating it directly to foreign models, see

the writing of the text, see Appendix m1. , Richard Hamann, Die Elisabethkirche zu Marburg und ihre 4. The introductory initial at the beginning of the man- kiinstlerische Nachfolge, 11: Die Plastik, Denkmaler der uscript occupies seven lines; those planned for folio 7or and deutschen Kunst, 2. Sektion: Plastik, Marburg, 19209.

folio 163v were allowed eight and six lines respectively. The scholars who identify the Kassel codex as a local, 5. A later artist working about 1400 eventually finished Hessian product include: Kurt Steinbart in Robert the first four miniatures left incomplete (fols. 3or—33v) in Freyhan, Kurt Steinbart, and Hermann Deckert, Religidse the original campaign of decoration (Figs. 31—34).There is Kunst aus Hessen und Nassau: Kritischer Gesamtkatalog der every reason to believe that he found these images in the Ausstellung Marburg 1928, exh. cat., Marburg, 1932, 109, 112;

, same state as the other incomplete illuminations in the Alfred Stange, Deutsche Malerei der Gotik, 1: Die Zeit von 1250 fourth quire (fols. 35r—38v), with underdrawing defining bis 1350, Berlin, 1934, 86-90; Helmut Reinecke, “Der | the compositions and flat color describing the backgrounds Wandermeister des Kasseler Willehalm,” Wallraf-Richartz and draperies (Figs. 35—39); see Joan A. Holladay, “The Jahrbuch, x, 1938, 43-64; Heinz Keller, “Das Wandgemalde

Willehalm Master and His Colleagues: Collaborative des Fritzlarer Domes und sein Umkreis,” Jahrbuch der Manuscript Decoration in Early-Fourteenth-Century Denkmalpflege im Regierungsbezirk Kassel, 11, 1936, $3—66; Cologne,” in Making the Medieval Manuscript Book: Techniques Heinz Heinrichs, “Die hessische Malerei in der ersten of Production, ed. Linda L. Brownrigg, Proceedings of the Halfte des 14. Jahrhunderts,’ Jahrbuch der Denkmalpflege im Fourth Conference of the Seminar in the History of the Regierungsbezirk Kassel, 1v. Sonderheft, Kassel, 1939. Book to 1500, Oxford, July 1992, Los Altos Hills, Calif., 12. Marie Mollwo, Das Wettinger Graduale: Eine geistliche

1995, 67-69. Bilderfolge vom Meister des Kasseler Willehalmcodex und seinem

6. The identification of these marginal texts as painter’s Nachfolger, Berner Schriften zur Kunst, 1, Bern-Biimpliz, 1944, directions rests on the wording of that on folio 132r: “hi sal chap. 5; Ellen Beer, Beitrige zur oberrheinischen Buchmalerei in der man malen wi Rennewart sine stangen nider leyde . ..” [here ersten Halfte des 14. Jahrhunderts unter besonderer Benticksichtigung

one should paint how Rennewart laid down his staff. . .]. der Initialornamentik, Basel and Stuttgart, 1959, s0o—54; Beer, 7. Hubert Janitschek, Geschichte der deutschen Malerei, “Gotische Buchmalerei,” Zeitschrift _fiir Kunstgeschichte, xxvii,

Geschichte der deutschen Kunst, m1, Berlin, 1890, 180-83; 1965, 136, 146-48; William Wixom, “Twelve Additions to the , Rudolph Kautzsch, “Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Medieval Treasury,’ Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, ix,

Malerei in der ersten Halfte des XIV. Jahrhunderts,” in 1972, 97-99; Gerhard Schmidt, “Die Chorschrankenmalereien

Il

Notes to Introduction des K6lner Domes und die Europaische Malerei,’ Kolner 18. Philipp August Becker, Des Werden der Wilhelm- und

Domblatt, xL1v—XLVv, 1979 —80, 301. der Aimerigeste: Versuch einer neuen Losung, Abhandlungen der Alone among postwar art historians in disputing the Philologisch-Historischen Klasse der Sachsischen Akademie

_ manuscript’s origins in Cologne is Gisela Plotzek- der Wissenschaften, xLiv, 1, Leipzig, 1939, 188—90. Wederhake (“Zur Buchmalerei,’ in Vor Stefan Lochner: Die 19. On the French Guillaume cycle, see Jean Frappier, Kélner Maler von 1300 bis 1430, exh. cat., Cologne, 1974, 61). Les Chansons de geste du cycle de Guillaume d’ Orange, 2 vols.,

She notes the variety of Cologne styles in the first half of Paris, 1955. The 10 chansons that figure in all the cyclical the 14th century but refuses to imagine the Willehalm manuscripts are: Enfances Guillaume, Couronnement Louis,

Codex as one of the products of this city. Charroi de Nimes, Prise d’ Orange, Enfances Vivien, Chevalerie 13. Werner Schroder, “Zum Muiniaturen—Programm der Vivien, Aliscans, Bataille Loquifer, Moniage Rainouart, and Kasseler “‘Willehalm’-Handschrift, 2° Ms poet. et roman. I,” Moniage Guillaume. Marianne Ott-Meimberg cites 24 preZeitschrift fiir deutsches Altertum, CV1, 1977, 213. See also Hella served chansons in the William family (“Karl, Roland, Friihmorgen-Voss, “Mittelhochdeutsche weltliche Literatur Guillaume,” in Epische Stoffe des Mittelalters, ed. Volker

und ihre Illustration: Ein Beitrag zur Uberlieferungs- Mertens and Ulrich Miiller, Kréners Taschenausgabe, geschichte,’ Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fiir Literaturwissenschaft CDLXXXIII, Stuttgart, 1984, 91).

und Geistesgeschichte, XLII, 1969, 45—51. This essay is reprint- 20. Section 3, lines 8—9: “Lantgrave von Duringen

ed in H. Friihmorgen-Voss, Text und Illustration im Herman / tet mir diz maere von im bekant.” Wolfram Mittelalter: Aufsdtze zu den Wechselbeziehungen zwischen names himself in section 4, line 19. All text passages from

Literatur und bildender Kunst, ed. Norbert H. Ott, the Willehalm are cited after the recent critical edition of Miinchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Wolfram’s poem: Wolfram von Eschenbach, Willehalm, ed.

Literatur des Mittelalters, 1, Munich, 1975, I-56. Werner Schréder, Berlin and New York, 1978. For the spe14. Werner Schréder, “Wolfram-Rezeption und cial use of “section,” see chap.1, n.8 below. Wolfram-Verstandnis im 14. Jahrhundert: Zur Faksimile- To my knowledge, only Erich Kleinschmidt suggests that Ausgabe der alteren Wiener Willehalm Handschrift (Cod. Hermann may have provided Wolfram with the French Vindob. 2670),” Euphorion, Lxx, 1976, 258—86; Schroder, source without actually commissioning the German ver“Verlorene Bilderhandschriften von Wolframs ‘Willehalm’,” sion of the poem (“Literarische Rezeption und Geschichte: in Philologische Studien: Gedenkschrift fiir Richard Kienast, Zur Wirkungsgeschichte von Wolframs Willehalm im Germanische Bibliothek: Reihe m, Untersuchungen und Spatmittelalter,’” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fir LiteraturEinzeldarstellungen, Heidelberg, 1978, 9-40; Schroder, “Die wissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, XLVI, 1974, 593).

Illustrationen zu Wolframs ‘Willehalm’ im Cod. Guelf. 30.12 21. Accepted dates vary slightly within these parameters, Aug. Fol.,” in Festschrift der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft an with current consensus dating the work in the second der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main, decade of the 13th century. Joachim Bumke pushes the

Wiesbaden, 1981, 375—98. composition more firmly into the reign of Ludwig even 15. Ronald M. Schmidt, Die Handschriftenillustrationen des though Wolfram does not mention Hermann’s successor by

“Willehalm” Wolframs von Eschenbach: Versuch der name in the text (Wolframs “Willehalm”: Studien zur EpenDokumentation einer illustrierten Handschriftengruppe, University struktur und zum Heiligkeitsbegriff der ausgehenden Bliitezeit,

of Bonn, 1982; Wiesbaden, 1985; Werner Schroder, “Arabel”- Germanische Bibliothek: Reihe m1, Untersuchungen und Studien II: Von der Ankunft Willehalms in Todjerne bis zu Tybalts Einzeldarstellungen, Heidelberg, 1959, chap. 5).

Abschied von Arabel and “Arabel”-Studien II: Arabel und 22. Literary scholars continue to debate whether Willehalm auf west-éstlichem Divan, which appeared, respec- Wolfram left his work unfinished or whether the sudden tively, in the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, ending is deliberate.

Mainz, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissen- 23. Ulrich von Tiirheim, Rennewart, ed. Alfred Hubner,

schaftlichen Klasse, 1983, 1v and 1984, IX. Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters, xxx1x, Berlin, 1938. 16. Schréder’s long-standing interest in the earliest and 24. Meister Ulrich von dem Tiirlin, “Willehalm.” Ein highest quality portion of the text, the Willehalm of Rittergedicht aus der zweiten Halfte des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts,

Wolfram von Eschenbach, accounts for his isolation of this ed. Samuel Singer, Bibliothek der mittelhochdeutschen section in the studies cited in note 14 above. His selection Literatur in BGhmen, rv, Prague, 1893. Text passages are cited of the consecutive passages for the two works cited in note here after Singer’s edition. In the six volumes of the “Arabel’15 also derives from literary concerns: how the epigone Studien listed in the bibliography, Werner Schroder has pubredacts and amplifies the original text. Of more than 200 lished parallel editions of two text versions in installments.

pages in each of these essays, Schréder devotes only 17 to 25. Werner Schroder is responsible for renaming this his documentation of the images in the passages examined. text: Eine Alemannische Bearbeitung der “Arabel” Ulrichs von

17. Philipp August Becker notes the inclusion of fabri- dem Tiirlin, ed. Werner Schroder, Texte und Untercated elements, such as the reconquest of Orange, already in suchungen zur “Willehalm”’-Rezeption, 1, Berlin and New

this Latin vita (Die altfranzésische Wilhelmsage und ihre York, 1981, xi. In earlier scholarship, the preface to Beziehung zu Wilhelm dem Heiligen: Studien tiber das Epos Wolfram’s poem is also entitled Willehalm and distinguished

von Moniage Guillaume, Halle, 1896, 37). from Wolfram’s text by its author’s name alone.

[2

Notes to Introduction 26. Scanning the rubrics and painter’s directions for the 35. Manfred Hellmann, Fiirst, Herrscher und miniatures, recorded in Appendix Iv, gives a closer narrative Fiirstengemeinschaft: Untersuchungen zu ihrer Bedeutung als poli-

overview of the story. tischer [sic] Elemente in mittelhochdeutschen Epen: Annolied27. Scholars agree that Ulrich von dem Tirlin devel- Kaiserchronik-Rolandslied-Herzog Ernst-Wolframs Willehalm, : oped his Arabel text by elaborating on this limited materi- University of Bonn, 1967; Bonn, 1969. The discussion of the

al, rather than by turning to a French source. Willehalm is on pp. 139-243. See also J6rn Reichel, | 28. This is a significant part of the evidence for those “Willehalm und die hdfische Welt,” Euphorion, Lx1x, 1975,

who argue that Wolfram left this text incomplete. 408-9. 29. Eight of the 12 preserved manuscripts of Wolfram’s 36. Norbert H. Ott,““Fypen der Weltchronik-Ikonographie:

Willehalm contain all 3 parts of the trilogy. Of the 67 Bemerkungen zu Illustration, Anspruch und GebrauchsWillehalm fragments known to Schéder in 1978, 8 came situation volkssprachlicher Chronistik aus tiberlieferungs, from manuscripts that originally contained the whole tril- geschichtlicher Sicht,” Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein ogy. This is not a particularly telling figure, however, as Gesellschaft, 1, 1980-81, 34-35. many of the other fragments are single pages or groups of In this context it should be noted that the earliest pre-

consecutive folios from a single section of otherwise lost served illustrated Willehalm (fragments at Munich, manuscripts that could also have contained the entire tril- Staatsbibliothek Cgm 193, m1, and Nuremberg, Germanisches

ogy text. Schroder does not list manuscript fragments that Nationalmuseum, Kupferstichkabinett, Kapsel 1607, Hz preserve only Arabel or Rennewart text passages; these too 1104-1105) uses a mise-en-page otherwise unknown for epic

may have come from codices in which the entire trilogy illumination but typical of the Sachsenspiegel legal texts.

was recorded. Likewise, manuscripts that combine works from two genres : For a descriptive list of the known manuscripts and frag- provide evidence that medieval scribes and patrons saw rela-

ments, see the introduction to Schréder’s edition of the tionships between these different text types. In St. Gall, Willehalm text, xxii—Ixv. His list must be supplemented with Kantonsbibliothek ms 302, for example, the Weltchronik of that in Hiibner’s introduction to his edition of the Rennewart, Rudolf von Ems and Stricker’s Karl are included in a single xi-xvil, and with Betty Bushey’s “Neues Gesamtverzeichnis volume and given illumination cycles that are very similar

der Handschriften der ‘Arabel’ Ulrichs von dem Tiirlin,” in extent and format. Wolfram-Studien, vu, 1982, 228—86. Bushey’s list updates that 37. Priihmorgen-Voss, “Mittelhochdeutsche weltliche

, in Singer’s introduction to his edition of the preface text Literatur,” 48, calls them Fiirstenhandschriften. The other (Meister Ulrich von dem Tiirlin), vii—viii. For the most recent Willehalm manuscript in which the patron is identified is

list of manuscripts and fragments of all three texts, see B. Vienna, Nationalbibliothek ser. nova 2643, completed in | Bushey, “Nachtraige zur ‘Willehalm’-Uberlieferung,” in 1387 for King Wenceslaus of Bohemia. Studien zu Wolfram von Eschenbach: Festschrift ftir Werner Schroder 38. Theodor Ugen and Rudolf Vogel, “Kritische

| zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Kurt Gartner and Joachim Heinzle, Bearbeitung und Darstellung der Geschichte des

Tiibingen, 1989, 359-80. thtiringisch-hessischen Erbfolgekrieges,” Zeitschrift des 30. In spite of the medieval understanding and recording Vereins fiir hessische Geschichte und Landeskunde, xx, n. s. X, | of these texts together, modern literary scholars have insist- 1883, ISI—380.

ed on treating them individually. See, for example, the sep- 39. I use “representational” here in the way in which arate editions cited in notes 20, 23, 24, and 25 above and David Van Zanten has recently introduced the word into the works of Schroder and Schmidt cited in notes 13-15. English-language art historical scholarship (“Nineteenth31. Only 7 of the 70-odd manuscripts and fragments Century French Government Architectural Services and the known to Schréder are dated in the 15th century. Design of the Monuments of Paris,” Art Journal, xtvim, 1989, 32. See, for example, Joseph J. Duggan, “The Medieval 18 and esp. n. 20).Van Zanten refers to symbolic architecture Epic as Popular Historiography: Appropriation of Historical that “represented the political nature of the state’’ This usage, Knowledge in the Vernacular Epic,” in La Littérature histori- which is particularly apposite in a discussion of court patronographique des origines a 1500, 1, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht age, contrasts with the more traditional usage in current

et al., Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des scholarly writing; see W. J.T. Mitchell, “Representation,” in

| Mittelalters x1, 1, Heidelberg, 1986, 304-11. Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and 33. Ibid., 287, and Harvey Stahl, “Old Testament Thomas McLaughlin, Chicago, 1990, 11-22. Both modern Illustration during the Reign of St. Louis: The Morgan French and modern German use the word as proposed here. Picture Book and the New Biblical Cycles,” in Il Medio Cassell’s German-English dictionary, for example, defines Oriente e l’Occidente nell’Arte del XIII Secolo, ed. Hans reprdsentieren as ““to keep up appearances (befitting a posiBelting, Atti del XXIV Congresso C.I.H.A., 0, Bologna, tion).” See also the essays in Hofische Representation: Das

1982, 85—88. Zeremoniell und die Zeichen, ed. Hedda Ragotsky and Horst 34. Karl-Heinz Bender, Konig und Vasall: Untersuchungen Wenzel, Tiibingen, 1990, and, in a specifically art historical zur Chanson de geste des XII. Jahrhunderts, Studia Romanica, context, Robert Suckale, Die Hofkunst Kaiser Ludwigs des

x11, Heidelberg, 1967. See also Ott-Meimberg, “Karl, Bayern, Munich, 1993, 31, 34, and Norbert Ott and Wolfgang

Roland, Guillaume,’ 93—94. Walliczek, “Bildprogramm und Textstruktur: Anmerkungen 13

Notes to Introduction zu den ‘Iwein’-Zyklen auf Rodeneck und in Schmalkalden,’ Kultur: Literatur und Gesellschaft im hohen Mittelalter (2 vols., | in Deutsche Literatur im Mittelalter: Kontakte und Perspektiven. Munich, 1986) hardly treats the role of the visual arts at

Hugo Kuhn zum Gedenken, ed. Christoph Cormeau, these courts.

Stuttgart, 1979, 482, 490. 43. On the landgraves’ commissions as models for those 40. Georg Landau, “Einige Aufklarungen tiber den of other nearby nobles, see Suckale, Hofkunst, 103-4. Theilungsstreit des Landgrafen Heinrich I. von Hessen mit 44. Heinrich demonstrated his genealogical awareness seinen Sohnen,” Zeitschrift des Vereins fiir hessische Geschichte where the connections were even more prestigious. Like und Landeskunde, 1, 1837, 33-42. See also Otto Grotefend _ his father and grandfather before him, he used inscriptions

and Felix Rosenfeld, Regesten der Landgrafen von Hessen, 1: on seals to proclaim his descent from the family saint 1247-1328, Ver6ftentlichungen der historischen Kommission Elizabeth: “abnepotis sanctae elisabethae.” See chap. 3.

fir Hessen und Waldeck, v1, Marburg, 1929, nos. 362, 365, 45. Kleinschmidt notes that the dukes of Brabant

§83a, 717, 721-23. included William of Toulouse in their family tree

4l. In fact, the landgraves’ own ancestor Hermann of (“Literarische Rezeption,’ 644). Heinrich II’s grandfather Thuringia had been a particularly active and astute patron; Heinrich I was a cadet son of the duke of Brabant.

see Joan A. Holladay, “Hermann of Thuringia as Patron of Kleinschmidt correctly observes that the Kassel codex’s | the Arts: A Case Study,’ Journal of Medieval History, xvi, final inscription does not specifically cite Heinrich’s descent

1990, I9I—216. from William, but it does indicate the manuscript’s special 42. Joachim Bumke’s otherwise impressive Héfische attachment to the Hessian house.

14

|,

Patron andpt Manuscri tdM OTH VISUAL AND VERBAL EVIDENCE within the Kassel Willehalm Codex attest

B to Heinrich II’s personal interest in this manuscript. It must have been a source | of pride to its owner, who intended it from the time of its commission to play a central role in the cultural life at his court and in his Kunstpolitik. The richness of the manuscript’s outward appearance, its extensive miniature cycle, and the quality of the painting all reflect the patron’s feelings for this work. Even more striking, however, is the insistent and unusual entrance of the patron into the pages of the codex itself. Secular manuscripts like the Kassel Willehalm only rarely possess marks of ownership,’ yet here Heinrich’s doubled presence effectively frames the text, associating him not only with the book as an object but with the story related in the manuscript’s text. The form of these

notices of ownership—the patron’s image on the frontispiece and the text of the final inscription—helps to illuminate Heinrich’s intentions for this manuscript and his under-

standing of the text it contains. |

| The Owner Image | The first text page (fol. rv) is the most lavishly decorated in the manuscript (Fig. 1). It is the only page structured according to an overall plan: the full-page frame organizes its

| diverse pictorial elements. In a page format frequently used for the openings of secular manucripts, an introductory image precedes the text and is bound to it by the vertical bar

in the left margin and the extension across the bottom of the page. The decorated or figural initial at the opening of the text and the drolerie in the bas-de-page are also characteristic of this basic page design.’ In the upper left quadrant of the page, a framed figure of Christ in Majesty initiates the Kassel manuscript’s illumination cycle. Immediately below this devotional image, Heinrich II, the manuscript’s owner, kneels in the opening letter of the text. Seated on

the lower page frame, in the center of the bas-de-page, a figure of less elevated status, the author of the text, or perhaps a scribe or reader, holds an open book in his lap. The sizes of these images and their placement on the page reflect their relative importance. In the principal image, Christ sits frontally on the rainbow inside a mandorla (detail of Fig. 1). He blesses with his right hand and supports a closed book on his knee with his left. The four beasts of the Apocalypse, each holding a banderole with the name of the Evangelist it represents, hover in the spandrels between the mandorla and the

, 15

Chapter I

architectural structure that constitutes the image’s outer frame. The image is a familiar one and, with minor distinctions, it can be compared with full-page miniatures from early-fourteenth-century Parisian missals and books of hours.3 The selection of a devotional image to introduce a secular text is one of several alternatives for the decoration of this page. Other possibilities, such as a scene or scenes from the text narrative or an image of the author or scribe presenting his work to his patron,‘ fill the same spatial function in the mise-en-page and serve to set off the beginning of the text in a similar way. Each

, choice, however, lends a different meaning to the text. The image of the enthroned Christ not only creates a majestic beginning for the story; it also sets the framework and establishes a mood for reading the text.> This first opening of the book already informs the reader of the religious tone of the story and recalls its part in Christian history. Even before the introduction of the saint or the other characters of the narrative, the text is given a holy setting, placed under the direction of Christ himself: In addition to establishing the tone of the epic, the image of Christ also serves as a guarantee of the authority of the ensuing text. The author and the manuscript’s readers, including Heinrich II, operate with the consent and guidance of the godhead. More concretely, the image of Christ in Majesty illustrates the opening lines of the poem. Like most medieval epics, the Arabel begins with a prologue, which serves the dual function of commending the author’s work to God and the reader and introducing

the story to its audience.° Ulrich von dem Tirlin’s introductory prayer, his praise of God’s name, and his plea for God’s help in the composition of the poem thus find visual expression in this hierarchic introductory image. The image 1s a figural representation of the first text line: “Aller wisheit eyn anevanc” [Of all wisdom a beginning]. Two subsequent text passages give the illuminator fairly explicit, but contradicting, references for the subject of this miniature. Section 1, lines 7-10 make reference to the Trinity (One God and yet three-fold .. .), but the line immediately opposite the image at the top of the right-hand column invokes the traditional image of Christ in Majesty (1, 20): “du lew, da ar, dd mensch, du rint!” [You lion, you eagle, you man, you bull!]’ Although the author addresses God on his own behalf in sections 1—m,* the painted initial directly below the devotional image portrays the patron of this particular man-

uscript kneeling in prayer. The elegant clothing and the arms immediately adjacent identify this figure as a landgrave of Hesse;? the final inscription names him specifically as Heinrich II. In view of the literal recording of the text in the devotional image above and

in the narrative images that follow, the introduction of Heinrich here is surprising. Representations of donors or owners in other manuscripts make Heinrich’s inclusion here seem all the more exceptional: neither his presence nor the means of his portrayal finds an exact parallel in secular codices of this period. Images of the owners of secular manuscripts more often record the author-patron relationship, usually the commission or presentation of the text."° Introductory images to the Mort Artu portray King Henry II directing Walter Map to write the text and, in a collection of poems by Adenet-le-Roi for Marie de Brabant, the poet sings to the queen and members of her court (Paris, Bibliothéque de |’Arsenal Ms 3142, fol. 1; Fig. 65). In 16

Patron and Manuscript

these images the patron and the author occupy a single space and share the same scale. The image describes specific circumstances surrounding this particular text; it records a real or hypothetical action at a fixed point in historical time.’ The interaction between the fig-

ures requires the use of the larger space, the introductory image above the opening initial. The frontispiece image of the Kassel manuscript departs from this pictorial formula in both iconography and arrangement. It dispenses with the historical circumstances of the manuscript’s commission and places Heinrich in a direct relationship to the words of the text rather than to the closed book as a material object. This position 1s typically reserved

for the author; in the manuscript of Adenet’s poems, the crown that plays on the poet’s epithet identifies the figure in the initial as the author himself."3 His placement here directly and permanently associates him with the text; his words literally issue from him.

A group of devotional manuscripts made for ladies of the French court in the second quarter of the fourteenth century also reserve the initial space for the source from which the words flow. In the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux, made for the wife of Charles IV between 1325 and 1328, and in related manuscripts for Jeanne de Navarre , and Jeanne de Savoie, the manuscript’s owner kneels in the introductory text initial below , a religious scene in larger scale (Fig. 66). The arrangement of devotional image, owner, bas-de-page, and text is analogous to that in the Kassel frontispiece.

In these devotional codices where the owner occupies the space at the begin- | ning of the text, the image emphasizes the manuscript’s intended audience or owner and his or her use of the finished work. Jeanne d’Evreux kneels at a prie-dieu saying her devotions from the very manuscript in which her image appears. The words of the text that the initial introduces are the prayers that she intones: “Domine labia mea aperies”’ [Lord, open my lips]. The use of this image type in a secular manuscript like the Kassel codex amplifies the more typical meanings of the introductory owner portrait by reference to religious manuscripts, where images of this type more frequently occur. Heinrich, like Jeanne d’Evreux, kneels in perpetual devotion, offering his prayers for all eternity to the vision of Christ above his head. Heinrich’s participation in and reaction to an image that illustrates the text also associate him convincingly with the story itself. The owner image _ encourages the viewer to understand Heinrich not only in the context of this codex, as its owner, but also in the context of this story, as a latter-day prince on the model of the story’s hero. As Willehalm himself turns to God for guidance in the conduct of his life, so too does Heinrich II. Finally, the image type suggests that Heinrich bears direct personal responsibility for the story that follows. The other known inclusions of historical figures at the beginning of a text link them personally—either as author or reader—to the

| words that follow. Although Heinrich does not hold the codex, the words of the text issue from his image and are thus provided with his personal authority. Heinrich’s clothing further connects the patron of the manuscript to the hero of the epic. Since fourteenth-century illuminations typically portray the characters of the story in contemporary costume, Heinrich closely resembles the figures in the narrative miniatures. Unlike some English and French miniatures, in which the manuscript’s

, 17

Chapter I

| owner wears a mantle bearing the family coat of arms, Heinrich wears a mantle in miparti. His pink and orange robes correspond in color to those that Willehalm wears in the scene of the brothers’ departure from their father on folio 6v (Fig. 5). This is one of the critical moments in the unfolding of the story, a crucial event on which the rest of the narrative depends. Furthermore, this miniature makes visible the immediate effects of Count Heinrich’s disinheritance of his sons. Heinrich II’s likeness to the figure of the hero in this scene may deliberately call to mind the parallels between patron and hero. Heinrich is not only portrayed with the same piety that sustains the story’s hero, but he may also be intentionally associated with a particularly potent moment of the story: the father driving away his sons.” The Kassel Willehalm Codex also devotes a second area at the beginning of the manuscript to the identification and definition of the manuscript’s patron. Instead of occupying the initial at the beginning of the text, the owner or patron of some religious manuscripts floats in the margin outside the page border, kneeling, hands raised in prayer (Fig. 67).'7 He or she pays homage to the devotional image, which now fills the initial. The removal of the patron from the tight net of the inner page structure emphasizes the hierarchic inequality between earthly figure and heavenly scene. In the Kassel codex, however, not the patron himself but his shield and helmet occupy the marginal space near the introductory image. This effectively doubles the space devoted to the owner’s likeness: Heinrich’s presence fills both the initial space and the neighboring margin. While a shield with the donor’s coat of arms in the margin near the introductory initial is not unprecedented, its placement here is unusual in three respects. First, the shield is large in scale and dramatically staged. Second, I know of no other case that combines the

image of the owner with the shield in this emphatic way at the beginning of the text. Finally, the shield in this position is not simply a heraldic emblem but a functional object from the ceremonial trappings of the knight. Together, these three aspects extend the shield’s importance beyond the identification of the owner to carry additional meanings. Shields identifying manuscript patrons appear most frequently in page frames. In the Hours of Yolande de Soissons, for example, some four hundred shields bearing coats of arms fill the bosses marking the four corners of the page frames." The half bosses at the midpoints of the frames’ vertical sides often receive similar treatment. In the Grey-Fitzpayn Hours, a vertical row of heraldic shields closes the right margin of the bar border of folio 3r (Fig. 67). In addition to this structural and decorative role on the page, shields with arms also appear in secondary areas of the page inside or outside the frame. In the Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg, for example, numerous bas-de-page center

on the owner’s shield supported by symmetrically arranged beasts that reinforce its heraldic qualities.’? In the Savoy Hours and the Metz Pontifical, shields bearing coats of arms also replace foliate motifs in decorated initials.*° Closer in placement to Heinrich II’s shield on the first folio of the Willehalm Codex are two shields that decorate the begin-

ning lines of the text on folio Ir of a Miscellany dated 1323 (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 20; Fig. 68). Directly opposite one another, one occupies the marginal position equivalent to that of Heinrich’s shield in the Willehalm Codex, while the other fills

18

Patron and Manuscript | the space between the two text columns. Both are placed exactly upright. Although the

, shields in each of these manuscripts identify the original owner of the codex, they are not visually associated with his or her image. The owner’s presence in the book, unless his or

her image appears elsewhere, remains abstract. | While the arms on Heinrich’s shield adequately identify him as a member of the Hessian landgraves’ family,** the combination of the shield with the helmet makes the marginal image more forceful. First, it provides additional space for two more representations of the landgrave’s coat of arms. On both ends of the lambrequin draping the hel-

met, the red-and-white striped lion emerges from the solid blue background.” In , addition, associating the shield with the helmet marks it as a functional and ceremonial object rather than an abstract identifying device. As functional objects, the shield and helmet define and record Heinrich’s social and political roles. Here the Grofie Heidelberger Liederhandschrift (Heidelberg, Universitatsbibliothek ms pal. germ. lat. 848) helps in under- _

standing the use of the Kassel arms. In most images of this manuscript, the poet is iden-

tified by a shield and helmet floating separately in the upper corners of the image, inside , the page frame. In a few of the images, where the layout leaves significantly more room _~ in one of the upper corners, the arrangement of the two pieces of armor is similar or identical to that in the Willehalm Codex.?3 However, in the Liederhandschrift images where

the poet wears his helmet and carries his shield, these objects are not duplicated in the upper reaches of the illumination. Each author’s helmet and shield appear only once; where they serve as functional objects, they do not recur as abstract heraldic emblems. The two parts of the owner image now define the patron’s place in society. The ceremonial helmet and shield in the margin portray him as a knight; his pious attitude in the initial paints him as a Christian. The first folio thus presents Heinrich as the ideal of Christian Knighthood, a fourteenth-century parallel to the hero and title figure of the text. In fact, this dual religious and secular role is summarized one last time at the end of the codex. The closing inscription dedicates the manuscript “to Saint William Marquis,” highlighting in the book’s subject the same dual role expressed in the patron portrait. The patron portrait, then, not only marks the owner in a prominent way at the beginning of his manuscript, but it inserts him into the narrative and defines him in terms of the Christian and knightly ideals it describes. The interjection of Heinrich II’s image into the introductory initial usurps the space frequently reserved in secular manuscripts for the author or scribe and destroys the characteristic visual relationship of the author to his text. On folio Iv of the Kassel

a 19 codex, however, the bas-de-page recalls this relationship (Fig. 1). A man in modest dress sits

in front of a reading stand, which supports a closed codex. In his lap he holds a second book, this one opened, and with the index finger of his right hand he points to the first words of the text: “Aller wisheit eyn anevanc,”’ the beginning lines of the Arabel text inscribed near Heinrich’s image above. This is therefore the very text under consideration,

perhaps the very codex the reader is holding. ,

The exact identity of this figure remains obscure although three possibilities pre-

sent themselves. It may represent the author Ulrich von dem Tiirlin and thus reinstate the ,

Chapter I

author-text relationship frequently found on the introductory pages of secular manuscripts.*4 It would also then complete the author—audience—work triangle implicitly sig-

naled in the Arabel’s prologue and in all epic prologues of this type. The tiny bas-de-page figure may also represent the scribe responsible for copying the text and perhaps for designing the codex as a whole. Unlike most scribes, however, he does not hold a quill or scraper. The pointing gesture of his right forefinger suggests that he represents a reader, who sounds out the words of the text for an audience of animals.A dog, a bird, and a hare listen attentively while two monkeys provide musical accompaniment.”> Whoever this man represents, his use of the text contrasts vividly with Heinrich’s. Whereas Heinrich is placed in an unmediated and unusually personal relationship to the text and reacts fervently to its words and the images it conjures up, the reader in the bas-de-page vocalizes the text in a public context as courtly entertainment. These images may well reflect the varied uses of the codex at Heinrich’s court.”° The overall page scheme marks Heinrich as the primary audience. He displaces the author from the traditional location at the beginning of the text, so that he is second to no one in his explicit devotion to the knightly and Christian ideals expressed in the book. Furthermore, his image occupies both the initial and the nearby marginal space,

creating an important two-part identity that corresponds to that of the hero. His posture of adoration records and eternalizes the homage paid to the epic’s hero in his commission of this manuscript.

The Final Inscription The manuscript’ frontispiece has a pendant on folio 395v, where the full-page inscription explains the circumstances of the manuscript’s commission (Fig. 64):

Anno domini millesimo trecentesimo tricesimo quarto. illustris princeps henricus lantgravius. terre hassie dominus volumen istud in honore sancti wilhelmi marchionis scribi fecit a sua curia nunquam alienandum.sed apud suos heredes perpetuo permanendum”? [In the year of our Lord one thousand three hundred thirty-four the illustri-

: ous prince Heinrich, landgrave, lord of the land of Hesse, had this volume written in honor of Saint William Marquis. It is under no circumstances to be removed from his court, but to remain forever with his heirs. | 20

Patron and Manuscript

In view of the relative scarcity of marks of ownership in secular codices at this date, this inscription provides vivid testimony of Heinrich II’s interest in this codex and the story it contains. The full-page form and the explicit contents of its text strengthen and recall the patron’s forceful presence on the frontispiece and leave the reader at the end of the manuscript with an impression of the manuscript’s patron as well as of its hero. Until now scholars have used the inscription only to date and localize the manuscript and its decoration. The naming of Landgrave Heinrich as the manuscript’s patron

and the 1334 date allow us to identify the specific family member represented with the arms of Hesse on the frontispiece. Since 1907 the form and text of the inscription have also been used to suggest the manuscript’s place of origin. Rudolf Kautzsch first likened the inscription to those in several manuscripts from nearby Fritzlar, noting their similar full-page form, use of large Gothic minuscule, and wording (Fig. 69).*° Since the two theological manuscripts were made for ecclesiastics at Fritzlar and entered the Hessian state collections from the library of the collegiate church there, Kautzsch hypothesized

their fabrication in that city and localized the production of Heinrich II’s Willehalm Codex there as well. His theory of the Kassel manuscript’s origins found a significant following in the first half of this century, with scholars supporting the execution of the images in Fritzlar itself or elsewhere in Hesse.” Recent scholarship has evaluated the Willehalm Codex’s final inscription more

cautiously. In the draft of her entry on the manuscript for the catalogue of the Landesbibliothek’s manuscript treasures published in 1985, Birgitt Hilberg noted that the manuscript’s careful preparation indicates a highly qualified professional scriptorium and that, in the surrounding region, only the collegiate foundation of St. Peter’s in Fritzlar fits this description. Although she correctly insisted on this idea as a hypothesis only, she raised the possibility that the landgrave might have intended his commission of the text in Fritzlar as a goodwill gesture, an attempt to normalize relations with one of the most important strongholds of the archbishop of Mainz in the wars that had raged until 1328.3° In a study of the canons of Fritzlar also published in 1985, Karl Demandt notes connec-

tions to the Hessian landgraves without specifically localizing the production of the

manuscript. Documents attest to the service of Fritzlar canons at the court of Hesse | throughout the period under discussion. Records of 1332 name Bertram von Wolfheim as magister of Heinrich II’s younger brothers and Wasmud von Homberg as a notarius. In 1333 Wasmud is called prothonotarius; Bertram succeeded him before April 1354.

| Although canons from Fritzlar may have advised Heinrich on the production of his manuscript or may even have copied it at Heinrich’s court, several factors militate against the use of the final inscription as a basis for localizing the manuscript’s production.

Although the inscription in the Willehalm Codex occupies a folio integral to the final quire, it is impossible to say whether the text was added at the same time or place as either the copying of the epic or the painting of the miniatures. Heinrich may have sent the manuscript or perhaps just the final quire to Fritzlar for the addition of the inscription. It is also possible that Heinrich conceived the text of the final inscription along the lines of those seen or heard of in Fritzlar manuscripts but had it entered into his 21

Chapter I codex by scribes located elsewhere. Slight changes in the wording of Heinrich’s inscription, its removal to the manuscript’s final folio, and differences in scribal hands separate the final text in the Willehalm Codex from the notations of ownership in the Fritzlar manuscripts.?? Furthermore, priority of date between the inscriptions in the Fritzlar manu-

scripts and that in the Willehalm Codex cannot be securely established. The earliest preserved owner notation in a Fritzlar manuscript dates from 1334, exactly the same year as the Willehalm Codex. Instead of the Fritzlar theological manuscripts influencing the conception of the Kassel codex’s owner notice, the possibility should at least be consid-

ered that Heinrich’s inscription became known in the nearby monastic scriptorium, whose scribes repeated and varied its formula in a number of uses over the next hundred years. Finally, no firm evidence supports the existence of a scriptor1um—much less an illumination atelier—in Fritzlar at this time, and it remains only a hypothesis that scribes in that city produced manuscripts for local clerics. Thus the final inscription in the Kassel Willehalm Codex yields no conclusive evidence about the manuscript’s place of origin. However, its full-page form, the wording of its text, and the complementary relationship to the owner’s visible presence on

the codex’s first folio do provide important information about Heinrich II’s understanding of his commission and about his intentions for this book. Verbal notations identifying a manuscript’s original owner usually take the form of short texts, squeezed into a free margin or included in the empty space left on the final text page. In the Psalter of Robert de Lisle, for example, the owner has recorded his wishes for the book on the November page in the calendar: Joe Robert de lyle donay cest lyvere sus cest jour en lan nostre signour mil CCCXXXIX a ma fille audere ove ma beneyssoun. Et apres soen deses a alborou sa soer et issy de soer en soer taunk come ascune de eles vyvont. Et apres remeyne a touz jours a les dames de chegesaundes. Escrit de ma meyn.

[I Robert de Lyle give this book on this day in the year of our Lord 1339 to my daughter Audere with my blessing. And after her death to Alborou her sister and so from sister to sister as long as any of them lives. And afterward it will remain forever with the ladies (nuns) of Cheqesaundes. Written in my hand.]

The text begins after the entry of Saint Katherine’s name on November 25 and terminates with a few cramped lines in the right margin. A professional hand has copied a nearly identical text into the lower margin of the December page.*4 Scribes also appended owner notations to the end of the text, often without change from the format and spacing used for the text itself. These explicits often link the owner’s name with that of the scribe. On the final inscribed folio of a Golden Legend illuminated by a Cologne shop in 1324, this information continues in the left column after the end of the text proper: 22

Patron and Manuscript

Explicit Legenda sanctorum sive Summa Lumbardica scripta per Thilmannum de are. Anno domini millesimo trecentesimo vicesimo Quarto Frater iohannes de Dusburg sacerdos domus Theutonice beate Katharine in Colonia Istud Passionale fecit conscribi ad honorem domini Jesu Christi genitricisque dei virginis gloriose beate Katherine et Omnium sanctorum ut cum eisdem consortium in celo mereatur habere et vitam eternam possidere in secula seculaorum Amen. .. .*

[The end of the Legend of the saints or the Lombard summa written by Tilmann von Are. In the year of the Lord one thousand three hundred twenty-four Brother Johannes von Dusburg, priest of the Teutonic house

St. Katherine in Cologne, had this passional written in honor of our Lord , a Jesus Christ and the mother of God and the glorious virgin Saint Katherine and all saints in order that he might deserve their society in heaven and possess eternal life for all eternity. Amen. . . .]

The right-hand column on this page and the final two folios of the manuscript are blank.° Likewise, in the lavishly illuminated Willehalm trilogy written for King Wenceslaus in 1387, the patron notice is attached at the end of the text.”’ Heinrich’s notice of ownership differs sharply from these. Its full-page form and large ceremonial lettering give it an obvious importance, a self-proclaiming pride that

contrasts with the reticence of the more typical smaller formats. It is no surprise to dis-

cover that, apart from the parallels in religious manuscripts from Fritzlar, the notice of , ownership most closely comparable to Heinrich’s in form exists in a luxurious manuscript

for a royal patron. On folio iv of the Bible of Jean de Vaudetar, opposite the large presentation miniature, the dedication text uses the same full-page form and ceremonial lettering as that in Heinrich’s codex: Anno domini millesimo

trecentisimo septuagesimo- ,

primo istud opus pictum fuit ad preceptum ac honorem illustri(s) principis karoli regis francie

etatis sue trecesimoquinto et |

| regni sue octavo. et johannes - de brugis pictor regis predicti fecit hanc picturam propria

sua manu.** [In the year of the Lord one thousand three hundred seventy~one, this work was illustrated at the behest and in honor of the illustrious prince Charles, King of France, at the age of thirty-five and in the eighth year of his reign, and Jean de Bruges, the well-known painter of the king, made

this picture with his own hand.]| , 23

Chapter I

The full-page form of the dedicatory text provides a visual counterpart to the introduc-

, tory miniature whose large scale and monumental conception anticipate panel painting.

| In Heinrich II’s manuscript, the wording of the text matches its monumental, self-assured form, again revealing some of Heinrich’s feelings for this manuscript and a

sense of its importance at his court. As seen in the examples above, the opening of such | notices with the date is commonplace. Like the introductory miniature on folio rv, the , first words of the inscription provide both a temporal and a spiritual setting for the undertaking. The following formula, “Prince Heinrich had this volume written in honor of Saint William,” is also unremarkable, but the number and assortment of titles are over-

powering and worthy of deeper investigation, as is the final command. | The inscription labels Heinrich with three sets of titles: “illustris princeps henricus lantgravius terre hassie dominus.” The use of titles both before and after the name and the introduction of the patron with the label “illustrious prince” have analogues in the slightly later Bible of Jean de Vaudetar, whose inscription page resembles Heinrich’s so closely in form. After Heinrich’s name, the titles that refer to his territorial holdings are emphasized, stretched out to note separately his political or legal rank and his territorial dominion. This double title, “landgrave, lord of the land of Hesse,’ mirrors the legal for-

mulas used in documents of the time. Whether in Latin or German, Heinrich’s documents regularly label him in exactly this fashion.3? Legal documents also provide parallels for the use of all three titles together. In a document of 1329 recording a dona-

tion to the house of the Teutonic Order at Marburg, Heinrich’s aunt refers to both Heinrich II and his grandfather of the same name as “illustris principis henrici lantgravu, terre hassie domini.’’4° The reuse of this formula in the final inscription serves two purposes: it lends a legal tone to the text, thereby giving an official quality to the patron’s wish for the book’s future, and it glorifies the patron in a way that would be unseemly in the first person. Yet the wording allows little doubt that this text was added at his behest. The inscription also labels Willehalm both before and after his name: “sancti wilhelmi marchionis.” While maintaining the rhythm of the patron’s titles and thus providing a loose link between the patron of the manuscript and its subject, the double title for Willehalm also emphasizes his dual role in the text and indeed the dual nature and or1gins of the text itself. This wording gives the saintly and noble roles of the hero equal stress; it reminds the reader that the text is both a saint’s vita and a record of political history. It is doubly true and doubly significant. The twofold understanding of Willehalm’s

role in the Kassel codex contrasts with the use of a single reference in two other fourteenth-century Willehalm manuscripts. In the Vienna manuscript dated 1320, a short text introducing the epic proper begins: “Ditz ist sand Wilhalms puech” [This is Saint William’s book].“ By contrast, the final text of the manuscript made for Wenceslaus of Bohemia in 1387 refers to the hero only as a worldly prince: “marchio Wilhelmus illustrissimo principi et domino” [Marquis William most illustrious prince and lord].4* The more subtle understanding of the hero’s dual nature in the Kassel manuscript must relate to Heinrich’s

interest in both this text and this codex. .

Resemblances between the story—especially the first, illuminated section—and

24

Patron and Manuscript

recent family history may help to account for at least part of Heinrich’s interest in the story of Willehalm’s life. Issues of undeserved disinheritance, filial expectations, and feu-

dal duties, the secular themes from the youth of Willehalm the marquis, were of para- , mount importance to Heinrich in the early years of his own reign.*? Willehalm the saint also provided a powerful attraction for the landgrave, for Heinrich understood himself to

, be descended from this holy man.*+ Family saints were important associative figures, promising both distinction and intercession to their descendants. The Hessian landgraves’ awareness of these ideas can be seen in their manipulation of their most famous and most recent family saint. They located the family necropolis strategically opposite the site of Saint Elizabeth’s tomb in her burial church in Marburg, and seals of family members marked the degree of descent from the saint as late as the end of the four-

teenth century.*° ,

A similar kind of interest in Willehalm as both a historical and a holy figure must have prompted the command at the end of Heinrich’s final inscription. The final clause admonishes the reader and the owner never to remove the book from the landgrave’s court but to leave it forever with his heirs. The two-part, almost repetitive nature of the - warning gives it a certain urgency and underlines the importance of the manuscript and its contents to the patron. It also suggests the intended prominence of the manuscript in the family’s future. The mention of Heinrich’s heirs projects the existence of Heinrich’s family and the landgraves’ court into the indefinite future, indeed into eternity. This stress on family continuity, from the sainted ancestor Willehalm through Heinrich II into the future, parallels emphases in the first series of miniatures illuminating the narrative. Here again in the final inscription, Heinrich insists on the permanence of the family’s lineage and the continued possession of its rightful property, including this precious codex. The contrast between Heinrich’s intentions for his codex and those that Robert

DeLisle recorded in his psalter five years later is instructive.*”? Like Heinrich, DeLisle , notes the importance of family in his instruction that the book be passed from one daughter to the other “‘and so from sister to sister.’ He also thinks it appropriate to decree |

the book’s location for all eternity: “it will remain forever with the ladies of | Chequesaundes.” Unlike Heinrich, however, DeLisle neither takes responsibility for com| mussioning the psalter nor does he link the psalter with his family in perpetuity. He estab-

lishes no connection between the book’s contents and the family’s future; his manuscript is a possession acquired in an unspecified way and disposed of like any other piece of

valuable property. | SEVERAL OF THE IDEAS expressed in the final inscription of Heinrich’s Willehalm

Codex recall the visual statements of the frontispiece. Both the form of the frontispiece , image and the inscriptional reference to the hero express the dual religious-secular, or pious-courtly, nature of the text. Both notices of ownership document Heinrich’s per-

sonal connection to the book and its contents. The emphatic nature of Heinrich’s pres- |

ence in both the introductory image and the final inscription goes beyond a straightforward indication of commission or ownership to create an active relationship of

25

Chapter I

the patron to the codex he commissioned. In the inscription this is clear enough: Heinrich pays tribute to the saint in commissioning this volume in his honor. Heinrich also pays homage at the beginning of the text, where he kneels beneath the image of Christ in Majesty. His placement here, in the position more often reserved for the author, gives him a responsibility for the words that follow. They are the result of his choice, of his commission, and the honor that he pays to them visibly here reflects the homage paid to the hero in choosing to record his story. The doubling of these notices of ownership and their repetition of parallel themes effectively frame the text with the owner’s presence. His image opens and closes the codex; his presence introduces and completes the text. They also stress the eternal quality of this association, the importance of this codex for Heinrich’s heirs forever. Heinrich’s descendants clearly understood this message and the book’s importance. A short-lived attempt

about 1400 to resume progress on the interrupted illumination cycle attests to ongoing appreciation of the book (Figs. 31-34). More importantly, the fate of the manuscript followed Heinrich’s wishes exactly. It remained in the possession of his heirs until its transfer

to the Hessian State Library, presumably at the time of its foundation by Landgrave Wilhelm IV in 1580.4 It seems unlikely that this was the only manuscript the family possessed, but it is the only one that can be firmly assigned to the landgraves’ library at this date and the only one that escaped whatever fate befell the other family books.49 Whether Heinrich’s descendants understood the specific message that made this manuscript so important to Heinrich is open to debate, but the patron’s personal pride in this manuscript and his sense of its significance descended to his heirs with the codex itself.

26 ,

, Notes

Notes to Chapter I

1. Of thirty-seven 13th- and 14th-century manuscripts Schiilern, ed. Otmar Werner and Bernd Naumann,

studied by Peter Jorg Becker (Handschriften und Friihdrucke Goppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, xxv, Goppingen, mittelhochdeutscher Epen: Eneide, Tristrant, Tristan, Erec, Iwein, 1970, 23-37.

Parzival, Willehalm, Jiingerer Titurel, Nibelungenlied und ihre 7. An image on folio 28v of the Grey-Fitzpayn Hours, Reproduktion und Rezeption im spateren Mittelalter und in der Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum ms 242, combines the friihen Neuzeit, University of Trier, 1976; Wiesbaden, 1977), Trinity with the Evangelist symbols that more typically only four have owner notices contemporary with the pro- accompany the Christ in Majesty. Ill. in Philippe Verdier,

duction of the manuscript. Of these four, one is the Kassel Peter Brieger, and Marie Montpetit, Art and the Courts: Willehalm and one is King Wenceslaus’s 1387 copy of the France and England from 1259 to 1328, exh. cat., 1, Ottawa, same text. In some cases, medieval manuscripts would orig- 1972, pl. so. For the special use of “section,” see note 8

inally have born coats of arms identifying the patron or below. first owner on their covers or clasps, but these have disap- 8. The Arabel and Willehalm texts are regularly divided

| , peared in subsequent rebindings. See, for example, several into text sections of 31 lines and 30 lines respectively. books from the collections of Jeanne d’Evreux, listed in the German authors refer to these as Dreifiger, which accounts

library inventories of Charles V and his heirs (Léopold for the form without addressing the issue of content. Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, u1, Paris, 1907, Literary scholars writing in English do not uniformly use

NOS. 47, 153, 164, 188, 338 bis). an equivalent term. Marion E. Gibbs and Sidney M. , 2. For examples of this page structure used at the open- Johnson, in their “Second Introduction” to the English ing of secular texts, see Karen Gould, The Psalter and Hours translation of the Willehalm (Harmondsworth, 1984) call of Yolande de Soissons, Speculum Anniversary Monographs, the text divisions “paragraphs” (in quotes, p. 234) or “secIv, Cambridge, Mass., 1978, fig. 58 (Histoire du Graal, Paris, tions” (p. 261), noting that they “are clearly not stanzas and Bibl. Nat. fr. 95, fol. 1r); Roger Sherman Loomis in collab- new topics often begin in the middle of a ‘paragraph’ or oration with Laura Hibbard Loomis, Arthurian Legends in elsewhere” (p. 234). For lack of a better term, I shall use

Medieval Art, Modern Language Association of America “section” to designate these 30- or 31-line divisions. The | Monograph Series, London, 1938, fig. 217 (Arthurian cycle, Rennewart text 1s not regularly divided.

Bonn, Universitatsbibliothek Ms 526, fol. Ir) and fig. 240 9. Marie Mollwo is alone in her hesitation over this fig(Mort Artu, Manchester, John Rylands Library Ms Fr. 2 , fol. ure’s identification (Das Wettinger Graduale: Eine geistliche 212); and Les Fastes du gothique: le siecle de Charles V, Paris, Bilderfolge vom Meister des Kasseler Willehalmcodex und seinem

~ 1981, no. 249 (Roman de la rose, Tournai, Bibhothéque de la Nachfolger, Berner Schriften zur Kunst, 1, Bern-Biimpliz,

Ville ms rot, fol. sr). 1944, 26). Although she notices the man’s “elegant” dress, 3. For example, in two Parisian missals, Paris, Bibl. Nat. she leaves open the possibility that he might represent the lat. 861, fol. 148r, and London, Brit. Lib. Harley 2891, fol. author. However, the fur-lined robes and especially the

- 146r. Ill. in Joan Diamond, “Manufacture and Market in emphatic juxtaposition of the Hessian arms preclude this Parisian Book Illumination around 1300,” in Europdische identification. Kunst um 1300, ed. Gerhard Schmidt, Akten des XXV. 10. A full study of dedication and presentation minia- ; Internationalen Kongresses ftir Kunstgeschichte, v1, Vienna, tures for the Gothic period is much needed, although a

1986, figs. 61-62. recent dissertation catalogues some of this material: Evelyn 4. See the examples cited in note 2 above. Benesch, “Dedikations- und Prasentationsminiaturen in der 5. On the various functions of frontispiece images, see Pariser Buchmalerei vom spaten 13. bis zum friihen 15. Martine Dauzier, “LImage-porche ou la premiére page Jahrhundert,” University of Vienna, 1987. See also Eva enluminée dans les romans médiévaux,” in From Sign to Lachner’s entries ““Dedikationsbild” and “Devotionsbild” in Text: A Semiotic View of Communication, ed. Yishai Tobin, the Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, m1, Stuttgart, Foundations of Semiotics, xx, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1954, cols. 1189—97 and cols. 1367-73, and Lucy Freeman

1989, $09—18. Sandler, “The Image of the Book-owner in the Fourteenth 6. On the function and forms of the medieval epic’s Century:Three Cases of Self-Definition,’ in England in the

prologue, see Hennig Brinkmann, “Der Prolog im Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Mittelalter als literarische Erscheinung,” Wirkendes Wort, Symposium, ed. Nicholas Rogers, Harlaxton Medieval XIV, 1964, I-21; Peter Kobbe, “Funktion und Gestalt des Studies, m1, Stamford, 1993, 58-80. Helpful for earlier periPrologs in der mittelhochdeutschen nachklassischen Epik ods are the works of Joachim Prochno (Das Schreiber- und

des 13. Jahrhunderts,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fiir Dedikationsbild in der deutschen Buchmalerei, 1, Die Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, XLIl, 1969, 405-57; Entwicklung des menschlichen Bildnisses, 1, Leipzig and |

. and Bernd Naumann, “Vorstudien zu einer Darstellung des Berlin, 1929) and Sigfrid Heinrich Steinberg and Christine Prologs in der deutschen Dichtung des XH. und XIII. Steinberg-von Pape (Die Bildnisse geistlicher und weltlicher Jahrhunderts,” in Formen mittelalterlicher Literatur Siegfried Fiirsten und Herren, 1: Von der Mitte des 10. bis zum Ende des Beyschlag zu seinem 65. Geburtstag von Kollegen, Freunden und 12. Jahrhunderts (950-1200), Die Entwicklung des men-

27

Notes to Chapter I schlichen Bildnisses, m1, Leipzig and Berlin, 1931). The detached from them. See P. Blanchard, Les Heures de Savoie, planned second volumes to both of these works, which London, 1910, pls. 5, 6, 17. The same is true of the shields in

: would have treated the period under discussion here, were initials in the Metz Pontifical (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam

never published. Museum ms 298). Where initials containing shields occur .

11. See Loomis, Arthurian Legends, figs. 240~—41. on pages with framed images, they are rarely attached to the 12. Presentation images, like those in the slightly later images and therefore bear no forceful visual relation to any manuscripts of Charles V, constitute variations on this type. specific figure in the miniatures. See Edward S. Dewick, The See the examples illustrated in Claire Richter Sherman, Metz Pontifical: A Manuscript Written for Reinhald de Bar, Bishop The Portraits of Charles V of France (1338-1380), Monographs of Metz (1302-1316) and now belonging to Sir Thomas Brooke,

on Archaeology and the Fine Arts sponsored by the London, 1902, pls. 10, 27, 33, and others. Archaeological Institute of America and the College Art 21. Azure, a lion rampant barry of seven argent and Association of America, xx, New York, 1969, figs. 2, 4-11, gules, crowned or.

13—IS. 22. These have suffered badly in the general abrasion of

13. For additional examples in contemporary chanson- this page and are now barely visible in the flaked blue paint. niers and literary texts, see Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: 23. See, for example, the images of Bruder Eberhard von The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyrical Narrative Poetry, Sax, fol. 48v, and Herr Christian von Hamle, fol. 71v, ill. in Ithaca, 1987, figs. 1, 4. In figs. 2, 3, and 5, the author is asso- Codex Manesse: Die Miniaturen der Grofen Heidelberger ciated with the beginning of his text although not includ- Liederhandschrift, ed. Ingo F Walter, exh. cat., Frankfurt,

ed in the initial proper. 1988, 42, 62. | 14. The image of the owner in the Hours of Jeanne 24. On the basis of his work on images of artists and

d’Evreux (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, scribes, Michael Gullick has suggested that an author por-

Cloisters MS 54.1.2) appears on folio 16r.The Hours of trait would be much morte likely in this position and in Jeanne de Navarre (Paris, Bibl. Nat. nouv. acq. lat. 3145) combination with the patron portrait than that of the scribe. dates after 1329 and probably after 1336. Its images clearly 25. My interpretation here disagrees with that of Horst show the iconographic and stylistic legacy of Jean Pucelle, W. Janson, who believes that “they try to distract a scholar the artist of the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux. See Francois from his task” and “suggest the temptation of worldly plea-

Avril, Manuscript Painting at the Court of France: The sures” (Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Fourteenth Century (1310-1380), New York, 1978, 68—73.The Renaissance, Studies of the Warburg Institute, xx, London,

folio with the owner is 1Ir, illustrated in the facsimile edit- 1952, 170). . ed by Henry Yates Thompson (Thirty-two Miniatures from 26. I know of no information that would allow us to the Book of Hours of Joan I, Queen of Navarre, Il, London, draw conclusions about Heinrich’s literacy. See chap. 3 for a 1899, pl. xm). The Hours of Jeanne de Savoie, now at the reconstruction of the physical context of Heinrich’s court.

Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, was painted between 27. In this and the following quotations, abbreviations

1325 and 1330. are written out and the use of u and »v is regularized. In

15. For figures in mantles decorated with family arms, order to preserve something of the look of the originals, — see the Grey-Fitzpayn Hours (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam capitalization has not been changed. Museum MS 242, fols. 2v~3r; Fig. 67) and New York, 28. Rudolph Kautzsch, “Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Pierpont Morgan Library Ms 700, fol. 2r (ill. in Medieval and deutschen Malerei in der ersten Halfte des XIV. Renaissance Manuscripts: Major Acquisitions of the Pierpont Jahrhunderts,” in Kunstwissenschaftliche Beitrage August Morgan Library 1924-1974, exh. cat., New York, 1974, no. 25). Schmarsow gewidmet, ed. Heinrich Weizsacker, Kunst16. For parallels between this part of the epic and the geschichtliche Monographien, 1. Beiheft, Leipzig, 1907, 82.

Hessian landgraves’ own inheritance problems, see chap. 2. The text on folio iv of a psalter written for Hermann 17. See also the leaf from one of a number of Cologne von Valkenberg in 1334 (Kassel, Landesbibliothek 2° ms manuscripts with marginal representations of kneeling nuns theol. 96) reads (Fig. 69): in Medieval and Renaissance Miniatures from the National

Gallery of Art, ed. Gary Vikan, exh. cat., Washington, D. C., Dominice incarnationis an

1975, no. 36. no millesimo trecentisimo 18. See the illustrations in Gould, Yolande de Soissons. tricesmo quarto. Hermanus de 19. Avril, Manuscript Painting, pl. 18. The manuscript valkenberg Custos ecclesie fritslariensis (New York, Metropolitan Museum, Cloisters Ms 69.88) hunc librum in honorem dei omnipoten

probably dates from the late 1340s. tis et beati Petri apostoli super chorum 20. Although the original owner of the Savoy Hours, ibidem suis propriis sumptibus scribi also known as the Hours of Blanche of Burgundy (New procuravit et expensis. Cuius no

Haven, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library ms men illequi est omnium bonorum , 390), appears in many of the miniatures, no direct visual pius retributor propter magnam suam connection is established between her and the coats of arms misericordiam asscribere dignetur in the initials. These initials are near the larger images but libro vite sempiterne. Amen.

28

Notes to Chapter I The owner’s entry now on folio tv of a breviary made although he recognizes that they do not prove conclusivefor Johannes Wolf in 1342 (Kassel, Landesbibliothek 2° ms ly the existence of a scriptorium there (“Bibliotheken im

theol. 119) reads: mittelalterlichen Pritzlar,” in Fritzlar im Mittelalter: Festschrift

Le. i, zur 1250-Jahrfeier, Dominice incarnationis Anno doFritzlar, So-Jahife1974, 7. 974,237, 237,240). 240)

ni millesimo.T tesi 34. London, Brit. Lib. Arundel Ms 83/t, fols. 122r and v.

mini millesimo. Trecentesimo.

; Lucy Freeman Sandler, The Psalter of Wolf Robert DeLisle in the Quadragesimo Sab. Johannes dy cag ; ; ; British Library, London and New York, 1983, pls. 1, 57.1 cite aconus. hunc librum in honorem Om , , , ; 4. ae the inscription after Sandler’s dissertation55 (“The of nipotentis dei beate Marie virginis a Psaltershe. , ; Robert de Lisle,’ New York University, 1964, 250—51); gloriose. et omnium sanctorum necnon . ser jute ani : relies on the transcription of the badly rubbed original in P , , .. Edward Maunde Thompson, Englishsujs Illuminated Manuscripts, Progenitorum. sumptibus propriis ,, et expensis secundum Registrum Mogun ro salute anime sue et omnium suorum

London, 1895, 55. My translation of the text differs slightly

; 4: oe ; from that Sandler publishes ac on page 11 of her book; furtinum scribi procuravit in ecclesia a. ,“ ee thermore, William Kibler tells me that “donay” could also fritslariensi in cripta ibidem que dicitur 7 .

.|

_ ae be translated omnium as a preterite adveniencium form: “I ... gave. Stumeche pro comodo ;—_ 35. Frankfurt am Main, Stadtund UniversitatsLiteratorum horas Canonicas servare volencium aa i, . I Cui ‘lle qui est , bibliothek 115. The erpetue collocavit. Cuius nomen illems quiBarth. est omnium , manuscript is described by ‘ onorum P tributor dionet q ‘bere lib Gerhardt Powitz and Herbert Buch, Katalogelibro der Stadtpius retributor dignetur asscribere , und ” 6 Universitatsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main, 11, 2: Die HandvitePsempiterne. : schriften des Bartholomdusstifts und des Karmeliterklosters in The repetitious “domini” in the first and second lines Frankfurt, Frankfurt, 1974, 266-68. and the “ti” at the end of “omnipotentis” in lines four and 36. On folio 3541, another 14th-century hand has added

five have been crossed out. In both of these manuscripts a pencil entry: “larem(?) de statere dissoluit lingua sua.’ | the owner’s inscription is now glued to a modern page, 37. Vienna, Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek ser. thus precluding any conclusions about the original posi- nova 2643, fol. 421r: “Anno domini millesimo trecentesi-

tion of this text in the book. mo octoagesimo septimo finitus et completus est liber iste Similar inscriptions also occur in two later Fritzlar man- videlicet marchio Wilhelmus illustrissimo principi et domiuscripts now in the Kassel Landesbibliothek, a missal from no, domino Wenceslao Romanorum regi semper augusto et

1439 (2° Ms theol. 120a, fol. 1r), and a missal from 1463 (2° Boemie regi domino suo gratiosissimo.” See Becker,

Ms theol. 132, fol. tv); see Ludwig Denecke and Hartmut Handschriften, 107. ! : Broszinski, ‘““Des Kanonikers, Scholasters und Bibliothekars 38. The Hague, Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum Johann Philipp von Speckmann ‘Catalogus manuscripto- MS 10.B.23. Sherman discusses the text and form of the rum’ des St. Peters-Stiftes in Fritzlar (mit Nachweis der inscription, noting that it “is unique in northern manuerhaltenen Handschriften),’ Hessisches Jahrbuch fiir scripts of this period” (Portraits, 26-27). She also discusses

Landesgeschichte, XXVI, 1976, 105, 109. the form and details of the dedication portrait and its prob29. See the works by Kurt Steinbart, Alfred Stange, lematic stylistic relationship to the images illustrating the _ Heinz Keller, and Heinz Heinrichs cited above in the dis- text of the Bible historiale. See also the catalogue entries on cussion of the Kassel manuscript’s style in note 11 of the this manuscript in Die Parler und der schéne Stil 1350-1400:

: introduction. Kunst unter den Luxemburgern, ed. Anton Legner, exh. cat., 30. Hiltberg follows here the suggestion of Karl Cologne, 1978, 1, 69, and Les Fastes du gothique: le siécle de | Demandt (Geschichte des Landes Hessen, 2nd ed., Kassel, Charles V, exh. cat., Paris, 1981, 331-32. 1972, 189). This section of Hilberg’s entry was deleted from 39. Arthur WyB, Hessisches Urkundenbuch: Urkundenbuch the final version published in Hartmut Broszinski, Kasseler der Deutschordensballei Hessen, pt. 1, vol. 11: 1300-1359,

| Handschriftenschatze, Kassel, 1985, 150-55. On the relation Publikationen aus den Koniglichen Preussischen Staatsof the Willehalm Codex to local history and contemporary archiven, xx, Leipzig, 1884, nos. $43, 566, 597, 685, dated

events, see chap. 3. between 1330 and 1339, The German, in no. 597 for exam31. Karl E. Demandt, Das Chorhervrenstift St. Peter zu ple, reads: “Wir Heinrich von godis gnadin lantgrabe, herre Fritzlar: Quellen und Studien zu seiner mittelalterlichen Gestalt Hessin landis... 2’ No. 543 differs only in spelling and in

und Geschichte, Veroffentlichungen der historischen the addition of “unde” between the two titles. No. 566 and

Kommission ftir Hessen, XLIx, §41—43, $55. no. 685 are in Latin: “Nos Henricus dei gracia lantgravius 32. See note 28 above. Notice, for example, the use of terre Hassie dominus. ...” “Anno domine” in the Willehalm Codex instead of This volume of documents will be cited hereafter as WyB m1. “Dominice incarnationis anno” and the failure of Heinrich’s 40. WyB8 I, no. 528. See also no. 518, May 1, 1328, for a inscription to specify “suis propriis sumptibus” although this similar wording in reference to Heinrich I]’s father Otto:

, would have worked well with the idea of the inscription. “quondam illustrissimi principis domini Ottonis terre 33. Ludwig Denecke uses the owner notations them- Hassie lantgravii piissime recordacionis.” selves as the primary evidence for a Fritzlar provenance, 41. Vienna, Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek Codex

29

Notes to Chapter I Vindobonensis 2670, fol. 1r. The inscription continues to century family tombs and their physical relationship to the

give the date of this codex. burial site of Saint Elizabeth, see chap. 3. 42. See note 37 above. 47. See the discussion of this manuscript’s notices of

43. See chap. 2. ownership on page 22 above.

44. Erich Kleinschmidt, “Literarische Rezeption und 48. Broszinski, Kasseler Handschriftenschatze, 7. | Geschichte: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte von Wolframs 49. The Kassel Landesbibliothek possesses a number of Willehalm im Spatmittelalter,’ Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fiir single-page fragments of medieval literary texts. Most of Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, XLVI, 1974, 643-44. these were removed from early modern bindings, in which

45. On the significance of ancestor saints, see the impor- they had functioned as paste-downs or padding. Broszinski tant article by Karl Hauck, “Gebliitsheiligkeit,” in Liber observes that several of these are in Hessian dialects, and he Floridus: Mittellateinische Studien. Paul Lehmann zum 65. suggests the landgraves’ court as the site of this “nest” of lit- , Geburtstag am 13. Juli 1949 gewidmet, ed. Bernhard Bischoff, erary activity, although he proposes the house of the Teutonic

St. Ottilien, 1950, 187—240. Order in Marburg and the court of the counts of Waldeck as 46. For a more detailed discussion of the early-14th- alternative locations (Kasseler Handschriftenschatze, 7).

30

IT

Image and Epic {HE FOUR HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE intended miniatures of the Kassel | Willehalm manuscript would have provided elegant decoration on nearly every spread, delighting the viewer’s eye wherever the book fell open. The miniatures’ quick pace and the rich courtly quality of their painting style served as constant reminders of the patron’s wealth and good taste and of the importance he attached to this codex. Yet the miniatures also played more specific roles. Their frequency and insistent presence con-

nect them in an unusually close way with the text. The illuminations guide the reader

through the epic, directing his or her attention to specific themes or events, setting accents | and emphases, in short suggesting an interpretation of the text.’ For an illiterate or semiliterate user, one who had only “conversational contact” with the text, the images functioned as a freestanding pictorial narrative, a visual equivalent for the words of the poem.’ For these users too, the choices of scenes for illustration and the iconographies of those scenes presented certain biases and conditioned a specific understanding of the story.

| Although scholarly attention on the manuscript has focused on the fifty-eight miniatures begun at the time of the manuscript’s commission (Figs. 1—58),? a nearly complete reconstruction of the entire illumination cycle 1s possible. The number, placement, and approximate size of the intended images are clear since the scribe had to leave space for the planned miniatures as he copied the text onto the parchment folios (Figs. 60—63).

In addition, directions for the painter penned into the margins in minuscule script record the subjects intended for many of the missing miniatures. Where these have been erased or trimmed away, nearby text passages or other contemporary Willehalm manuscripts suggest likely subjects for illumination. The patron or his representative determined at least the more general features of the iulumination cycle. The number and size of the miniatures, factors that set the tone of a

, 31

manuscript, also directly affected its cost. Likewise the style of a manuscript also reflected the

patron’s personal choice as he approached a shop whose work he respected or an artist whose reputation he knew. Patrons closely involved in determining the character of their commissions in other media probably also intervened directly in the more specific aspects of their books’ miniature cycles, requesting illuminations of certain subjects or stresses on | certain themes, for example.* The richness of the Kassel Willehalm and the patron’s assertive presence in the codex signal Heinrich’s personal commitment to this work. A more detailed

examination of the manuscript’s illumination cycle will reveal the degree to which the

. miniatures reflect his involvement in its planning as well as his goals for its use.

Chapter II

The Kassel Codex and Comparative Manuscripts

The four hundred twenty-five illuminations planned for the Willehalm Codex set this book apart from other contemporary manuscripts from the moment of its conception.* The patron and the craftsmen involved in the manuscript’s design devised a work to sur-

pass other similar commissions in the scale of its miniature program and the elegant style chosen for its iluminations. The large miniatures depicted scenes from the epic in elaborate detail using a wide palette of richly modeled colors. Lavish use of gold in the delicately patterned backgrounds and decorated frames heightened the opulent effect. Other manuscripts of secular narratives considered to be profusely illuminated contain only a fraction of the number of miniatures planned for the Kassel Willehalm Codex. In the Bodleian Alexander, illuminated by Jehan de Grise in 1344, nine or perhaps ten full-page frontispieces prefaced sections of the text, while one hundred eighty-one mostly single-column miniatures accompany decorated or, less frequently, historiated

initials at the beginnings of text sections.° A richly illustrated manuscript of the full Lancelot cycle dated to the year 1286 has three hundred forty miniatures, while the most elegant Lancelot, at the Pierpont Morgan Library, has only thirty-nine illuminations, usually comprising two scenes each, and numerous historiated initials.” A late-thirteenthcentury manuscript containing Rudolf von Ems’s Weltchronik and Stricker’s Karl illustrates one hundred nineteen scenes from the two texts on two hundred ninety-six folios;* as most of these images were paired, however, only sixty-one pages bear figural decoration.

In the number and quick pace of the miniatures and the almost successful attempt to include at least one image on each and every spread, the Kassel codex parallels “one of the

most luxurious French manuscripts of the fourteenth century,’ a copy of the Grandes Chroniques made ca. 1335-40 for Jean le Bon, King of France.® Only manuscripts that repeat a standardized mise-en-page, and thereby regularize the visual relationship of text to

image, devote a greater proportion of their page space to illumination.” , Compared with these manuscripts, the physical relationship of the illuminations to the text in the Kassel codex is also exceptional. The illuminators of all the manuscripts

discussed above structured their miniatures according to the arrangement of the text. Their illuminations, whether full page or set into the text, adhere closely to the page frame and thus reinforce the visual relationships between the text and the images. Spiny tendrils may shoot into the empty margins from the corners of images or initials, but in general the frames of the miniatures follow the ruling lines traced by the scribe and thus bind the images into the text columns visually. The Willehalm Master, by contrast, uses all the space available to him. Beginning with the book’s third image (Fig. 3), he regularly extends his miniatures sideways through the intercolumnar space until the inner frame abuts the letters of the adjacent column. He also frequently claims an equal amount of sideward extension from the page’s outer margin so that the image remains centered in its column of text.Vertical extensions provide space for architectural devices like portals (Fig. 4) and turrets (Fig. 5) and for accessory

elements that elaborate the primary scene (Figs. 3, 40). Miniatures occupying corner , 32

Image and Epic

spaces take advantage of both the neighboring margins, stretching out vertically as well as

horizontally, sometimes almost doubling the miniature’s height within the text column (Figs. 10, 14). The grand scale of the miniatures themselves enhances the imposing size of

the miniature program. ,

The polished, courtly style of the Willehalm Codex’s images matches their generous size. Ample space lets the artist develop his sinuous linear rhythms and color harmonies. The large scale of the miniatures allows the uncrowded, stately arrangement of the tall slender figures and the detailed description of their elegant clothing. A crisp metallic perfection characterizes the elaborate diapered and vine-covered backgrounds in the expansive empty spaces around the figures. Just as Heinrich’s commission stands apart from other illuminated secular manuscripts of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it also isolates itself against the more specialized backdrop of other illustrated Willehalm codices. Although a tradition of the extensive illumination of this text did exist, it was by no means the only choice for the decoration of the epic. Two early-fourteenth-century manuscripts are particularly useful for comparison since they are nearly contemporary with the Kassel codex. The first of these, the Willehalm now in the Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna (Figs. 70-71), is dated 1320." Like the Kassel codex, it contains all three poems of the canonical Willehalm cycle; indeed the two manuscripts belong to the same text stemma.” The Vienna codex is slightly smaller in format than its Kassel counterpart: its three hundred fifty-one folios measure 31 X 22 centimeters. Likewise the scale of its image | cycle is more modest. The one hundred seventeen miniatures punctuating its text repre-

sent only one-quarter of the number planned for the Kassel manuscript." The artist has , conceived his images less grandly than those in Heinrich’s Willehalm; although they | extend sideways into the empty margins, the space available in the text column determines their height, even where they occur at its top or bottom. Finally, the Vienna Willehalm’s miniatures do not seek the overtly elegant style of those in Heinrich’s book. Despite the regular application of gold to the backgrounds, the figure style and use of color create a simpler impression that, compared with the Kassel illuminations, seems

almost folksy. |

The other illuminated early-fourteenth-century Willehalm useful as a comparison to the Kassel manuscript is now represented by thirty-three folios, preserved mostly in Berlin and Munich." Like the images of the Vienna codex, the miniatures on these preserved folios are less elegant in style than those in Heinrich II’s manuscript. Heavy black lines give three-dimensional form to bright, unmodeled colors and outline the figures as well as the interior and exterior edges of the frame (Figs. 72—74). Exaggerated gestures characterize the figures, whose heads are marked by large features and bouffant hairdos. Flat gold backgrounds and regular banded frames recall the Vienna miniatures. These miniatures confine themselves more strictly than those of either Kassel or Vienna to the format of the text column: the sides of frames lie along or just outside the scribe’s ruling lines. Corner images sometimes extend a few lines into the upper or lower margin. This manuscript, like its Kassel and Vienna counterparts, also contained all three

, 33

Chapter II , sections of the Willehalm story. Although the longest remaining sequence of consecutive

pages is only six folios, the red rubrics in an early-fourteenth-century manuscript in Heidelberg correspond closely to those accompanying the illuminations in the Berlin and Munich fragments and allow reconstruction of the illumination cycle of this manuscript in significant part.’’ Although the Heidelberg manuscript itself has no miniatures, it seems to have been copied from an illuminated model in which the rubrics accompanied the images, perhaps the very codex of which the Berlin and Munich fragments are the last remains.*° In any case, the preserved folios in Berlin and Munich, together with the Heidelberg manuscript, allow a fairly accurate impression of the illumination cycle of — : the dismantled codex and the subjects of its miniatures." The rubrics in the Heidelberg manuscript number two hundred forty-six, suggesting an illumination cycle of at least this size in its illustrated model and in the codex represented by the Munich and Berlin fragments. Although this is roughly double the number of images in the Vienna manuscript, it still fails to compare with the four hundred twenty-five images planned for the Kassel codex." At 35 X 25 centimeters its outward appearance was less stately as well. In addition to its usefulness in reconstructing the image cycle of the mutilated

, codex preserved in the Berlin and Munich fragments, the unilluminated Heidelberg Willehalm itself provides a third contemporary comparison for the Kassel manuscript. Although copied from an illuminated model, this codex itself contains no images. The decision to omit them may have arisen from either financial or aesthetic concerns, but their exclusion from the copy illustrates the strictly optional nature of illuminations accompanying this text. In fact, among the preserved Willehalm manuscripts from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the unilluminated manuscripts greatly outnumber those with illuminations.” Comparison of these three nearly contemporary manuscripts with the Kassel codex reveals widely differing attitudes about their miniature programs. The Kassel codex combines its extensive miniature cycle with other striking visual features. The larger for-

mat chosen for the manuscript marked the book’s importance even before the reader opened its cover. And finally, the size and style of the images exhibit a monumentality and ©

a courtly character unparalleled in the illuminations of the other books.

Patterns in the Ilumination of the Kassel Codex

In addition to the role of the illustrations in making Heinrich’s codex a statement of , family pride, the illuminations helped the reader to punctuate and ultimately to interpret the text. Independent of a standardized page format and unrelated to the textual divisions marked by the colored initials, the images owe their irregular placement to conscious choices on the part of the manuscript’s designer.*° They serve as markers within the columns of script, attracting attention to certain pages, and directing the reading process by highlighting specific text passages and emphasizing special themes. Those who relied

34

i Image and Epic on the pictures independently of the text would likely have received these messages even | more strongly. In the Kassel codex, where the patron’s presence so insistently documents his interest in the manuscript, these themes reflect his intentions for and his interpretation of the text. An effort to understand the illuminations of the Kassel Willehalm and the degree to which they guide an understanding of the text must begin with a discussion of some general features of the miniature cycle. This overview then leads to an increasingly specific examination of the images and their relationship to both the text and the wishes of the | patron. Comparison of the Kassel images with those in the two other nearly contemporary manuscripts mentioned above, Vienna Ms 2670 and the dismembered manuscript represented by the Berlin and Munich fragments and the rubrics in Heidelberg Ms 404, will aid investigation into both general and specific aspects of the miniature cycle. Medieval readers and listeners understood the Willehalm trilogy as a unified text and a continuous story.”* Scribes rarely isolated Wolfram von Eschenbach’ central text, the literary superior of the later preface and sequel that depart from it, but instead regularly embedded it in the longer tale.*? In the Kassel codex, however, the designer of the manuscript planned distinctions in the illumination of the three texts. The single scribe who wrote the manuscript’s entire text varied the number, placement and size of the spaces for

, the intended miniatures, suggesting differing levels of interest in the three poems. The Rennewart text was to receive the most lavish illumination. The longest of the

three texts by far, it occupies about sixty percent of the folios of the codex, but its two | hundred eighty-seven empty spaces represent more than this proportion of the illumi- , nations (see Appendix m1). The lively activity described in this text is partly responsible. The war between the Christians and the pagans, single struggles and larger battles as well as preparations for combat and its aftermath, was the subject of about one-quarter of the planned images. Scenes related to Christian ceremony, baptism, marriage, death, burial, and mourning, together with discussions about conversion and heavenly visions, were destined for some fifty spaces. An equal number would have represented scenes of court-

ly ceremony, especially receptions and discussions with messengers. The return to Willehalm’s life after line 33,178 was to have been more densely illuminated than any other part of the codex, with forty-one illuminations on twenty-three folios.*? The Willehalm text is under-illuminated to about the same degree that the Rennewart text 1s over-represented in the total number of illuminations. While this supports the position that medieval readers did not appreciate the Willehalm text’s literary value over that of the Arabel and of the Rennewart, it does seem surprising in view of the large number of picturesque episodes included in this text section. On the other hand, long dialogues, like the

, famous theological debate between Gyburg and her father in sections 215—221, did not lend themselves readily to illustration.** Indeed the only illustration in this passage—a double-column image before section 215, lines 1 and 27—-was to represent the burning of Orange, which does not occur in the text until section 223.” The 9672 lines of the Arabel represent sixteen percent of the total text and claim a nearly equivalent portion of the manuscript’s illumination program. Here again, how-

35

Chapter II | ever, the images emphasize certain aspects of the story or develop them more highly than in either of the comparison manuscripts. The Kassel manuscript multiplies scenes of courtly ceremony, for example, especially in comparison with the Vienna codex, and — thus reinforces the elegant courtly quality produced by the manuscript’s refined style. In addition to this overall tone, one sequence of episodes receives special attention: near the beginning of the manuscript, the incidents surrounding Willehalm’s departure from

his father’s court are illustrated in particular detail.*° , Just as the scope of the illumination program changes from one text to the next, | so do the preferred sizes and placements for miniatures. While the scribe has allotted space for a variety of mage sizes and locations on the page in each of the three texts, each also exhibits distinct preferences that help in understanding the relative importance ascribed to them. Greater regularity marks the spaces for illumination in the Willehalm and Rennewart texts than those in the Arabel. In the Rennewart, for example, the first sixteen illumination spaces exhibit minimal variations in height, but from folio 176r to 286v, with only two exceptions, the scribe regularly allotted nine text lines for each miniature (Fig. 62). On the subsequent eighty folios, ten-line images are strongly preferred and, from folio 378r to the end of the manuscript, only two exceptions break out

, of an eight-line image pattern (Fig. 63). The exceptions to the planned eight- to tenline image height are minimal; two spaces seven lines high and six eleven-line miniature spaces represent the extremes in this text’s illumination cycle. The spaces reserved for miniatures in the Willehalm text of the Kassel codex also exhibit a certain amount of regularity. From folio 142r to the end of the Willehalm text on folio 163r, fifteen of the seventeen spaces for miniatures are two columns wide; only a sin-

gle one of these departs from a standard nine- or ten-line height similar to that in the book’s Rennewart section. The beginning of the Willehalm text, however, follows more closely the illumination of the Arabel text. Reserved spaces, mostly a single column wide, vary considerably in height with as few as nine lines or as many as nineteen left empty for

the planned images (Fig. 61). The only regular element in the intended image cycle is the placement of the miniatures: in the first seventy-three folios of the Willehalm text, the scribe left spaces for twice as many corner images as those set into the text column.The finished miniatures of the Arabel demonstrate how corner placement allowed a significant increase in the size of a miniature as the image extended into the neighboring margins in two directions.

- No pattern whatsoever emerges in the illumination of the Arabel. A very slight preference for corner placement of the miniatures becomes the rule only on the folios where the images were not begun (Fig. 60). Likewise no preset pattern determined the sizes of the illuminations. Miniatures range in height from seven to eighteen text lines, with additional marginal space claimed for miniatures located at the corners of the text. A large number of miniatures in the thirteen- to sixteen-line range overshadows a small group of illuminations nine and ten lines high. Preference for single-column miniatures predominates, with one double-width image standing out dramatically from the others in this text (Fig. 50). 36

Image and Epic

This general overview of the manuscript’s illumination patterns reveals that the book’s illustration becomes increasingly regularized as the epic progresses. Extra attention lavished on the beginning of the manuscript with larger miniatures and individualized sizes and placements for the images slowly gives way to set patterns in both the placement and the size of the images in the other two texts. The last two-thirds of the book elicited less obvious concern for the uniqueness of each miniature, at least at the level of the book’s planning and the copying of the text. Indeed the greater number of illuminations planned for the Rennewart text may correspond not only to this narrative’s lively action and to the possibility of using familiar image types, but also to the ease of inserting the _ standardized miniature format into the text without adjustment. The greater consistency in image size, and perhaps also the suspension of the illumination program, may reflect a decreasing interest in the miniatures planned for the rest of the codex.?7 Where images depart from the regular pattern of the surrounding miniatures, they carry extra weight, emphasize a certain episode, or highlight a particular theme. On folio 48v, for example, the first double-width image in the codex and the only one in the Arabel occupies fourteen lines, one-third of the page’s text space, and extends beyond that into the upper margin of the page (Fig. 50). This large format (12 X 27 cm) dramatizes the first encounter between King Louis and Arabel and celebrates the reunion of Willehalm with his father in an especially festive treatment. The emphasis on this image thus heightens the courtly mood of the Arabel already noted above and reinforces themes laid out in the first images. Just as variations in the size of miniatures draw attention to certain scenes, changes in the pace of the illuminations also emphasize certain passages. Two quickly paced groups of images planned for the Willehalm text corresponded to particularly touching passages in the hero’s relationships with beloved family members. Three images on a single opening, folios 83v and 84r, provided space for a lengthy description of the end of Vivianz’s life (Fig. 61): Willehalm offering his beloved nephew the host, holding him at the moment of his death, and fighting off the enemy as he carries the body home. The Vienna manuscript included none of these scenes while the Heidelberg manuscript’s rubrics suggest that its model represented only the last of the three. On folios 88r through gor of the Kassel manuscript, a group of six scenes arranged in a quick, staccato rhythm was to represent Willehalm’s return home, Gyburg’s initial failure to recognize her husband in pagan armor, and her eventual reception of him. Again, the choice of scenes in the Vienna manuscript and in the Heidelberg manuscript’s model lacks the touching details of this per-

sonal interaction. | manuscript. 7 , As noted above, the most visible change in the iluminations of the Rennewart text occurred at the return to Willehalm’s own story at line 33,178. From here to the end of the codex, the pace of the illuminations speeds up, giving special emphasis to the saintly life of the hero’s last years and providing a grand visual finale to the end of the The longest unilluminated passage in the manuscript, from folio to4v through

IIIv, sets a negative emphasis. Although the Heidelberg manuscript includes nine rubrics ,

37

Chapter II

for this long text passage from sections 170 through 212, none of these subjects interest-

ed the designer of the Kassel manuscript, who chose to ignore both the final steps of the reconciliation between the hero and the king and the circumstances under which Willehalm meets Rennewart. Neither the festivities of the court nor the burlesque, yet touching introduction of the young pagan who became Willehalm’s most valuable ally

, detracted from the gravity of Willehalm’s situation. Only a single scene, Alyze’s kiss as she sends Rennewart off to battle, turns the reader’s attention from the high seriousness of the central Munleun scene before this empty passage and the hero’s return to his burning home at its end.

The Images as Interpretation Decisions about emphasis of certain text passages were made in the initial phases of the miniature cycle’s design, at the latest when the scribe copied the text onto the parchment folios. In addition to highlighting short text passages, like those noted in the Willehalm above, the images accent two longer sections of the manuscript, its beginning and end. The greater randomness of the Arabel iluminations—their variety in size and placement, coupled with their comparatively heavy density—points to a more detailed interest in the individuality of each separate miniature at the beginning of the trilogy. That the uluminations were actually executed here also reflects the greater care accorded to this portion of the codex.?® An equally strong stress created in a different way marks the end of the codex. The images vary little in size, but their pace is so lively that, if completed, the effect of these pages would have been more richly visual than any other passage in the book. At least two separate reasons help to account for these richly illuminated passages at the beginning and end of the codex. At the first level, they make the book immediately visible as an exceptional object. For this, their position in the book is of course essential. They would strike the reader or viewer promptly on opening the codex and immediately before closing it. They condition the initial and final response to the manuscript. In addition to this preliminary visual role, these two specially treated miniature passages illuminate two text passages of primary importance for the story. Naturally the episodes recorded in the early miniatures set the stage for the rest of the narrative, while those described at the codex’s end bring the story to a conclusion. More than this, however, these two sections of the epic, with their accompanying illuminations, define the

hero in a way that reflects the patron’s understanding of him. The ulumuinations from , Willehalm’s life at the beginning of the manuscript, especially those dealing with his departure from home and his early actions at Charlemagne’s court, provide the book’s first definition of the hero in his worldly role, as vassal and territorial lord, albeit dispossessed. In contrast to these secular scenes at the manuscript’s beginning, the codex’s last images concentrate on the deeds that define Willehalm’s sainthood. His life as a monk, his clois-

ter foundation, and the visions and miracles that surround the end of his life provide a religious counterpoint to the miniatures of the beginning of the book. 38

, Image and Epic The emphases on the miniature sequences at the manuscript’s beginning and end provide essential clues to the reading of the text intended by the manuscript’s design-

er and its patron. These same two roles, Willehalm as vassal and territorial lord and Willehalm as saint, parallel the characterization of the hero in the owner’s inscription dedicating the book to “Saint Wilhelm Marquis” (Fig. 64). Since the design of the image cycle and the composition of the final inscription reinforce one another and insist on the importance of this double reading to the patron and for the intended reader, a more detailed study of individual miniatures and image sequences should begin with these sequences.”? Examining the relationship between the images and the text they illustrate shows how the images configure the text and promote a specific interpretation that is

unique to this manuscript and pertinent to its patron.

The First Miniatures

After the initial miniature of Christ in Majesty that introduces the text, the sequence of narrative miniatures begins on folio 2v with a twelve-line image of the hero’s father Heinrich of Narbonne and his wife seated in honor (Fig. 2). This image stands out from the others in the manuscript for it is the only one that does not illustrate a particular narrative moment. Nowhere does the text in this section of the epic repeat or even approximate the words of the rubric; nowhere does the text describe Heinrich and

Irmenschart seated in honor. At best, the flowered circlet she offers him refers loosely to the love service mentioned in the lines immediately following. This image, preceding the lengthy introduction of the hero’s father, stands alone in representing his early life. Unlike the battle scene chosen to stand for Heinrich’ early life in the Vienna Willehalm and the illuminated model for the Heidelberg codex,?° this scene sets the refined, court-

ly tone that will characterize the Arabel from the very beginning of the illumination | sequence. More specifically, it establishes the dynastic character of the epic. Rather than depict Heinrich as a knight battling for his king against the Saracens, as he is shown in the Vienna manuscript and the illuminated model for the Heidelberg codex, the artist instead portrays him as a family man enjoying the company of his wife.

The choice of this nonnarrative image for the beginning of the miniature sequence also serves a second function, one that suggests the subtlety and multileveled thinking of the book’s designer. The inactive, emblematic quality of the miniature of Heinrich and his wife creates a transition between the iconic introductory image on folio Iv and the active, narrative images of the rest of the story. It links the introductory image to the narrative and associates the unusual figures of Christ and the patron with the epic.

The sequence of narrative miniatures properly speaking begins on folio sr: here , Heinrich disinherits Willehalm and his other six sons in favor of the child of a comrade killed in battle (Fig. 3). The rubric reads: “Hi liet Grave Heinrich sime vatteren gut unde

maket sine sone erbelos” [Here Count Heinrich disposes of his father’s property and | leaves his sons without inheritance]. The miniature’s composition clearly reflects these ,

39 ,

Chapter II

actions: it separates the horizontal space into two distinct halves, each occupied by a psychologically self-contained figural sroup. On folio sv, the image sequence continues:

“Hi maghet Grave Heymerich sine sone tzo rittar” [Here Count Heinrich makes his sons knights] (Fig. 4). The composition nearly repeats that of the previous image with the father at the left and his sons in a group at the right. The father’s speaking gesture, his eye contact with the eldest son, and the physical contact provided by the tightening of the girdle relieve the psychological tension of the previous image. The third image in this series, on folio 6v, uses a similar compositional type. The father stands at the left, his last contact to his departing sons maintained across the dividing space by their gaze (Fig. 5). The rubric reflects the primary actors in the image: “Hi sceydet der Markis unde sine bruter van Grave Hemrich eren vater” [Here the marquis (Willehalm) and his brothers depart from Count Heinrich their father]. By the introduction of the next episode, across the opening from the departure scene, the reader has become accustomed to the quickly paced narrative illustrations in which Heinrich, at the left of each miniature, opposes his sons grouped opposite. The images read consistently from left to right, as they will almost without exception through-

out the manuscript. At first sight, then, the image of Willehalm before Charlemagne seems reversed (Fig. 6). Since Heinrich’s sons rode off to the right in the scene of their departure from their father, the viewer expects Willehalm to enter from the left, prolonging his movement in a single direction.** Both the rubric and the accompanying text support this expectation. The text passage (xxIx, 7—8) opposite the image reads: “Der quam in riterlichen siten / In Kuning Karlis hof geriten” [He (Willehalm) rode in knightly manner into King Charles’s court], and the rubric reads: ““Hi wart der Markis Kuning Karlles ghesinde” [Here the marquis became King Charles’s man]. In fact, no specific text passage emphasizes the king strongly enough to justify turning this image. Instead, the reversed directionality of the composition makes this scene continue the sequence of the three previous images. Charlemagne has now taken the place of the father at the image’s left margin. Rather than represent Willehalm’s progress toward Charlemagne, this image reflects Charlemagne’ role in the text as a substitute father for the disinherited hero. Indeed, the text itself never labels Willehalm as Charles’s “vassal’’, saying simply that he “received the office of the shield”; on the page with this image, however, derivatives of the word Kind (child) appear nine times.?* The father figure replaces the natural father; the father-son relationship parallels that of the king to his vassal. Figure 4 predicts this merging of the father with the ruler, as the father rather than the liege lord knights the young men. Even the clothing of the older men likens them to one another: on the facing folios 6v and 7r (Figs. 5, 6, 59), the father and the king

both wear pink fur-lined mantles over blue robes; turning back to folio sv, the gold ~ brooch fastening Heinrich’s short fur cape and his delicate circlet also directly anticipate details of the king’s dress (Fig. 4). Other devices link the scene of Willehalm’s homage to Charlemagne to the previous images particularly strongly. As this is the first time in the manuscript that two iluminations appear on a single spread, their placement relates them more closely than

40

Image and Epic

heretofore. The three successive scenes on folios $v, 6v, and 7r use virtually identical background patterns, the only time such extensive repetition occurs in the finished miniatures. Finally the artist repeatedly employs eye contact and the isolation of gestures in the tense space between the main figures to force concentration on the ceremonial acts:

knighting, blessing, and homage. |

The images on the verso of this folio state and reinforce related themes. On folio 7v, for the first time two images appear on a single page. The battle scene in the left column is fairly standard in its iconography, although the knight identified as Willehalm, on the pale spotted horse at the center of the composition, pushes ahead of Charlemagne into the battle fray (Fig. 7). The next image is more telling in its composition and iconography. The rubric reflects the cursory, matter-of-fact quality of the text itself:““Hi sterbet | Kuning Karl” [Here King Charles dies]. The emperor, still wearing his crown, lies on his _ deathbed surrounded by mourners (Fig. 8). Willehalm, identifiable by the same clothing he wears in the adjoining scene, stands near the head of the bed, gazing into the dead

king’s face. The male figure at the far left may represent Louis, Charlemagne’s son and | heir. In addition, three unidentified women mourn the dead king. Unlike the corresponding scene in the Vienna codex (Fig. 71), in which a bishop is present to administer

the last rites, no cleric disrupts the family’s privacy in the Kassel scene. The scene of Louis’s marriage contained within the same frame immediately minimizes the effects of Charlemagne’s death and dilutes the mournful mood of the scene. This is the first double image of the manuscript and one of the few multiple images

~ in the Arabel to use a strict left-to-right reading rather than top to bottom or a sinuous line through two registers of the image. Visual devices, such as Willehalm’s reappearance in the same clothing, and the rubric, which refers to Louis as “King Charles’s son,” maintain the continuity between the two parts of the image. Willehalm plays the major role in this scene. In one of the few instances where the artist uses dramatic scale differences, Willehalm towers over the other figures, his head breaking the frame. He stands at the center of the composition, the visual and ceremonial link between the bride’s party and that of the groom. And his is the major role signaled in the rubric: “Hi gevet der markis sine suester Loyse Kuning Karls sone” [Here the marquis gives his sister to Louis, King Charles’s son]. Here again clerical prerogative is down-

played in favor of family unity and privacy.*3

, Two additional points reveal the importance of this image in the context of the

manuscript’s illumination program. First, the text passage that describes the marriage 1s

two full columns away, in the last lines of folio 8r. This dislocation is atypical in the | Willehalm Codex, where an image that corresponds exactly to a specific text passage usu- ,

ally occurs in immediate proximity to the relevant lines. The marriage scene has not only been moved forward, away from its description in the text, but it has apparently replaced another scene, and one worthy of illumination. Between the death of Charlemagne and the marriage of his son and successor, the text relates Louis’s hesitancy in occupying the throne, Willehalm’s support for his candidacy according to the dead king’s wishes, and at Willehalm’s insistence, the nobles’ elec-

4r

Chapter II

tion of Louis as king. Yet neither the process nor the fact of Louis’s accession to the royal

office is of interest here. The artist portrays instead a more intimate family moment, Louis’s taking of a wife, Willehalm’s giving of his sister. Family is important here in two

other ways as well. The king’s death is not followed by a coronation, ensuring the suc- | cession and the good of the realm in the political sphere, but rather by a marriage, which secures the family line and its physical ability to provide an heir to the throne. The marriage likewise guarantees Willehalm’s family a place of importance in the realm and a position of influence at the court. The image indicates this status by Willehalm’s central position in the composition, by his overlarge scale, and by his essential role in effecting the marriage in both the image and the rubric.

The next scene makes clear the changes initiated with this image, changes in Willehalm’s standing, and in the position of the king in general and Louis in particular (Fig. 9). Here, in the first scene in which Louis appears crowned, the artist weakens his

: pictorial role. The king now sits in the middle of his advisors, surrounded as it were, no longer decisively isolated in the power position at the image’s left margin. He is not the visual, or political, successor of Charlemagne or even of Heinrich. The subject of this miniature, the king sending for help, dilutes Louis’s single illustrated moment of power in this part of the Arabel. So does its size: this is the smallest illumination of the Arabel, only seven lines high.#4

The subjects and compositions of the first images in the Kassel codex prompt | several intermediate conclusions. The repeated compositional type of the images on folios sr through 7r draws parallels between the roles of father and king. The choice of scenes and the means of their portrayal illustrate the filial and feudal elements in Willehalm’s relationships to both his father and his king. With Charlemagne’s death, the position of the emperor is weakened, and he recedes into the background. Willehalm himself plays

the major part in the next battle scene, on folio tor (Fig. 11). The manuscript’s first sequence of scenes, then, illustrates the narrative using a variety of subtle text-image relationships that read as a statement about the respective roles of king and noble against

, a background of dynastic strength. A cursory look at the illuminations of the Vienna Willehalm indicates not only the richness of the Kassel cycle and the greater cohesion of its illuminations, but also their interpretive intent. Only three of the Vienna manuscript’s illuminations in these first pages correspond in subject to those in the Kassel codex (see Appendix tv). Although the two manuscripts’ illustrations of Heinrich sending out his sons are nearly identical in composition, suggesting a possible relationship between the two image cycles, no related scenes extend the Vienna scene into a larger series (Fig. 70). Likewise the figure of

Charlemagne appears only once in the Vienna codex, in the deathbed scene (Fig. 71), , the final episode of a story that appears here without the beginning or middle given it in the Kassel Willehalm. No compositional elements visually connect these images in the Vienna manuscript or clarify their narrative relationship to one another. The miniatures appear disjointed, each made coherent by the text alone rather than by connections to its neighbors. Unlike the Kassel codex, which makes the hero’s role visually explicit, and

42

Image and Epic

even goes beyond the text in giving him clerical duties, the Vienna manuscript downplays his role, specifically identifying him in miniature and rubric only in the forty-fifth section.

Here he shares with the king the responsibility for defending the empire against the

pagans, a role given entirely to Willehalm in the Kassel manuscript. , The neutral, impersonal character of the Vienna illumination sequence parallels the manuscript’s lack of information about its patron and the circumstances of its commission. By contrast, the personalized notices of ownership in the Kassel codex document Heinrich’s personal interest and involvement in the material it contains, both visual and textual. Indeed, episodes in the Hessian landgraves’ recent family history do seem analosous to elements of the story. The continuity of the family in a single undisputed line and the legal inheritance of rights and territories were issues that Heinrich II had only just

resolved after almost a century of dispute. In fact, he had spent the first months of his rule , trying to lay firm and permanent claim to his rightful territories, denied to him as the | result of an inheritance dispute.

} In 1294 Heinrich II’s grandfather, Heinrich I, made known his decision to divide his land between Heinrich the Younger and Otto, the sons of his first marriage, and Johann and Ludwig, his sons by his second wife (see Appendix 1).** About this time

Heinrich I, with his second wife Mechtild and their children, moved their residence | from Marburg to Kassel, the capital of their son Johann’s intended inheritance in Lower Hesse. Upper Hesse, the area around Marburg where the ancestral saint Elizabeth was buried, fell to Heinrich the Younger, and after his premature death in 1298, to his younger brother Otto. Otto tried unsuccessfully to reunite Hesse by force but seems to have relinquished his claim to Lower Hesse after this, living in peace with his half brother Johann even after their father’s death in 1308. Johann himself died in 1311 without a male heir, and Otto once again ruled a united Hesse.

His troubles, however, were not yet over. The archbishop of Mainz quickly reac- , tivated thirteenth-century claims to Lower Hesse, and Otto had to defend his interests against the archbishop’s attacks in the mid-1310s and 1320s; Heinrich II carried on the fight after his father’s death at the beginning of 1328.A decisive battle in the summer of 1328 and the subsequent death of the archbishop led to a period of uneasy peace that lasted until midcentury. The themes of undeserved disinheritance in favor of a near relation, of military engagements with powerful adversaries, and of the final triumph of righteous claims - underscore both the Arabel text and the landgraves’ history and seem close enough to suggest that Heinrich intended his manuscript to make visible the analogy between his _ family’s past and the beginning of the epic. That these resemblances between family history and the text of the epic are strongest in this first part of the manuscript may relate to the completion of the illuminations in this portion of the book.

The theme of disinheritance in the Kassel codex crops up once again in the illumination program designed for the manuscript’s central Willehalm text. The painter’s directions in the lower margin on folio 7ov indicate that the first image in this text section was to repeat the scene of Heinrich disinheriting his sons. This scene alone repre-

| 43

Chapter II

sented Wolfram’s short summary of the hero’s early life (5, 15—8, 29). While this image does correspond to the first text line describing Willehalm’s story, its isolation here lacks

apparent narrative connections to the images that precede or follow it. In neither the Vienna codex.nor the Heidelberg manuscript did the designer find it necessary to reca__ pitulate the story elements already illustrated in the context of the Arabel’s more detailed treatment of the hero’s early life. Both grant the pictorial narrative an internal consistency across the boundaries of the different text sections and begin their image programs for the Willehalm proper with the arrival of the pagan army in Provence. In addition to making visible the parallels between the epic and the landgraves’

history, these introductory images reflect the kinds of relationships advocated by the manuscript’s patron and perceived by him as ideal political affiliations. During the last twenty years, literary scholarship has interpreted the Willehalm text as a statement of an , ideal relationship between the king and the German nobility, in which the relative positions of the powerful, self-conscious princes and the comparatively weak king in the central part of the text reflect the political views of the text’s early-thirteenth-century patron, Heinrich II’s great-great-great-grandfather.*° The illuminations at the beginning of the Kassel manuscript, especially the marked change from the idealized figure of Charlemagne to the weakened representation of his son, indicate the continued importance of this text reading into the fourteenth century. Heinrich’s manuscript presents another reading as well, one that insists on the familial elements within the story. The

| repeated compositions of the first images relate this aspect in unusual detail and in an important position at the beginning of the codex. Heinrich’s choice of a text commissioned by an ancestor may also suggest an extension of the dynastic elements of the story | into the fourteenth century. Likewise, the concern expressed in the final inscription for the manuscript’s perpetual presence among Heinrich’s heirs implies both the continuity of his line into the future and the role of this manuscript in the line’s self-definition. The only double-width image in the Arabel, already highlighted in the Kassel

, manuscript by its unusual format, gains added importance in the context of the first miniatures’ themes (Fig. 50). Although the reunion of father and son occurs simultaneously with that of king and vassal, the composition of the image stresses the former relationship. Willehalm and Heinrich occupy the exact center of the image; the asymmetrical frame created by the long trumpets and the staffs of the banners also leads the eye to this pair. The reconciliation of father and son takes precedence over the reunion of king and vassal. This is then the primary relationship, and this miniature reinforces the family themes seen in the manuscript’s initial illuminations and in the quickly paced sequences

on folios 83v—84r and 88r—9or.°” , The Munleun Miniatures

The Munleun episode occupies a central position in analyses of the Willehalm text’s structure and in recent readings of the text as a political statement about the respective 44

Image and Epic

roles of the king and the nobles.3* Willehalm, arriving at the court in Munleun to seek aid

in liberating Orange from the Saracen siege, is snubbed by the king, his own sister the queen, and their courtiers. On the following day he receives the same treatment, a marked contrast to the courtly reception offered to his parents and their retinue. When Willehalm finally presents his petition to the king, his sister promptly dissuades the favorably disposed

monarch from offering help. Furious at her disloyalty to family needs and vassalage bonds, | Willehalm nearly beheads her. Princess Alyze facilitates a reconciliation and, after the united family pleads for the king’s support, Louis agrees to assemble his troops and place

} Willehalm at their head (fols. 95r—104r). The longest unillustrated passage in the Kassel codex (fols. 1o4v—111v) highlights the

events at Munleun by isolating them from the following episodes. The failure to provide pictorial distraction from Willehalm’s confrontation with the king and queen leaves these central scenes long in the memory of the visually oriented reader. Here again the scenes chosen to explicate the events at Munleun in the Kassel codex set different accents from those selected for the Vienna Willehalm and for the model of the Heidelberg manuscript.

, All three illumination cycles included the two most picturesque events of this episode. Willehalm’s reaction to his sister’s failure to support his request for aid was too graphic for the illustrator to omit. Unable to control his fury, the marquis knocks the crown from her head and grabs her by the braids (147, 16-18). Only the intervention of their mother prevents him from slicing off her head. All three cycles also include the queen’s

: ultimate reaction to this unexpected emotion: with her brothers, she goes down on her knees before the king to support Willehalm’s plea. In the Heidelberg rubrics these two images succeed one another without interruption; the Vienna version separates them only with the more intimate reconciliation between the queen and her brother. While the Heidelberg manuscript’s model extended this image sequence with several scenes following the dramatic moments just outlined—a feast, Louis’s promise of help, three Rennewart scenes, and the departure from Munleun—neither the Vienna nor the Heidelberg manuscript illustrates any scene that would help to explain Willehalm’s outburst. Only the Kassel codex gives the hero just cause for his grave breach of chivalric

a etiquette. Three planned illuminations would have described Willehalm’s icy reception at court, his departure from court in the company of the sympathetic merchant Wimar

and, on the next day, the king’s gracious reception of Willehalm’s parents while their son , remains isolated from the inner circle. Tension builds visibly as the vassal feels himself barred from his proper place in the proceedings. These three scenes of the marquis’s

rejection by his feudal lord are countered by three scenes of family support after his , attack on his sister. In the first Alyze falls at her uncle’s feet to beg his mercy toward her mother, the second records the reconciliation of the queen and her brother, while in the third the queen and her brothers plead Willehalm’s case before the king. The miniatures do not record the king’s response to this petition, and the long unilluminated passage that follows deemphasizes the king’s decision to back his vassal. The illuminations leave

the reader instead with the images of the king who fails in his feudal duties and the sol- ,

idarity of the family who confronts him for this breach. | , 45

Chapter II

The Last Miniatures

If the images accompanying the beginning of the text and the central Munleun episode illuminated the changing relationships among the hero, his family, and his king, the secular world of these two important image series gives way to the religious in the last miniatures of the Kassel manuscript. Willehalm is presented as a saint.

, While this change in tone at the end of the manuscript naturally corresponds to the text, emphasis on the last illuminations in the Kassel codex dramatizes the change in Willehalm’s life and thus highlights the dual nature of his life. The increased density of the images after the resumption of the story of Willehalm’s life on folio 372r highlights the importance of this passage. Neither the Vienna Willehalm nor the rubrics of the Heidelberg

: manuscript exhibits such a dramatic change in the pace of the illuminations illustrating Willehalm’s last years.29 These final illuminations also gain added significance from the allu-

sion to the book’s hero in the final inscription of the Kassel codex. The dual reference to Willehalm as saint and marquis invites the reader to see this final miniature series, which occurs immediately before the inscription, as a pendant to the images of Willehalm in his secular role. The front and the back of the manuscript complement each other, presenting the

| hero in different lights at the points in the book where the reader is most impressionable.*° The image series designed for the Kassel codex to illuminate the story of Willehalm’s last years is not only more extensive than those in the Vienna and Heidelberg manuscripts, it also sets different accents (see Appendix tv). All three cycles depict the lively, picturesque scenes from this section of the text: Willehalm killing the thieves who steal the cloister’s wood or tending the cloister’s chickens, for example. The Heidelberg manuscript’s model also illustrated Willehalm killing both the giant and the thieves who

try to rob him, as well as two scenes accompanying the episode of the devil who destroyed the bridge before Willehalm’s cloister. All three cycles record the entry of both Willehalm and Gyburg into the cloister and devote their final miniature to the end of the hero’s earthly life. Here the similarities end, however. The Kassel codex’s miniature cycle plays up the miraculous and saintly aspects of the end of the story much more strongly than do those of the other two books. The Kassel series starts with a group of four iluminations leading up to Gyburg’s entry into the cloister (fols. 372v—375v). These scenes—Gyburg kneeling at Willehalm’s feet, her fainting, Willehalm holding her hand as they discuss their decisions, and her gift of a belt to her husband—give a sense of the two main characters’ wrenching emotional reaction to the difficult decision to retire from the world. Heidelberg records both the beginning and end of this sequence while Vienna illustrates only its result. Gyburg’s death

and the reception of her soul appear in the Vienna manuscript, but the Kassel codex portrays only the messenger informing Willehalm of her death, reserving these standard events from saints’ lives for the hero himself. Four scenes depict Louis’s messenger discovering Willehalm in his hermitage in the woods and the preparations for the hero’s brief return to military life; they convince the reader of the difficulty of luring the retired

marquis back into active life. In the first two of these, in a double miniature on folio 46

Image and Epic | 381v, the messenger is present at one of the miraculous meals that had long nourished the

saint and at the appearance of an angel to Willehalm. He serves as a pictorial witness to , the wondrous events; his presence lends authenticity to these miraculous occurrences. After Willehalm’s return to the cloister, planned for folio 387r of the Kassel manuscript but omitted from the image sequences of the other two codices, angelic appearances, miracles, and the religious rites of the end of the saint’s life distinguish this cycle from its contemporaries. Only the Kassel codex would have included the angel appearing to Willehalm to advise him to go to Louis’ aid, and it alone records the angel directing Willehalm to build a cloister (fol. 384r) and the appearance of the Virgin to the saint (fol. 389r). Likewise, neither of the other manuscripts chose to illustrate the episode of the blind boy cured during the transport of Gyburg’s bones (fol. 390r; Fig. 63). Finally, the last six miniatures, which were to describe the hero’s last hours, also receive unusually full

treatment in the Kassel codex. The hero’s premonition of his own death prompts his confession, last communion, and taking of orders. The scene of the hero’s death, in which

the angel receives his soul, precedes the burial of the saint in the monastery he had founded. Each of the other cycles limits itself to a single miniature to summarize all these , events: Vienna depicts the saint’s death while Heidelberg records his burial. The Kassel manuscript’s emphasis on the miraculous, saintly, and religious events of the end of Willehalm’s life leaves the reader with the impression of a saint’s biography, a vita written in the vernacular. These images would have balanced the secular tone of the first miniatures; the worldly hero of the important early illuminations is shown in another guise. At exactly the same places where the patron marks his ownership of a prized

possession, he also has the hero clearly defined. Heinrich associates himself with the | book’s hero both visually and verbally, but he is careful to define Willehalm’s character both as a knight and as a saint. IN EMPHASIZING THESE two aspects of Willehalm’s character, Heinrich reveals his interests in the hero and his story. As a patron saint of knights, Willehalm was already a fitting figure for Landgrave Heinrich’s attention. The miniature cycle expresses Heinrich’s deeper attraction to Willehalm, especially in the image sequences chosen for critical positions in the manuscript and for pivotal episodes in the story. The hero’s inheritance problems and his proximity to the emperor, accented at the beginning of the manuscript, come surprisingly close to events in Heinrich’s own recent family history. Heinrich seems

, to identify with Willehalm, to perceive him as a role model. A similar personal attraction may account for the elaboration of Willehalm’s life at the close of the book. As Heinrich understood himself to be descended from Willehalm,* he naturally wanted additional attention directed to this aspect of his ancestor’s life. The Kassel codex’s multifaceted presentation of the figure of Willehalm suggests

different readings of the text. At the beginning of the manuscript, the reader is under the impression that he has opened a work of history. Structured around events in the life of the hero, the text and the images illuminating it relate the occurrences of a specific

period in the past. The reference in the final inscription to Willehalm as the marquis 47

Chapter II

insists on the hero’s role in the history of the realm. As in all medieval understandings of history, these events take place in the larger framework of the history of salvation, suggested by the large introductory image of Christ in Majesty. At the close of the Rennewart text, however, the reader is left with the impression that Heinrich’s book 1s a vita, a saint’s biography. This reading too is confirmed in the owner’s notice at the end of the book. Another reading of the Kassel manuscript’s text and ulumination cycle together

suggests still a third understanding of Heinrich’s commission. If the early scenes of Willehalm with Charlemagne and then with his son Louis projected Heinrich’s ideal of the relationship between the king and the princes, then the Kassel codex also works as a kind of Fiirstenspiegel, a prescription for proper princely behavior. The scenes of courtly activities so prevalent in the Kassel manuscript also contribute to this reading. The repeated chess games, banquets, and jousts, and the multiplication of images of gift-giving, reception, and leave-taking portray an elegant cultivated society. The manuscript records not only the courtly life style of the story’s hero, but also the princely ideal to which the patron himself aspired. Heinrich’s portrayal in direct relationship to the text of the epic on folio Iv suggests the patron himself as the primary audience for this manuscript’s complex messages. Within the codex itself, however, a second public is also mentioned: the final inscription implies the use of the book among the landgrave’s descendants in perpetuity. The urgency of tone and the particular wording of the inscription hint at a third audience as well. Heinrich’s specification that the manuscript was to remain forever at his court reflects the visible and important role he intended the codex to play there, where its messages were accessible to the landgraves’ peers and allies. The manuscript’s frontispiece reflects two of these uses. Heinrich’s unmediated relationship to the text, likened in the previous chapter to that of Adenet-le-Roi reading his poems or Jeanne d’Evreux intoning her devotions, suggests the patron’s private use of the codex. No matter what Heinrich’s degree of literacy, and we know nothing in this regard, it is hard to imagine that he never used this book in private contemplation, following the story line in the images and perhaps the short rubrics at the least.47 The basde-page image, on the other hand, parodies a more public use of the codex. Contemporary texts and images describe public readings in the context of court festivities,*? and the newly completed knights’ hall in the palace at Marburg provided an appropriate setting

| for such banquets with musical and literary entertainment (Fig. 79). Both the manuscript’s presentational character and the interpretive specifics of its program spoke to the wider and favorably disposed public at these events.** For all these users, the manuscript’s messages served as internal affirmation of collectively accepted ideas.

48

Notes

Notes to Chapter II

1. My sense of the miniatures’ role in the manuscript dif- one contract with detailed specifications on the size and

fers from that of Robert Freyhan, who sees the illumina- cost of a manuscript is included (Chrétien Dehaisnes, tions’ primary purpose as decoration (Die Ilustrationen zum Documents et extraits divers concernant Vhistoire de Vart dans la Casseler Willehalm-Codex: Ein Beispiel englischen Einflusses in Flandre, l’ Artois et le Hainault avant le XV siecle, 1: 627-1373,

der rheinischen Malerei des XIV. Jahrhunderts, Marburg, 1927, Lille, 1886, 167). A receipt from 1321 “pour ledit romant

13). escrire et enluminer” (p. 237) is the only other record of

Among the many works illustrating the currently accept- Mahaut actually commissioning books rather than buying ed theory that the choice, content, and even style of illu- them ready-made. Contrast, for example, the number and minations provide an interpretation or gloss on the text, degree of specificity in the contracts and payment records see, for example, Lieselotte E. Stamm -Saurma, “Zuht und for sculpture and monumental painting executed for

: wicze: Zum Bildgehalt spatmittelalterlicher Epenhand- Mahaut. schriften,’ Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins fiir Kunstwissenschaft, 5. This figure reflects the number of miniatures and

XLI, 1987, 42—70; Sandra Hindman, “King Arthur, His miniature spaces in the existing manuscript regardless of Knights and the French Aristocracy in Picardy,’ in Contexts: size or number of scenes depicted. Folios now missing from Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature, ed. Daniel the manuscript had space for another 12 to 23 images (see Poirion and Nancy Freeman Regalado, Yale French Studies, Appendix tv). While the number of text lines given over

special issue, New Haven, 1991, 114-33, and Sealed in to illuminations on the missing folios is easily determined Parchment: Rereadings of Knighthood in the Illuminated by subtracting the number of missing text lines from the Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes, Chicago, 1994; James A. possible page total of 160, these calculations do not reveal

Rushing Jr., “The Adventures of the Lion Knight: Story whether two image spaces were on a single page or on and Picture in the Princeton Yvain,’ Princeton University opposite sides of the folio, much less whether they were _ Library Chronicle, L11, 1991-92, 31—49; and the article by arranged side by side in a single space two columns wide.

Norbert Ott cited above in note 36 of the introduction. It is impossible to know exactly how many scenes were

On a more theoretical level, see Stephen G. Nichols, “The to have been illuminated in these 400-odd spaces. Since 26 , Image as Textual Unconscious: Medieval Manuscripts,” of the empty spaces are two columns wide and have double

L’ Esprit créateur, XX1X, 1989, 7-23. rubrics or painter’s directions, the number of scenes would 2. I owe the felicitous phrase “conversational contact” have been at least 451. Two empty spaces have triple directo Michael Curschmann (“Der aventiure bilde nemen: The tions. To this should be added five images in the Arabel text,

Intellectual and Social Environment of the Iwein Murals which, although only one column wide, depict two disat Rodenegg Castle,’ in Chrétien de Troyes and the German tinct scenes with separate rubrics. The total number of Middle Ages, ed. Martin H. Jones and Roy Wisbey, Arthurian scenes intended for the preserved folios comes then to at Studies, xxv1, Cambridge, 1993, 226). Scanning Figs. 1-58 _ least 460. The 25 double-wide spaces without painter’s

and the rubrics in Appendix Iv gives a good sense of the directions, which may have contained one to three sepadegree to which the images convey the story indepen- rate scenes, add a certain margin for error, and together

dently of the text. | with the unknown width of the spaces on the few missing 3. The exceptions to this rule are Werner Schréder, folios, may have raised the number of individual scenes “Arabel”-Studien I: Von der Ankunft Willehalms in Todjerne bis planned for this manuscript to 500 or more. zu Tybalts Abschied von Arabel, Akademie der Wissenschaften 6. Montague Rhodes James, The Romance of Alexander: A und der Literatur, Mainz, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Collotype Facsimile of Ms. Bodley 264, Oxford, 1933.The 14thSozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, 1983, Iv, 189-93; “Arabel”- century portion of the manuscript contains 208 folios.

Studien III: Arabel und Willehalm auf west-dstlichem Divan, 7. The Lancelot of 1286 is MS 526 in the UniversitatsAkademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz, bibliothek in Bonn. The Morgan Lancelot (New York, Ms Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen 805—806) is generally dated in the second decade of the Klasse, 1984, IX, 194-200; and “Zum Miniaturen- 14th century; see Philippe Verdier, Peter Brieger, and Marie Programm der Kasseler “Willehalm’-Handschrift, 2° Ms Montpetit, Art and the Courts: France and England from 1259 poet. et roman. 1,” Zeitschrift fiir deutsches Altertum, Cv1, 1977, to 1328, exh. cat., Ottawa, 1972, no. 14. On the illumination

210-36; and Ronald M. Schmidt, Die Handschriften- of the Lancelot cycle, see M. Alison Stones, “The [lustration , illustrationen des “Willehalm” Wolframs von Eschenbach: Versuch of the French Prose Lancelot in Flanders, Belgium and | der Dokumentation einer illustrierten Handschriftengruppe, Paris 1250-1340,” University of London, 1970, and Roger

University of Bonn, 1982; Wiesbaden, 1985. ~ Sherman Loomis with Laura Hibbard Loomis, Arthurian 4. Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and their Legends in Medieval Art, Modern Language Association of Methods of Work, New Haven, 1993, 52—53. The number of America Monograph Series, London, 1938.

preserved contracts for medieval manuscripts is relatively 8. St. Gall, Kantonsbibliothek Ms 302.This manuscript , small. Among the hundreds of documents associated with was published in facsimile in Lucerne in 1982 with a short

Mahaut d’Artois’s patronage of the arts, for example, only commentary volume by Ellen J. Beer and Hubert

49

Notes to Chapter II Herkommer. My figures here take into account four dou- Hamburg auction catalogue (“Neues Gesamtverzeichnis ble images missing on five leaves excised from the Karl. der Handschriften der ‘Arabel’ Ulrichs von dem Tiirlin,” 9. London, Brit. Lib. Royal 16.G.v1. See Anne D. Wolfram-Studien, vu, 1982, 261—62). Hiibner, in the introHedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the “Grandes duction to his edition of the Rennewart text (Deutsche Chroniques de France” 1274-1422, California Studies in the Texte des Mittelalters, xxx1x, Berlin, 1938, xii), also men-

History of Art, xxvu, Berkeley, 1991, 5I—73, 213-21. tions a bifolio in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich Of the 394 text spreads still preserved in the Kassel man- (from the Rennewart text, without illumination) as a fraguscript, only 65 have no pictorial decoration. Two of the ment of this manuscript. unilluminated spreads, at the beginnings of the Willehalm Hans Wegener associated the two Berlin fragments and Rennewart texts, would have had decorated or figural (Beschreibende Verzeichnisse der Miniaturen-Handschriften der

initials. An unusually large proportion of the undecorated Preufischen Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, v: Die deutschen spreads, 60 percent, are in the Willehalm portion of the text. Handschriften bis 1500, Leipzig, 1928, 5). Hiibner, in his The number of images for which space was reserved on Rennewart introduction (p. xii) brought the Munich fragmissing folios makes it extremely unlikely that the number ments into the discussion. This mutilated manuscript has of spreads without miniatures would have been any higher. received almost no attention from art historians. To my

10. See, for example, the Estoire de Seint Aedward made knowledge, only Wegener, in the short descriptive text of . for Queen Eleanor of England in the middle of the 13th the catalogue entry cited above, has commented on the century, recently discussed in Age of Chivalry: Art in artistic features of the manuscript: “According to costume, Plantagenet England, 1200-1400, ed. Jonathan J. G. Alexander style and dialect, the manuscript was created at the begin- .

and Paul Binski, exh. cat., London, 1987, no. 39. ning of the 14th century in Franconia.’ I have excluded from this discussion image sequences 15. See Appendix tv. The relationship of Heidelberg 404 where the text plays a visibly secondary role to the images, to the fragments preserved in Munich and Berlin was first

like the Bodleian genealogical rolls (Oxford, Bodleian published by Fritz Schnelbogl, “Die Heidelberger Library Ms Bodl. Rolls 3; Age of Chivalry, no. 10) or the Handschriften 364 (Parzival G4 und Lohengrin A), 383 und Histoire de Fauvain (Paris, Bibl. Nat. fr. 571), and those 404,” Beitrage zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und entirely without text, like the Pierpont Morgan Library’s Literatur, LIV, 1930, 56. See also Werner Schroder, “Verlorene Old Testament Picture Book (New York, Ms 638). The radi- Bilderhandschriften von Wolframs ‘Willehalm’,” in cally changed relationship of text and image in these works Philologische Studien: Gedenkschrift fiir Richard Kienast, precludes their direct comparison with the more typical Germanische Bibliothek: Reihe mm, Untersuchungen und

illuminated narratives discussed in this paragraph. Einzeldarstellungen, Heidelberg, 1978, 9 —40. 11. Cod.Vindobonensis 2670. The manuscript is dated Closely related to the Berlin-Munich fragments and the before the beginning of the text on fol. 1. It contains no Heidelberg codex are a manuscript of the Arabel in indication of patron or place of commission. The manu- Hannover (Niedersachsische Landesbibliothek ms tv, 489) script has appeared in facsimile, with an introduction and and an Avabel fragment in Berlin (Staatsbibliothek Ms germ. commentary by Hedwig Heger (Graz, 1974), cited here- fol. 923, 31). Although the Hannover manuscript is unillu-

after as Heger. minated, it contains red rubrics labeling the subjects that

12. This is the *VKa text model. See the introduction to were intended for the empty spaces left in the text. The Werner Schroder’s critical edition of Wolfram’s Willehalm, two Berlin bifolios contain three images with rubrics and Berlin, 1978, xxii—xxv, xxxii-xxxiil. See also Heinz Schanze, one additional rubric without a miniature. Bushey dates Die Uberlieferung von Wolframs Willehalm, Medium Aevum, the Hannover manuscript in the 14th century (pp. 244-45)

Philologische Studien, vu, Munich, 1966, 35—43. and, following Wegener and others, places the fragments at In addition to the Willehalm cycle, the Vienna manuscript the end of the 13th or beginning of the 14th century (pp. also contains two short unrelated works inserted, probably 264—65). See Werner Schréder, “Arabel”-Studien IT, 194-98, at a later date, onto blank pages at the beginning of the and “Arabel”-Studien III, 200-203, for detailed comparisons quire in which the Willehalm text begins. See Heger, 35-37. of specific passages in the Heidelberg-Berlin-Munich illu-

13. Heger, 18, calculates three additional illuminations mination program and the Hannover-Berlin cycle.

missing on excised folios. 16. Htibner, introduction to the Rennewart text, xxxvi.

SO ,

14. The remaining folios from this manuscript are pre- 17. Schréder notes that certain of the rubrics from the served in at least six different locations. Fragments with model have been omitted in the Heidelberg manuscript illuminations are Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cgm (“Verlorene Bilderhandschriften,” 10). The second and 193, V (18 folios from Rennewart text); Berlin, Staats- fourth rubrics in the Berlin fragments of the Willehalm (Mss bibliothek PreuBischer Kulturbesitz Ms germ. fol. 923, 43 germ. fol. 746 and 923, 43), for example, are not included in (1 folio from Willehalm text) and Ms germ. fol. 746 (8 folios the Heidelberg manuscript. with passages from all three texts). Betty Bushey also lists As will be discussed in more detail below, the Heidelberg holdings of single leaves or bifolios, presumably without manuscript is less useful in specifying the placement of the illuminations, in the Staatsarchiv in Bamberg (A 246 Nr. miniatures than in determining the extent of the cycle and

8), at SchloB Aschbach near Bamberg, and in a 1978 the subjects of the illuminations.

Notes to Chapter II 18. Schréder reaches a different conclusion since he age of text to illuminations is extremely high when comconsiders only the illumination of Wolfram’s Willehalm text pared with similar figures in Appendix m1. In fact, the illus(“Verlorene Bilderhandschriften,’ 10) . The two manuscripts tration of this part of the Rennewart text is so heavy that it

: contained comparable cycles of 60 to 70 miniatures for this distorts the view of this text’s illumination as a whole. The . text section. The differing proportions of the Willehalm 33,178 text lines of the Rennewart up to the point where images in the total cycles of the two manuscripts will be Willehalm’s story is taken up again account for $5.45 per-

examined below. See also Appendix m1. cent of the trilogy’s text while the miniature spaces repreDespite Schréder’s own repeated point that medieval sent 57.8 percent of those in the book and 56.1 percent of | readers understood the three text sections together as part the reserved column widths. The greatest portion of the of a larger whole and did not isolate Wolfram’s work for Rennewart text, then, is illuminated at an approximate 1:1 its higher quality or greater literary interest, he has repeat- pace comparable to that of the Arabel. edly segregated this central, original part of the text in his The illuminations illustrating the end of Willehalm’s life own work on the illuminations of codices that contain the are examined in more specific detail in a separate section

entire trilogy. below (pp. 46—47).

19. See the manuscripts Schréder described in the intro- 24. On her baptism near the end of the Arabel text, duction to his Willehalm edition, xxii—lxv, and Peter Jorg Arabel changed her name to Gyburg. Becker, Handschriften und Friihdrucke mittelhochdeutscher Epen: 25. Werner Schréder observes correctly that pushing this __ Eneide, Tristrant, Tristan, Erec, Iwein, Parzival, Willehalm, Jiingerer image forward not only jumps over the religious discusTiturel, Nibelungenlied und ihre Reproduktion und Rezeption sion but treats it as nonexistent (“Kasseler “Willehalm’-

im spdteren Mittelalter und in der friihen Neuzeit, University Handschrift,” 223). | of Trier, 1976; Wiesbaden, 1977, 99-120. 26. This illumination sequence is examined in greater 20. It seems likely that the placement of the miniatures depth below (pp. 39-44). resulted from the scribe’s decisions at the time of the copy- 27. Birgitt Hilberg, in the catalogue entry on the Kassel ing of the text. Recent work on the production of illumi- Willehalm, has suggested that the inscribing of painter’s

nated manuscripts has suggested, however, that the directions near the illumination spaces of the Willehalm and production of some manuscripts was overseen by a super- the Rennewart may reflect the knowledge that the ilumivisor who may have been identical with the bookseller nator would not execute these images for some time (in (libraire), the scribe, or the illuminator. On the role of the Hartmut Broszinski, Kasseler Handschriftenschatze, Kassel, libraire, see Alexander, Medieval Iluminators, 52—54 and 1985, IST). 113—15; on the identity of the libraires and their collabora- 28. On the steps in the execution of this manuscript and

tion with other craftsmen, see Richard H. and Mary A. the different patterns of work for the other manuscripts Rouse, “The Commercial Production of Manuscript Books associated with this artist, see Joan A. Holladay, “The

in Late-Thirteenth-Century and Early-Fourteenth- Willehalm Master and His Colleagues: Collaborative Century Paris,” in Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Manuscript Decoration in Early-Fourteenth-Century Evidence, ed. Linda L. Brownrigg, Proceedings of the Cologne,’ in Making the Medieval Manuscript Book: Techniques

Second Conference of the Seminar in the History of the of Production, ed. Linda L. Brownrigg, Proceedings of the Book to 1500, Los Altos Hills, California, 1990, 108-11. Fourth Conference of the Seminar in the History of the Cases, like the Kassel codex, where the manuscript reflects Book to 1500, Oxford, July 1992, Los Altos Hills, Calif.,

the patron’s interests so clearly, attest to the close contact 1995, 67-91. of the patron with the designer of the work or of his or 29. My approach, which starts from the manuscript

her agent with both parties. itself, differs here from that of the literary scholar Werner 21. Schréder’s introduction to the Willehalm, xxi. See Schréder, who uses the miniatures as a criterion for test- | also Christoph Gerhardt, “Zur Uberlieferungsgeschichte ing the adequacy of the illuminator’s understanding of the des ‘Willehalm’ Wolframs von Eschenbach,’ Studi medievali, text (“Verlorene Bilderhandschriften,” 30: “Pritifstein

ser. 3, XI, I, 1970, 370-71. adaquaten Textverstandnisses”). Schréder’s premise that the 22. See introduction, note 29. miniatures can be used in this way necessarily assumes that 23. For comparative purposes, it might be useful to the 20th-century critic has found the ideal or proper relate the ratios of text and illumination in this passage to understanding of the text. 1 would suggest instead that there

, those computed in Appendix m.The 3340 lines describing is no single correct interpretation and that the miniatures | the ends of Willehalm’s and Gyburg’s lives represent 5.55 can best be used to understand how 13th- and 14th-centupercent of the text as a whole, while these 23 text folios ry patrons of Willehalm manuscripts perceived both the text represent 5.86 percent of the codex. The 41 illuminations and their commission. Schréder himself states this as his planned for this passage equal 9.64 percent of the manu- goal (“Kasseler “Willehalm’-Handschrift,’ 213) but repeatscript’s illumination spaces. Since many of these spaces are edly reverts to qualitative judgments about the scribes’ and

two columns wide, however, the 54 column widths illuminators’ understanding of the text (p. 235). Nichols reserved for illumination equal 10.93 percent of those in cautions against such text-centered readings (“Image as the manuscript. This approximate 1:2 ratio for the percent- Textual Unconscious,” 11-12). Stamm-Saurma (“Epenhand-

SI

Notes to Chapter II schriften”’) and Hedeman (The Royal Image) demonstrate sen- minations to the events from the end of Willehalm’s life. sitively how changed image cycles reflect different readings The Kassel manuscript, by contrast, dedicated some Io per-

of a single text over time and for different clienteles. : cent of its miniatures to the end of the hero’s story. ,

30. See Appendix Iv. | It is not possible to say whether Kassel’s illuminations to

31. Contrast this scene with those of Kunal bringing this part of the story would have numbered 43, 44, or 45. gifts from Willehalm’s family to Arabel (Fig. 47) or The page now missing between 386v and 387r carried only

Heinrich’s audience with the pope (Fig. $7). 128 verses, leaving space for 4 miniatures at the 8-line 32. XXVIII, 28; XXIX, I, 2,7, 12, 22, 31; XXX, I, 17. height typical of this section of the manuscript. Four illu33. For the more typical wedding iconography with an minations a single column wide would result in a total officiating cleric at the center of the composition, see, for count of 45 images for the end of Willehalm’s life. It is also example, the wedding of Willehalm and Arabel on fol. s6r possible that these 4 column widths were arranged as 2 of the Vienna Willehalm or that of Yvain and Laudine in double-width images or as a double and 2 singles. the Princeton Chevalier au lion (University Library Garrett 40. This same awareness of the power of images and

125), ill. in Rushing, “Lion Knight,” 46. ideas presented at the beginning and end of the book 1s 34. The only other 7-line images in the Kassel codex are seen in the location of the Kassel manuscript’s owner near the end of the Rennewart text on fols. 375v and 39Ir. notices. See chap. I.

35. Georg Landau, “Einige Aufklarungen iiber den Al. See note 45 of the introduction. Theilungsstreit des Landgrafen Heinrich I. von Hessen mit 42. The marks of use within the manuscript are most seinen Sohnen,” Zeitschrift des Vereins fiir hessische Geschichte obvious in the first folios and decrease throughout the und Landeskunde, 1, 1837, 33-42. See also Otto Grotefend book, indicating that the pictures have, over time, condiand Felix Rosenfeld, Regesten der Landgrafen von Hessen, i: tioned the use of the codex. It is not possible to tell, of

| 1247-1328, Veroffentlichungen der historischen Kommission course, whether the worn and dirty corners date from as fiir Hessen und Waldeck, v1, Marburg, 1929, nos. 362, 365, long ago as the manuscript’s possession in the landgraves’

§83a, 717, 721-723. library.

36. Jorn Reichel, “Willehalm und die héfische Welt,” 43. Por example, a bas-de-page image in the Florence Euphorion, LXIX, 1975, 388—409, and Manfred Hellmann, copy of the Bestiaire d’amour (Biblioteca MediceoFiirst, Herrscher und Fiirstengemeinschaft. Untersuchungen zu Laurenziana Plut. 76—79, fol. 31) shows a reader or singer

ihrer Bedeutung als politischer |sic] Elemente in mittel- using a codex of the scale of the Kassel volume, rather than hochdeutschen Epen: Annolied—Kaiserchronik-Rolandslied-Herzog the scrolls illustrated in its own images; ill. in Helen Ernst-Wolframs ‘Willehalm’, University of Bonn, 1967; Bonn, Solterer, “Letter Writing and Picture Reading: Medieval

1969, 139-247. Textuality and the Bestiaire d’Amour,’ Word and Image, v,

37. See page 37 above. 1989, fig. 5. Books of the scale of the Kassel manuscript

38. For a recent analysis of the central position of the must have been used on fixed reading stands, however, and Munleun episode in the epic’s structures of time, location, not hand-held as portrayed in this marginal image. Two and action, see Marion E. Gibbs and Sidney M. Johnson’s images in the Kassel manuscript show musicians entertain“Second Introduction” to their recent Penguin translation ing at banquets but omit the reading or reciting of texts of the Willehalm, (Harmondsworth, 1984) 262—66. For that also frequently occurred at such events (Figs. 38, 53). readings of the text as a political statement, see the works 44. It is hard to imagine that any of the landgraves’ ene-

by Reichel and Hellmann cited in note 36 above. mies would have had direct access to the manuscript, but 39. This portion of the Rennewart accounts for 5.55 per- with the landgraves’ changing alliances, described in chap. 3,

cent of the trilogy’s text lines. The Vienna codex, with 8 it seems likely that general knowledge of the manuscript illuminations, and the Heidelberg manuscript, with 18 and its contents was available to those outside Heinrich’s rubrics, each devoted 7 percent of its total number of illu- immediate circle.

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Ii]

Court and Context FULLER UNDERSTANDING of the Willehalm Codex necessitates looking beyond

A the evidence contained between the manuscript’s covers and examining it in the larger contexts of the Hessian court. Both artistic tradition and political

| tactic shaped the look of Heinrich’s manuscript and the program of its illuminations. The first part of this chapter examines two commissions created for the Hessian landgraves in the first century of their independent rule. Additions to the family castle at Marburg initiated under Heinrich I, the first Hessian landgrave and the grandfather of Heinrich II, and a group of family tombs erected by Heinrich II’s father Otto in the succeeding generation prepared the way for the Willehalm Codex by establishing a visible Kunstpolitik at the Hessian court. Linked to one another by similarities in scale, mes-

sage, and in the choice of Cologne artists, these works appear, like the codex, as legitimizing, self-proclaiming statements at critical moments in the landgraves’ history. The second part of the chapter explores Heinrich II’s political and religious concerns in the

first years of his rule. Heinrich’s maneuvering in the ongoing conflict over inheritance issues, his interactions with the king, and his few documented religious provisions also illuminate his conception of the manuscript and intentions for its use. Study of family interests, both artistic and political, helps reconstruct the political and cultural environment in which Heinrich II created and used the Willehalm Codex. Matching previous family commissions in the subtlety and complexity of its program and in its quality, the Willehalm Codex joins these earlier works as attributes of a well-

appointed court of important and self-conscious nobles. ,

The Late-Thirteenth-Century Additions to the Castle , The earliest of the landgraves’ major commissions still preserved today 1s the Gothic chapel attached to the hill-top castle at Marburg (Fig. 75). A small, double-apsed structure with side niches, it extended the axis of the main castle structure that housed the family’s living quarters.” An over-lifesized painting of Saint Christopher carrying the Christ Child, dating from about the time of the chapel’s dedication in 1288,? occupies the full height of the west wall; on the remaining walls slender lancets rise above a plain socle (Fig. 76). Carved foliage and masks decorate the capitals and keystones of the graceful rib vaults.

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Chapter II Jurgen Michler has described convincing similarities to the church of St. Elizabeth down the hill from the castle.* In particular, architectural members and sculptural details in the church’s four western bays closely resemble elements of the chapel’s structure and decoration. When the west end of St. Elizabeth’s was completed shortly before the church’s

dedication in 1283, workmen from the larger building moved to the smaller one.° Developments in wall and vault membering, as well as tracery forms, also relate the castle chapel to recent innovations in Cologne, especially work on the cathedral sacristy from the | decade of the 1270s.° Thus when the landgraves in this earliest commission hired masons _ and sculptors working nearby, they consciously or unconsciously chose to import the latest developments from the most important project underway in the empire. Details in the construction of the chapel reinforce a sense of the building’s care-

ful and deliberate planning. A narrow bench tucked into the outside wall of each side niche provided seating for two important household members (Fig. 77). Michler sees these seats as isolated, direct quotes from the Sainte-Chapelle in the royal palace at Paris.” In this royal commission from the 1240s, angels hold crowns in the relief borders of these recesses, identifying their occupants as the king and queen. The equivalents at Marburg

were intended for the landgrave and his lady, allowing them to participate in the mass as , | a royal family would in its private household. The recurrence of such seats in other four-

teenth-century palace chapels built for princely patrons in imitation of the SainteChapelle suggests the potency of this royal model and its widespread popularity in the visual definition of rulership.® The very building of the castle chapel in Marburg evokes the elitism and exclu-

sivity of the landgrave’s family. With the parish church a mere eighty steps below the castle, at the highest point in the city, and a special priest saying daily anniversary masses at the altar donated by the family at St. Elizabeth’s, the erection of a private palace chapel was hardly a religious necessity.° Instead, it stands as a visible element in an environment considered appropriate for a certain rank of noble. Indeed, recent scholarship has found that the very presence of a palace chapel referred to a lord’s power and right to rule and served a legitimizing function.” At the same time, the chapel made visible a religious

element considered essential for the conduct of a knight and ruler. Another requisite part of the well-appointed court was the large-scale knights’ hall. Erected as a separate wing behind the original castle building (Fig. 78), this annex not only doubled the castle’s surface area, but provided an appropriate space for ceremonial and festive gatherings. The double-nave plan (Fig. 79) is typical of halls of this type as is the lower, less decorated ground floor, which served more mundane functions." Unusual

in Marburg are the grand scale of the upper hall and the stone vaulting.” A “throne niche” accents one long side of the upper hall: the center of the five bays protrudes outward in a small apse. Significantly, this throne niche does not project into the castle’s interior court but toward the outside, St. Elizabeth’s far below, and the public roads connecting the church and the town. Although no reliable documents date the knights’ hall, the foliate keystones are close enough to the architectural decoration of the chapel to place it in the same campaign

54

Court and Context

of renovations to the castle in the late 1280s. Wigand Gerstenberg, a late-fifteenth-century chronicler and historian of the Hessian Landgrave Wilhelm III whose work relies heavily on earlier texts, mentions the erection of the chapel and the great hall together and in conjunction with Heinrich I.% Two seventeenth-century authors, Wilhelm Dilich and Johann Winkelmann, corroborate Gerstenberg’s attribution and dating.’ While credit for the conception and initiation of the knights’ hall must go to Heinrich I, he was apparently unable to finish this ambitious project, for all three chroniclers mention the great hall again in connection with Heinrich I’s son Ludwig, bishop of Miinster, in the middle of the second decade of the fourteenth century. Gerstenberg explains: “Unde so nu lantgrave Ludewig ... buwete die capellen und den sail ufme slosse Margburg follen uss, want sie nicht bereyd woren” [Landgrave Ludwig ... brought the chapel and hall at the Marburg

| castle to completion, finishing them where they weren’t yet ready].' Scholars traditionally credit Ludwig with the erection of the sacristy to the north of the chapel. The hall’s grand scale, together with its date about the time of the chapel dedication in 1288, connects its construction with Heinrich I’s appointment as a prince of the realm in 1292. As constituted in 1177, the Reichsftirsten formed an elite group of ninety ecclesiastical and sixteen lay princes; they were the most important nobles in the empire,

vassals of the crown, and the body from which the electors chose the German kings.” Heinrich’s new position, one of only four such elevations in the thirteenth century, involved new duties as a politician and a host, and demanded a larger, grander space for diplomatic and social assemblies. Equally important, however, this appointment served as official recognition of the first landgrave’s political status. A direct descendant of the

royal house of Hungary, the ducal house of Brabant, and the landgraves of Thuringia, , and the grandson of Saint Elizabeth (see Appendix 1), Heinrich I, with this appointment, finally achieved a political rank corresponding to his high birth. As the claim to an appropriate standing or the expression of a recently conferred status, the hall reflects Heinrich’s role in the politics of the realm. The ceremonial hall, then, functioned as an exhibition of the landgraves’ power and importance as well as of their financial well-being and good taste. This display, visible not only to those invited inside the hall, but, equally important, to those remaining outside, symbolized the rule of the new landgraves and the location of a functioning capital at Marburg. The decision to add to the older castle visibly linked the newly installed Hessian |

rulers with their predecessors and associated them with the architectural symbols of Thuringian rule. The castle’s proximity to St. Elizabeth’s and its architectural response to the church below the hill also associated the landgraves with their family saint. Although Heinrich I had already begun to note his descent from Elizabeth on his seals, this expression of the pride and authority deriving from the relationship was more public.

, 55 7

Gerstenberg’s chronicle provides support for a reading of Heinrich I’s additions to | the castle as political symbols. Citing Johann Riedesel, a chronicler under Heinrich’s son

| Otto I, Gerstenberg notes that Heinrich maintained himself in an extravagant fashion befitting nobility: “Unde hat gar erlichen unde kostlichen furstenstad degelichen gehalten, zu glichen wole eynss konniges hoffe” [And he held a rich and luxurious court, to be

Chapter III

compared with that of a king].'? The very choice of chapel and knights’ hall is indicative of the image the landgraves wished to convey as rulers; while the knights’ hall represents their secular role, the chapel suggests not only the source of their power but the guidance

for their rule. The two together on the hill above town provide a visible image of the Christian knight secure in his power, ruling his lands from his established family seat. In the additions to the Marburg castle, the landgraves expressed for the first time |

ideas that they would refine and develop in their subsequent commissions. On a site that , allowed important familial and political connections, Heinrich I made visible a statement of his rule, a symbol of his political success. At the same time he created an impressive noble environment, with elegant attributes of a princely court, by importing stylistic and formal features from the workshops of an important art center. As the first holder of a new title and founder of a new line, Heinrich used his commissions to create a permanent setting for future members of his family.

The Family Tombs at the Church of St. Elizabeth , From 1298 to 1557, the south transept at the church of St. Elizabeth served as the site of the

Hessian landgraves’ family necropolis. Family tombs, each bearing a likeness of the deceased, form two north-south rows, with the older ones nearest the altars set against the transept’s east wall and the more recent ones behind (Fig. 80).The tombs of the back row, which all date from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, are outside the scope of

this study, but the monuments of the front row fall during the rules of Heinrich I, his

ments it contains. :

son, and his grandson and express the family’s early ideas about this space and the monu-

On entering the south choir, one encounters two raised tombs on plain, low bases; one represents a man (Fig. 81), the other a woman with her small son (Fig. 82). They are followed by two larger, more imposing tombs whose style, decorated bases, and effigies’ costumes mark them as a pair (Figs. 83—84). The first, a double tomb, represents a man in secular robes and another in armor, while the second tomb, bearing only a single figure, commemorates a similarly armed knight. The simultaneous execution of these elegant raised tombs for three male family members established the nucleus of the south transept family necropolis. Just as their presence called future burials to this site, their form and

, iconographic details served as models for the later monuments of the cycle. Two engraved slabs also belong in a study of the family’s thirteenth- and fourteenth-century tombs. One, bearing a very worn representation of a woman, is hidden under a later tomb near the end of the front row. The other, representing a third knight in armor (Fig. 85), was discovered in 1847 under the raised double tomb (Fig. 83); it now stands against the west wall of the transept. While the beginnings of the family necropolis in this area date after 1257, when an altar dedication marked the completion of this space,”° both the custom of burial ad sanctos and early documentary evidence indicate that the first burials in St. Elizabeth’s 56

Court and Context

must have occurred near the saint’s burial site in the north transept.”? Even before Elizabeth’s canonization 1n 1235, her confessor Konrad von Marburg and his assistant Gerhard had been buried near her tomb in the chapel that originally stood on the site of the current building’s north transept (Fig. 86, dotted line). An important text passage appended to a vita of Saint Elizabeth suggests that subsequent burials up to about 1290 were also relegated to the same area. These included Konrad of Thuringia, Elizabeth’s brother-in-law and High Master of the Teutonic Order from 1239 until his untimely death in 1240, and the first wife of Heinrich I, Adelheid of Braunschweig (d. 1274) (see Appendix 1; Figs. 81—82).””

The premature death of Heinrich the Younger in 1298 made apparent for the first time the need for a family necropolis, a burial site for the male line of the newly established landgrave’s family. Heinrich’s burial site in the south transept can be identified. In the excavations of this area conducted in 1854, Friedrich Lange discovered four similar graves in a row extending south from the pier between the two altars (Fig. 87, a—d).”3 He handled these graves as a group, since they resemble one another in type and in their depth under the floor level. Significantly, neither the lead sarcophagus under the tomb of High Master Konrad nor any of the later burials in the south transept shared this three-

foot depth. The four similar graves must have housed the bodies of near contemporaries, , family members who died in a time span short enough to insure an unchanging burial practice. Heinrich the Younger’s grave is the first in this row (Fig. 87, a). According to Lange’s plan, this grave was slightly larger than the other three in this series, measuring four by nine feet. These dimensions correspond almost exactly to the 3'Ir" X 810" measurements that Lange gives for Heinrich’s preserved tomb slab (Fig. 85).74 The unusual placement of Heinrich’s tomb, well into the south transept and without a direct relationship to either of the two existing altars, may indicate that the transfer of the tombs of Konrad of Thuringia and Adelheid was intended, or perhaps even accomplished, by the time of Heinrich’s burial here in 1298. The placement of Heinrich’s tomb not only set the stage for further family burials in this area of the church; it may already have created a highly developed program. With the transferred tombs of Konrad and Adelheid, Heinrich’s tomb created a visual genealogy, tracing the family line through three generations (see Appendix 1). Furthermore, the inclusion of Konrad traced the current landgrave’s family back to the Thuringian rulers who had preceded them in this region. It also implied descent from the highest placed official of the Teutonic Order, while the opposition of the family tomb cycle to the burial site of Elizabeth associated the family with its recent saint. Both links served to elevate the new landgrave’s family, tracing it back to glorious moments in its not too distant history.

Heinrich the Younger’s monument provides important information about him and about the family’s conception of its tomb cycle. The tomb represents a knight in armor, holding his sword and a shield bearing the family arms (Fig. 85). An inscription in large majuscule is still almost entirely legible: ENRICUS DOMICELLUS LANTGRAVIUS IUNIOR ANO DOMINI MCCXC VII INVIGILIA BARTHOL. .. .”° Except for breaks at

the lower edge, the tomb is in unusually good condition and shows none of the erosion

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Chapter III

characteristic of pavements or the tomb slabs inserted into them. In fact, both Lange and | a mid-nineteenth-century contemporary note the striking difference in condition between the tomb slab for Heinrich and the other one of about the same date at the end of this row.*”

I maintain that the tomb slab for Heinrich the Younger was removed from service within a few years of its installation. It reappeared only in 1847 with the temporary move of the later raised tombs placed above it.?* No source from the medieval or early modern period gives the year of Heinrich’s death, a date that would have been readily accessible if the tomb slab had been exposed. While documents recorded Heinrich’s existence and his

, role in the inheritance struggles with his half brother,”? chroniclers were at a loss when it came to specifying the date of his death. The first silence on this point occurs as early as the first half of the fourteenth century: the fragments of a necrology from St. Elizabeth’s

, lack an entry for Heinrich under the appropriate date, August 23. Neither the original | scribe, working about 1320, nor his successor, who amplified and updated the entries in the

years before 1341, recorded the information from the tomb’s inscription.?° Similarly, Wigand Gerstenberg omits Heinrich in the chronicle’s narrative of family affairs and in the genealogy notes only that he died “in his youth.’3* Wilhelm Dilich’s drawing of the tombs ca. 1600 and his slightly later text both ignore the existence of Heinrich’s slab.”

The next two graves of about the same date as that of Heinrich the Younger (Fig. 87, b—c) must have held the bodies of his father Heinrich I (d. 1308) and his younger brother Otto (d. 1328), who inherited Upper Hesse in his stead. As early as the fifteenth century, Gerstenberg noted the burial of these two men at St. Elizabeth’s.8 The two men’s death dates, not far removed from that of Heinrich the Younger, correspond to the similarity of these four graves and suggest that Heinrich I’s would follow Heinrich the Younger’s closely (Fig. 87, b), with Otto’s as the third in the series (Fig. 87, c). Although the identifications of the effigies of the double and single tombs have occasioned much confusion in the scholarly literature, they correspond directly to this proposed chronological arrangement of the graves below the pavement.3+ In 1911 von Bezold first suggested the use of costume to identify the Marburg tomb effigies.** The clue lies in the stiff caps worn by two of the figures (Figs. 83, left and 84). Identifiable through medieval legal books such as the Sachsenspiegel and the Soester Nequambuch, this “count’s cap” served as a sign of rank. In at least one case, it also served as the nobility’s

counterpart of the royal crown.*° In this context it may be important that on folio sr of . the Kassel Willehalm, in the image in which Heinrich disinherits his own sons, he invests his chosen heir Floret with a hat (Fig. 3).

The inclusion of the count’s cap as an attribute for two of the three members of the landgrave’s family could signify either of two titles: landgrave of Hesse or Reichsfiirst. The enfeoffed territories associated with the latter title had formed part of Johann’s inheritance on his father’s death in 1308 and reverted to Otto in 1311.37 Since Heinrich the Younger predeceased his father, he never held this title nor ruled any part of Hesse in his own right. Thus the first figure in this series, the only one of the three not eranted the count’s cap as a sign of rank, can only represent him (Fig. 83, right). The

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Court and Context

three-dimensional effigy of Heinrich the Younger then must have replaced the flat tomb

slab that first marked the young man’s grave; when the raised monument commemorating Heinrich with another male family member was positioned over his grave site, it obscured the earlier memorial and the detailed information of its inscription was lost. Since Heinrich the Younger’s gisant corresponds to the location of his grave, the second effigy on this tomb represents his father Heinrich I, whose death in 1308 would have made his the next family burial.3* A second item of clothing helps secure this identification. In her studies of costume in Cologne painting, Aenne Liebreich found the short cape, which she labels a “prince’s mantle”, a sign of rank rather than a functional article of clothing.3® One of her examples is particularly telling; in all three images near the beginning of the Willehalm Codex where the hero’s father appears with his sons, his clothing is distinguished from theirs by this short cape (Figs. 3—5). This courtly dress also distinguishes the father’s tomb effigy from those of his sons and accords him a higher status, corresponding to his role as founder of the dynasty and first landgrave. The third effigy, that of the single tomb, must then represent Landgrave Otto (d. 1328). He wears armor and closely resembles his older brother, except that he wears the count’s cap, as landgrave and Reichsfiirst. Otto’s separate tomb and the higher quality of his

effigy highlight his position at the end of this short series and correspond to his role in the commission of these monuments shortly before his death.*° The overwhelming

, impression, however, is one of continuity, between the double and single tombs, between the two generations. The presence of Heinrich the Younger in this tomb cycle defines him as an integral part of the family line and associates him intimately with his father and

brother in a newly designed tomb program. The decision to include Heinrich the Younger in this program, to go to the trouble and expense of remaking his tomb, explains the second son’s succession as a result of his elder brother’s early death, describes the steps in Otto’s accession as his father’s rightful heir, and affirms his position as landgrave. The tombs present a statement of family genealogy and rightful succession.” The next tomb highlights the importance of this statement and perhaps a change in patron. The badly worn flat slab found just beyond Otto’s tomb and grave site (Fig. 87, d) commemorates Adelheid of Ravensberg, his wife, who died sometime between 1335 and 1339.” In returning to the plainer, less expensive tomb type, and in departing from the visual continuity of the raised tomb series, this monument distinguished Adelheid from the title holders and heirs in her husband’s family. Although the tomb form excludes Adelheid from the statement of male lineage conveyed by the effigies of the double and single tombs, women and other family members figure around the bases of both these tombs, where small-scale figures stand in individual arcades. Unlike the earliest pleurant tombs, which depicted a funerary procession of earthly or heavenly mourners often moving solemnly in a single direction,* later examples, including those at Marburg, take a secular tone. The emphasis is no longer on the liturgical measures taken to guarantee the well-being of the deceased’s soul, but rather on the — strength of the family he or she leaves behind. The surviving relatives exhibit individual mourning gestures, but they fail to unite in a coherent religious event. Instead they present

S9

Chapter III a “pompous display of powerful family, ...a display of high rank and worldly eminence.’*4

On the bases of the double and single tombs, isolated figures facing forward with- | in individual arcades defy the processional order and movement of a funerary march. Their fixed unmoving stances and the tiny polygonal pedestals provided for the pleurants of the double tomb further deny any impression of motion. Nor do these “mourners” provide a consistent display of sorrow. While some of them exhibit standardized mourning gestures, without conviction or particular energy, others simply hold books _ or other attributes. Their uncovered heads also exclude them from participation in a funeral service or procession.

: Although the pleurant cycle plays down religious motifs, it stresses the idea of family lineage. Family members of particular importance are identified by both individualized costume and position within the cycle. The heir apparent, distinguished by his blunt, chin-length hair and elegant robes, stands at the foot of each tomb (Figs. 88, 89), and the ranking ecclesiastic also occupies a place of honor.** This display of family lineage

on the bases of the double and single tombs further emphasizes ideas expressed in the cycle in other ways, supplementing and elaborating the message of the armored gisants. The family derives its social position and political power not only from its knightly rank but from the number of its members, their descendance, and their various ecclesiastical and worldly titles. The pleurant group is, in a sense, a reflection in miniature of the south transept tomb cycle itself. The themes of family strength and unbroken descendance appear all the more insistent when one considers the sources and precedents for these monuments. The landgraves have adopted a tomb type not previously known in this area, importing forms and themes of major French monuments east of the Rhine for the first time. Details such as

the elaborate three-dimensional baldachins and the nuns or monks tucked between the feet of the deceased derive from Parisian and Burgundian models respectively.‘ Thirteenth-century Parisian tombs had used both the effigy in armor and the pleurant arcade, but the combination of these two elements does not occur before the second decade of the fourteenth century. In the commission for a monument for her husband Otto, count of Burgundy (d. 1303), Mahaut d’Artois described in detail the elements she wanted included on the tomb top. Jean Pépin de Huy was to represent the deceased as a knight in armor with sword and shield accompanied by two angels at his shoulders and a lion at his feet.47 Although not recorded in the commission of 1312, a receipt dated two years later mentions the arches on the tomb base, and one of the pleurants has been preserved.4® Mahaut’s personal involvement in the commission and her exacting specifications for its elaborate form convey her sense of the significance of this monument. Likewise

her choice of an artist active in Paris rather than one closer to the site of the tomb’s intended installation at the Burgundian abbey of Cherlieu reflects her desire to insure its high quality. This must have been an extremely influential monument. The count’s social status and political position, Mahaut’s relation to the French royal house and her reputation as a distinguished patroness of the arts, and the artist’s position among the sculptors of Paris would all have contributed to the prestige and importance of this tomb. The com60

Court and Context bination of pleurant base and armored gisant, however, was repeated only infrequently,” so its quick recurrence at Marburg may reveal a more or less direct connection between the _ count’s tomb and those of the Hessian landgraves. Looser precedents for the pleurant tombs also exist closer to Marburg, in a series of monuments at Cologne cathedral. Although none of these works directly prefigures the form or the message of the landgraves’ tombs, they may have suggested ideas about the meaning and function of pleurant figures. Nineteenth-century authors record a pleurant base for the tomb of Archbishop Konrad von Hochstaden (d. 1261).5° Open bronze arcades housed statuettes of the same material. The tomb of Saint Irmgard, erected about 1270-80 in the cathedral’s St. Agnes chapel, differs from the tombs discussed thus far in its lack of an

effigy, but regularly spaced arches member its high tumba base. Painted figures, probably , mourners, once occupied these spaces.* A third occurence adapts the pleurant type for a different type of interior furnishing: small-scale figures in arcades decorate the sides of the high altar installed in the 1310s.°* Although it seems unlikely that any of these works provided an immediate impetus for the double and single tombs at St. Elizabeth’s, their existence closer to Marburg might suggest a means of transfer for French ideas into Hesse. Stylistic examination strengthens the connections of the Marburg pleurant tombs to both Cologne and eastern France. In planning the tomb cycle, the Hessian landgraves sought out artists familiar with a range of models and capable of expressing their ideas in elegant, sophisticated form. While local artists had made the isolated tombs for High Master Konrad and Adelheid and the flat slab for Heinrich the Younger, accepted practice for larger and more important projects dictated calling in artists from major centers. Jiirgen Michler has noted back-and-forth architectural influences between Cologne

and Marburg at the end of the thirteenth century,** and sculptures at Cologne and Freiburg served as sources for the figures of St. Elizabeth’s high altar, dedicated in 1290.°° By the 1320s then, this practice was well established; so too was the contact with Cologne.

Cologne in the years around 1300 was an active center for sculptural produc- : tion, with a number of workshops producing works as different as the cathedral choir apostles, the Pestkreuz for Santa Maria im Kapitol, and the Adoration group from the Gate

of the Three Kings. Since the 1910s and 1920s, the relationship of the Marburg tombs to this third group of Cologne sculptures has been recognized. The four-figure Adoration from the Gate, the standing Madonnas from the Tonger’schen Haus am Hof and the Church of St. Ursula, and the sculptures of the cathedral choir stalls and high altar share their stocky proportions, broad faces, and shallowly carved folds with many of the Marburg tomb pleurants.5° These Cologne works date from the first and second decades of the fourteenth century and depend on stylistic sources in Lorraine.5’ The landgraves’ choice of artists working in this tradition seems likely to have been based on the appeal of the style and its association with major monuments in Cologne. Likewise, artists familiar with this Lorraine-derived stylistic tradition may have offered the landgraves new and compelling iconographic features current in eastern France. In any case, the landgraves’ look to Cologne and their choice of these sculptors guaranteed a level of sophistication and a powerful set of associations for their family monuments. OI

Chapter III

The dates of the related Cologne monuments in the second decade of the fourteenth century allow placement of the tombs no earlier than about 1320. Two iconographic features of the single tomb push this date slightly later. Otto’s “count’s cap” probably dates after his recognition by King Ludwig of Bavaria in 1323.A costume detail provides a similar terminus post quem for the archbishop pleurant at the foot of the tomb; not until 1327 was Landgrave Otto’s son appointed to the See of Magdeburg. The familial concerns expressed in the tombs, particularly the emphasis on lineage and the apparent legitimizing aspects, also correspond to the landgraves’ political and religious activities in the middle of the 1320s. In 1323 a single preserved use of a seal with the portrait of Saint Elizabeth indicates a historicizing, family-centered mood that coincides with the feelings that produced the tombs.** Soon afterwards, the erection of a painted metal figure cycle (Fig. 90) atop the iron screen surrounding Elizabeth’s shrine in the sacristy of her church reiterates similar interests. Otto and his son Heinrich II appear here in the company of King Ludwig, the anti-king Friedrich of Austria, and other important German lords and local nobles.°? While von Brockhusen has dated the figural group convincingly to 1326, its patronage remains unclear. Its secular tone and the order of the figures suggest it as the landgraves’ contribution to the shrine’s permanent setting. The arrangement accords Otto and his son symmetrical positions flanking the representative of the Teutonic Order in the middle of the group, and a special accompaniment of two musicians flanks Otto. Likewise, the rather unusual inclusion of both

Kings Ludwig and Priedrich traces the history of the landgraves’ alliances. Until Friedrich’s decisive defeat in 1322, Otto had supported his claims to the crown.The figure cycle is an important statement of the company in which the landgraves wished to be regarded. Allied nobles and kings and the Teutonic Order’s local commander join family members in protecting Elizabeth’s remains. The figure cycle on the sacristy screen and the tomb group in the south transept both appeared during a period when the landgraves, Otto and his son Heinrich II, had a particular interest in defining their social and political milieu and legitimizing their titles and territorial claims.°° Archbishop Peter of Mainz had actively reasserted the See’s thirteenth-century claims to Lower Hesse on Johann’s death in 1311; after a period of peace

at the turn of the decade, increased violence broke out in the early 1320s under Archbishop Matthias von Bucheck. At the end of 1324 the parties attempted a legal settlement, with representatives of the landgrave and the archbishop affixing their seals to a list of disputed claims with partial settlements on November 10. In the following weeks various citizens and nobles deposited testimony before judges chosen by the two par-

ties.°* Each of these men described in detail Heinrich I’s division of Hesse between his , sons as effected in 1296 in the presence of King Adolf of Nassau, the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz, and other high ranking nobles and clerics. Although they include other particulars of Otto’s succession to Lower Hesse on Johann’s death, none of these testimonies mentions Heinrich the Younger. The momentum toward a legal solution waned at year’s end, and in May of 1325 King Ludwig entered into a political and military alliance with Otto, particularly direct62

Court and Context

ed against the archbishop.° In a letter of May 4, 1326, Pope John XXII mentions continued fighting between the landgraves and the archbishop.™ Four months later the judge at the church of Aschaffenburg notes the deposition of four documents from 1324.% A further deposition in February 1327 chronicled the past of the legal case.®° Gerstenberg records the archbishop’s invasion of Hesse in the late spring of the same year; on July 15 the pope wrote his subordinate begging for peace, or a truce at the very least.°* On August 5 the pope repeated this wish, writing simultaneously to the archbishop and the

landgrave.® He also wrote to Otto, the landgrave’s son recently named archbishop-elect of Magdeburg by papal decree, in an attempt to enlist his help in ending the hostilities.7°

A further reprimand to the archbishop accused him of starting the trouble and again pleaded for a peaceful settlement.” The archbishop responded with the taking of Giessen.” A few months later Otto was dead, and by the end of 1328 Heinrich II had succeeded in securing his father’s entire territory. While this lengthy dispute was a major concern and a determining force in the landgraves’ political and economic policy during these years, it was hardly a series of nonstop battles or a sole preoccupation. Indeed, the documents indicate that Landgrave Otto

as well as other members of his family found time and money for regular commercial business, religious concerns, and perhaps even a major journey. As the war with the arch, bishop during these years did not halt normal affairs over a long period, it is inviting to see the commission for the tombs at this time; in fact, they seem a direct response to the particular political situation of the 1320s.73 The housing of the cycle in St. Elizabeth’s, the church of the family saint and the woman responsible for the establishment of Marburg as an important political and religious center, heightens the direct connection between the saint and her descendants by placing the tomb cycle opposite Elizabeth’s grave. Otto is especially emphasized in this arrangement, for the placement of his tomb in the south conch exactly mirrors that of his sainted ancestress’s grave site in the north.

The inclusion of Konrad of Thuringia in the south transept cycle further emphasizes its legitimizing aspect. His presence traces the landgraves’ genealogy back to the time before an independent Hesse, explaining the root and derivation of the landgraviate itself. The inclusion of Heinrich the Younger as a full-fledged member of the cycle explains Otto’s inheritance of the Hessian titles and land through his older brother, while the absence of all reference to Johann nullifies the archbishop’s claims, ignor-

ing the three-year territorial division as an insignificant interlude. The length of the cycle and the similarity of the double and single tombs’ effigies gives the impression of continuity and solidarity; the numerous family members appearing as pleurants support the ruling landgraves. Details of the landgraves’ costumes and those of the pleurants signify rank and recall honors accorded to various family members, thereby glorifying the whole group, while the very existence of an involved tomb cycle establishes the landgraves as nobles of a certain rank and acts as part of a visual environment presenting this idea to the public. The particular orientation of Otto’s earliest documented religious interests corresponds perfectly to the twofold political-pious motives seen in the tombs and supports

63

Chapter II the commission of the pleurant tombs as a response to political events in the mid-1320s.% As early as 1325 Otto seems to have established contact with Pope John XXII, with the combined intention of impressing him with his piety, enlisting an ally against Matthias of Mainz, and gaining further honors for his family in the form of prestigious and lucrative

appointments for his sons. In March 1325 the pope appointed young Otto a canon at Cologne cathedral and promised him a prebend in addition to the canonicates and benefices he already held at Paderborn and Muiinster.% In the spring of 1326 the interchange was more complex. In separate documents dated March 6, the pope furthered the interests of four different members of Otto’s family. He appointed two other sons canons, at the important cathedrals of Mainz and Wtirzburg. An intercessor was named for Otto’s half sister Agnes, a resident of Marburg, to represent her outstanding claims against the family of her dead husband, and the archbishop of Mainz was contacted with respect to Otto’s intended foundation of a collegiate church at Grinberg.” That all these actions

were taken at Otto’s bidding is suggested by another letter four days later; writing to Otto, the pope verified the receipt of his recent letter and excused himself for retaining the landgrave’s messenger for so long. The pope also thanked Otto for his favorable attitudes and willingness to serve the church.” In early May a similar exchange occurred. The pope verified the arrival of Otto’s messengers and the receipt of his letters. He voiced his intention of supporting Otto’s son and namesake for the recently vacated archbishopric of Magdeburg, as the landgrave had requested; repeated his wish for peace between the landgrave and the archbishop of Mainz;

and promised to remind the archbishop to act on Otto’s intention to build a church.” Gerstenberg’s chronicle mentions briefly that Otto traveled to meet with the pope personally at this time.7?? Documents support this in a negative fashion only; between the pope’s letter of May 4, 1326, and March 12, 1327, there is no indication of Otto’s pres~ ence in Hesse. During this period, the pope accorded two important concessions to the landgrave’s family. On November 20, 1326, he granted Otto and his wife Adelheid permission to choose a confessor, and on March 2, 1327, the pope appointed young Otto, the landgrave’s second son, as archbishop of Magdeburg.*° The pope was apparently anxious to have young Otto in this position; the text of the appointment declares invalid the cathedral chapter’s election of another candidate and grants Otto special dispensations to compensate for his youth and his possession of only the lower orders. Otto was further distinguished by the permission to dispose of his former canonries and prebends as he saw fit.’ This appointment significantly elevated the standing of Landgrave Otto’s family. Not only was it a mark of distinction to have a highly placed ecclesiastic in one’s immediate

family, but Magdeburg was one of the most powerful German bishoprics of the fourteenth century. A letter dated four months later explains the pope’s special interest in Otto’s family at this time: John XXII thanks the landgraves for their animosity toward Ludwig of Bavaria and encourages them to maintain this stance.*? The landgraves’ rewards for this strategic support of the pope took the form of privileges and positions that further confirmed their standing. Privileges such as the right

to choose a confessor were not so much religious necessities as signs of princely rank. In , 04

Court and Context

a similar vein, the pope granted Heinrich II and his wife an indulgence to hear private mass in areas under interdict and permitted the use of a portable altar.*4 A final mark of the pope’s recognition of the landgraves took the form of letters of sympathy to Adelheid and Heinrich II after Landgrave Otto’s death on January 17, 1328.* During the last three years of his life Landgrave Otto carefully cultivated a strategic relationship with the pope. Offering himself as an ally, Otto succeeded in interesting the pope in his own difficulties with the archbishop of Mainz. Furthermore, he arranged for the advancement of his sons’ careers as well as the conferring of honors and privileges upon his family. Ever conscious of family honor and dynastic legitimization, Otto considered every means for their achievement and expression. This is not to say that the landgraves have left no record of more spiritual inter-

ests. At the same time as the tomb’s commission, at mid-decade, Otto made his single recorded donation with the specified aim of providing anniversary masses for himself. Citing Elizabeth as his model in providing for the Teutonic Order, he gave his portion of a wood to the Order’s house at Schiffenberg in a document dated June 28, 1325.°° As this cloister had been desperately in need of repair at the time of its takeover by the Teutonic Order in 1323, Otto may be demonstrating his awareness of the Order’s needs;*7 he also cites the wood’s proximity to the Schiffenberg house in justifying his donation. Although a comparable document arranging similar memorial masses at St. Elizabeth’s no longer exists, Otto may have made similar provisions at about the same time here. Otto's donation came at a time when another family member was making simi-

lar arrangements. Agnes of Nuremberg, Otto’s half sister, made repeated gifts to the Teutonic Knights from the mid-1310s.*° Starting in 1323, however, these donations stipulate the income for anniversary masses. In that year a gift to the Marburg house established anniversaries for herself and her parents.*? A year later a similar gift to the Order’s public hospital in Marburg provided small sums of money for the inmates on her parents’

anniversaries and her own, presumably in return for their prayers.°° After Otto’s death , in 1328, Agnes established an anniversary mass for him at St. Elizabeth’s.*’ The family’s repeated turn to provisions for the hereafter in the years 1323—25 further marks this as a likely time for the planning and execution of the tombs. The pleurant tombs appear as a calculated response to a conflation of events in the mid-1320s—territorial difficulties, political maneuvering, and religious concerns. The calculated iconography of these monuments explained the landgraves’ genealogy and thereby legitimized their territorial claims, glorified the family’s collective honors, and acclaimed their solidarity. The specific trials and aggravated intensity of the events of 1324-28 and the systematic, many-angled manner in which Otto went about strength-

ening his position support the tombs’ commission at this time. In their finished form the tombs helped in the landgraves’ defense against the claims of the archbishops of Mainz and constituted one element in a multifaceted campaign to gain and exhibit strength. In a more general way, the tombs, with various other privileges gained in the 1320s, were part of the landgraves’ long-term effort to establish a physical, legal, and reli-

| cious setting appropriate to their rank. 05

Chapter III

The Artistic Context of Heinrich II’s Commission The architectural and sculptural commissions of Landgrave Heinrich I and his son Otto

were visible and important parts of the environment in which Heinrich II grew up, , marking the physical setting for the landgraves’ rule and updating and embellishing the capital of their territories. They also existed as evidence for a tradition of family patronage. But the additions to the Marburg castle and the family tomb cycle at St. Elizabeth’s worked in other ways as well. They conditioned the way in which the family saw itself and, more importantly, they directed outsiders’ understandings of the family and the office. On the one hand, this intended reading of the family’s importance assisted in creating a visual environment appropriate for the high birth of its members and their position in affairs of the empire. On the other hand, the artistic commissions responded to specific and important events in family history. By the time of Heinrich II’s advent to the role and title of landgrave, family members had long accepted works of art as appropriate responses to these events and powerful vehicles for defending family claims. Heinrich’s Willehalm Codex repeats many of the essential features of these projects and, with its impressive scale, high quality, and finely tuned message, provides a grand finale to the

first century of the landgraves’ patronage of the arts. , To understand the degree to which Heinrich’s commission depends on and develops the patterns established by his ancestors, the manuscript’s place of production, the most consuming problem in the earlier literature on the Kassel codex, must first be localized. If Heinrich imported his most important manuscript rather than turning to local painters, the efforts expended and the artists chosen may disclose his intentions for _ this work. Was the family’s perception of this manuscript’s significance linked to their choice of artist or style? Or, conversely, does their choice of a certain artist or regional school further illuminate their intentions for this book? Since the previous chapters have revealed the careful planning of every other aspect of the Willehalm manuscript’ design, it is likely that style too was chosen for its possible connotations and considered a tool in the service of this codex’s total concept. The style of the miniatures in Heinrich’s manuscript relates closely to parts of the illumination programs in two other manuscripts, the so-called Wettinger Gradual (Aarau, Switzerland, Kantonsbibliothek Ms Wett. Fol. max. 1-3) (Figs. 91-93) and a sermologium now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (Ms Douce 185) (Figs. 94—96).” Like the Willehalm manuscript, these two works are large-scale productions, whose extensive decorative programs comprise numerous large illuminations executed in color and gold and devote considerable attention to other decorative elements such as borders and large colored initials. Also like the Willehalm Codex, their production was structured to allow the collaboration of other artists. In the case of the Bodleian Sermologium, this division of labor was organized by quires; two, or more likely three, different artists participated with the Willehalm Master in the manuscript’s early-fourteenth-century decoration.% The division of labor in the Wettinger Gradual is more complex. The Willehalm Master was responsible for the figural and initial decoration of volume one on his own, but in 66

| Court and Context volumes two and three, a second master executed the historiated initials and all those decorated with color and gold. The two artists both worked on the red and blue penwork initials, with the Willehalm Master’s characteristic forms easily visible in all the penwork initials on the pages where the second master later applied color and gold.°* The close collaboration of the artist of the Willehalm Codex with four other contemporary illuminators signals their simultaneous activity in a large urban center where a number of accomplished masters worked in close proximity and could count on one another’s cooperation when an unusually large commission or time pressure strained the capacities of a single small shop. Only a relatively small number of centers had the personnel and clientele to support such ad hoc cooperative working arrangements. One such site was Paris; Cologne was another.?>

A group of manuscripts related to the Grof St. Martin Bible (Diisseldorf, Universitatsbibliothek A5) provides the immediate roots for the Willehalm Master’s style in Cologne (Fig. 97).°° In these works from the 1310s, many features that later characterize the Willehalm Master’s work appear in nascent form. Full soft draperies are modeled in light highlights and pockets of dark shadow. The delicate, balanced colors and the

modulated, controlled hemlines create a similar elegant impression. The restrained gestures | and expressive poses of the figures predict those of the Willehalm Master as do the facial types. The architectural settings are equally complex and refined. Simplified readable compositions are preferred: symmetry around a central figure or void, with a single focus of attention, is the standard form. In total, the images project a delicate preciousness and a sense of exacting balance. These miniatures prefigure the Willehalm Master’s images, providing the foundation from which they emerge. Yet, while the Willehalm Master’s painting seems to have its beginnings here, his images have lost the inventive freshness of the miniatures of the Bible group. The Willehalm Master’s perpetuation of this style into the 1330s results

in a variant whose elegance has become more stately, almost frozen. The corresponding , monumentality of his images also has a precedent in the manuscripts of this group: the first two miniatures in an antiphonary (Cologne, Diézesansbibliothek ms 149) prefigure the larger, more firmly outlined figures of the Willehalm Master (Fig. 99). Even the Willehalm Master’s characteristic initial style derives from and develops the examples found in the Bible. The monumental “P” on folio 345r (Fig. 98) uses the vocabulary he will make his own.%” The dramatic looped extensions, whose axis is emphasized by a tiny row of bubbles ending in a flower with five petals around a central void, and the organization of the initial’s interior fill according to a strict geometry of repeated elements, which echo in the initial’s exterior corners, closely resemble the patterns that will

become his trademark. Yet the Willehalm Master’s initials deviate from this one in the same way his miniatures deviate from those in the Bible: he firms and monumentalizes the Bible’s initial type in the same way he does the figures of this group of manuscripts, giving them a sturdiness and a self-assured elegance not yet seen in the earlier work. If the Willehalm Master’s illuminations reveal their origins in an earlier style,

which he has frozen and monumentalized, and made more mannered and more decora07

Chapter III

tive, they have a contemporary comparison in a pair of panel paintings. Two of the works

around which the essence of the “Cologne style” in the early fourteenth century 1s defined, an Annunciation and a Presentation, both in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum (Figs. 100—I01), are very close to the Willehalm Master’s illuminations in spite of the differ-

ence in medium.”

The most striking points of contact between these works appear in the treat- , ment of the figures. Within the firm, closed outlines, the softness of the figures’ robes gives a sense of the body underneath. The tall figures stand solidly or step forward with deliberate intention, their restrained, almost staged movement sustained by the fall of their heavy robes, the stately, expressive hand gestures, and the concerned tilt of the head. The obvious pleasure in hems that roll back on themselves to create calligraphic

patterns and in lively plays of color remains in check, as controlled and stately as the | other aspects of the image. Numerous motifs in the drapery configuration repeat in both panel and miniature: the small point where the corner of a mantle projects beneath an elegant curve, the playful device of one covered foot whose pointed toe pushes into the drapery, and the heavy fall of robes against the ground. Single details also match closely: the slightly tightened hem of Gabriel’s right sleeve and the fall of the Virgin’s veil in the Presentation find exact parallels in Arabel’s garments in the Willehalm’s first chess scene (Fig. 24).

Both works use a heart-shaped facial type for all but old men. The tiny chins become even smaller as the far cheek slopes away sharply. The large eyes with straight lower edges and the small mouths and dimpled chins are consistent in manuscript and panel. The relationship of the figures to the background also links the Willehalm Codex

with the Wallraf-Richartz panels. The figures press up to the foreground, standing right on the edge of the frame. They are pushed forward by the impenetrable background, which keeps the figures’ movements almost entirely horizontal although limited diagonals, suggested by looks and gestures, vary the progress across the picture plane. The tooled patterns of the panels’ backgrounds also correspond closely to the grounds of the Kassel manuscript’s miniatures. The figures are tightly enclosed with an additional outline; its composition in tiny dots in the Annunciation panel 1s close to that in the Willehalm Codex’s second chess scene (Fig. 25). In the remaining background surfaces foliate forms spread out to fill the available space; the oak leaf pattern behind the angel Gabriel appears

as a cramped version of that on folio sr of the manuscript (Fig. 3). The similarities between the work of the Willehalm Master and the two Wallraf-Richartz panels extend to their slightly retardataire quality, the impression of an older style prolonged into the decade of the 1330s. Indeed, until recently the panels had been dated some thirty years earlier, at the turn of the century.% Iconographic details also link an image from the Willehalm Master’s immediate circle, the Annunciation in Bodleian ms Douce 185, with the Wallraf-Richartz panel of the same subject (Figs. 94, 100). The two images use a similar footed pitcher for the symbolic lilies. The three-petaled form of the lilies and the whimsical motif of the single flower thrusting up through the pitcher’s spout also repeat in both images. 68

Court and Context If there is a place for the Willehalm Master in Cologne painting of the 1330s, the work of his collaborators must also fit into local production. Like the best comparisons for

the Willehalm Master’s work, those for the illuminations of his two primary collaborators come from large-scale painting rather than manuscript illumination. The miniatures of his

younger colleague on the Wettinger Gradual, like the paintings of the cathedral choir , screen, have been discussed as derivatives of Jean Pucelle’s Parisian illuminations.’°° And indeed, the Younger Gradual Master’s taller, slimmer figure type, his more linear drapery folds highlighted in shimmering pale colors, and his head types, in particular the oblong one preferred for old men, find close correspondences on the choir screen and elsewhere in Cologne painting. The high forehead above sharply angled brows, the long hooked nose and the wide down-turned mouth give the Younger Gradual Master's aging apostles distracted, anxious looks that are accentuated by the unruly, flamelike locks of the long beards (Figs. 92—93). The repeated images of Constantine and Sylvester on the north screen and Bishop Eustorgius in the sixth panel of the Three King’s Legend on the south

also belong to this type. Even better comparisons, however, are Joseph and Simeon in the Presentation panel discussed above (Fig. 101). Clearly, the artists of these paintings were

familiar with one another’s work. The figures of the so-called Master of Douce 185, the most active artist in the decoration of that manuscript, also come closest to elements found in large-scale Cologne painting. Head types on the cathedral’s choir screen provide close matches for those in the Bodleian manuscript’s large historiated initials (Figs. 95, 96, 102). Both the large figures from the narrative scenes and the tiny grisaille figures filling the diapered compartments of the background use the same dramatic white highlights employed by the Master of

, Douce 185 on forehead, nose, and cheeks. Wide horizontal mouths and rust-colored shadow patches in the underjaw area appear in both the manuscript and the large figures.

In addition to the stylistic correspondences between the illuminations of the Willehalm Master and his assistants and the paintings of their Cologne contemporaries, a number of iconographic formulas help to place the manuscripts associated with the Willehalm Master even more firmly in the sphere of Cologne painting. As these comparisons are variants on standard religious subjects, they appear in the other manuscripts associated with the Willehalm Master and his colleagues rather than in the Willehalm Codex itself: Picturesque details borrowed predominantly from stained glass further support the proximity of these artists to monumental painting. The Madonna’ throne on folio 44v of the Bodleian manuscript (Fig. 96), for example, borrows the lively angels standing on the throne arms from the Bible window made for the Dominican church of the Holy Cross.’* Likewise, the Willehalm Master finds a quaint solution for the placement of the old magus’s crown in the Wettinger Gradual’s Adoration (Fig. 91) by turning to the Adoration window in the cathedral’s axial chapel: in both scenes the kneeling king drops his crown over his wrist and allows it to hang on his arm." In addition to borrowing these details, the manuscript artists adapt other stained

, 69

glass windows from Cologne as compositional models for their images. The Tiee of Jesse in MS Douce 185 organizes the ancestors of Christ into categories: prophets in the outermost

Chapter III columns, kings in the two closest to the center.’°? The central column itself'is occupied by tiny scenes from the life of Christ—Annunciation, Nativity, and Crucifixion—obscuring the central idea of Christ’s genealogical descent from Jesse by introducing narrative and dis-

placing lines of Christ’s Old Testament ancestors. A window from the church of St. Kunibert, dated about 1220-35, provides a model for this variant.* A looser correspondence between manuscript and window occurs in the compositions of the All Saints image in volume three of the Wettinger Gradual and the cathedral window of the same subject. The manuscript productions of the Willehalm Master and his collaborators also

display iconographic preferences of other Cologne artists. In the Adoration in the

Wettinger Gradual (Fig. 91) and the seated Madonna and Child in the Douce Sermologium (Fig. 96), the Child stands on his mother’s knee. In the Presentations in these two manuscripts (Fig. 93), the Child is held directly above the surface of the altar as he is passed from the Virgin’s hands to Simeon’s. Both of these devices are standards in Cologne as artists consistently stress the sacrificial aspects of these scenes.’ The final step in the production of the few finished pages in the Willehalm manuscript also helps locate the painting of the miniatures in Cologne. After completion of the illuminations, a scribe lettered red rubrics near the images.'°” Unlike the rubrics in the Vienna manuscript, which occupy ruled lines within the text block, those in the Kassel manuscript appear as afterthoughts, squeezed into the margins at the edges of the page or between the columns. The rubrics’ linguistic character also evidences their separate conception from the text. Unlike the middle German dialect of the epic’s text, the red labels exhibit a strong lower German influence.'’°* Cologne, on the threshold of the lower German dialect area, is a likely site for the occurrence of this linguistic mixture." Heinrich II’s turn to an artist in the Rhenish metropolis for the illumination of the Willehalm Codex reflects not only the wide appeal of Cologne works, but also the importance that the landgrave vested in this manuscript. He could entrust only an established artist with such an extravagant commission, for only a commercially successful artist could sustain the elaborate production in a workshop with access to qualified col-

, laborators and assistants. And only a mature master of considerable experience could be expected to interpret the text in pictorial form according to the landgrave’s needs and wishes. In Cologne, Heinrich found artists -with these qualifications. Other practical considerations may also have helped to determine the landgrave’s decision to seek a Cologne shop for the illumination of his manuscript. Cologne marked

the end of a major thoroughfare that connected Hesse, especially Kassel, with the Rhineland.”° This important axis for travel and trade made Cologne an obvious place for the landgrave to turn. Political and familial connections also guaranteed the landgrave’s knowledge of artistic activities in Cologne. From 1326 the landgraves at least sometimes sided with the archbishop and the papal party against King Ludwig of Bavaria. In 1325 Heinrich’s younger brother Otto had been appointed a canon of Cologne cathedral; one of the striking features of his appointment as archbishop of Magdeburg in 1327 was that he was allowed to retain his earlier posts." In addition to these concrete associations, the landgrave’s choice of a Cologne artist

70

Court and Context

also served two subtler purposes. The selection of a recognizable Cologne style for the Willehalm Codex marks the landgrave as an informed patron aware of the city’s artistic role

and anxious to participate in its cultural activity. Several factors account for the prestige element associated with Cologne work: the city’s longstanding reputation as an art center and the consistent high quality and international reputation of the works produced there.™

, Heinrich may also have sought out a Cologne artist for the specific connotations his style carried. Recent work on medieval perceptions of style indicates that patrons and artists sometimes chose a specific style for a project because its use might draw meaningful allusion to other, earlier works."+ Thus style itself might become a carrier of mean-

ing, and we might cautiously speak of an iconography of style. The exact associative meanings with which Heinrich invested the Willehalm Master’s style can only be sur: mised. Cologne’s government of wealthy patrician families, independent of a feudal overlord," may have held desirable associations for the landgrave, a loose parallel to the ideal power relationships propounded in the Willehalm text and the illumination program designed for the Kassel codex. The elimination of the archbishop as a political power within the city may have struck a particularly responsive chord for Heinrich, caught in a continuing struggle over his territory’s sovereignty with the archbishop of Mainz. Likewise, the retrospective, slightly retardataire character of the manuscript may also hark back to the time before the division of Hesse that had opened the way for the archbish-

op’s intervention.™°

The recognizable Cologne style of the Willehalm Codex also links it to the family’s major commissions of the two previous generations, the palace chapel and knights’ hall and the tomb cycle in St. Elizabeth’s..” Their execution in elegant styles imported from a single source asserts the similarity of the three works’ messages. Heinrich II’s preference for Cologne, like the dramatic scale and overt message of his commission, connects

him firmly to his forefathers in a family tradition.™ | The Political Context of Heinrich’s Commission The telling of the Willehalm story from the viewpoint of the noble and the distribution of power recorded in the epic, where the hero takes over some of the duties and roles of the ruler, made this material particularly appealing to patrons who saw their own situa-

tion reflected in that of the hero.”? Yet the carefully planned features of Heinrich II’s codex, together with the political functions of earlier artistic commissions at the landgraves’ court, prompt a search for more specific reasons for Heinrich’s interest in the Willehalm text and for his commission of this manuscript in 1334.A study of his political and religious concerns in the first years of his rule suggests that, as in the cases of his father and grandfather, specific events also motivated Heinrich’s commission. The continuing violence of the territorial dispute with Mainz conditioned the first year of Heinrich’s rule. With the death of Landgrave Otto in January 1328, his son became the family standard-bearer in this longstanding feud. A contract dated March 1

71

Chapter III

allied Archbishop Matthias von Bucheck and Count Johann von Ziegenhain, a local Hessian noble, and stipulated Landgrave Heinrich as their prime enemy.'’*° In a major battle on August 10 the archbishop routed Landgrave Heinrich’s troops; Gerstenberg’s mention of this battle in two different contexts in his fifteenth-century chronicle of Hessian history gives the impression that it played a decisive role in settling the conflict."*" However, only with the death of Archbishop Matthias on September 9, 1328, did the chance for peace actually materialize. Although the ensuing truce must have been welcome to both sides, the events of the last eighty years gave every reason to expect that it would provide temporary relief at best. Indeed, this turned out to be the case. On November 8, 1328, an arbitration court was appointed to make arrangements for ending the war and to find a final settlement by the following Easter.* Representatives of the two sides met on May 14, 1329, but they

had reached no agreement by June 20.73 A truce was pledged on October 30 for the brief period until February 1330.4 A contract between Heinrich and Mainz, dated December II, 1329, extended the newly arranged peace for a three-year period dating from May 1, 1330.**5 But at the end of the summer of 1332, tensions mounted.”° The wording of a truce arranged on August I, 1334, suggests recent hostilities but promised concord until Candlemas 1336.” By late 1335 the situation seems to have deteriorated again; a document dated October 3, 1335, 1n which Heinrich contracted an alliance with his brother-in-law, the margrave of Meissen, against Mainz,’*® suggests impending hostilities. In September 1336 Heinrich made arrangements with the representatives of the margrave of Meissen and Mainz in a war against another noble, but the document also included provisions for the eventuality that the three allies might not agree on the division of the spoils.”9 On February 5, 1338, Archbishop Heinrich allied himself anew with Landgrave Heinrich, in a peace that they renewed three years later for a second term."° The expected renewal in 1344 does not seem to have been a matter of course. A peace arranged between the archbishop and the margrave of Meissen on March 29 mentions

the possible admission of the landgrave of Hesse to its terms, but on September 22, Heinrich allied himself with the margrave of Meissen and four other lords against the archbishop and those who would take his part in war." In a document of May 6, 1345, the archbishop mentioned an upcoming battle with Landgrave Heinrich, but at the end of the next month, they agreed on a four-year peace." The outbreaks of violence and periods of tension interspersed with renewals of the truce allow characterization of this now century-old dispute as an important, ongo-

72 |

ing concern during most of Heinrich’s rule. New hostilities in the early 1350s and 1360s affirm the tenuous character of the peace between these now traditional enemies.“ Thus. it seems hardly surprising that Heinrich II chose to validate his position in this war, just as his father had done before him, in the central commission of his first years as landgrave.

The emphasis on Willehalm’s disinheritance in the illumination cycle designed for

Heinrich’s codex especially links this manuscript with the origins of the family’s most difficult political struggle. Heinrich’s manuscript may also reflect his dealings with the king. Although the

Court and Context

landgrave’s relations with Ludwig of Bavaria vacillated almost as wildly as those with Mainz, by the early 1330s Heinrich had achieved an advantageous position in his dealings with the monarch. After supporting Friedrich of Austria until his decisive defeat in 1322, Landgrave Otto had allied himself with Ludwig, and on April 7 the king invested him

with the fiefs that had belonged to his father and half brother.%4 In 1325 Otto and Ludwig formed a defensive union against the king of France, but in 1327 Otto shifted his allegiance to the pope against Ludwig."> By 1331, however, Heinrich II was allied with Ludwig again. That year—shortly before Heinrich conceived the codex project—was a

particularly fruitful one in his relationship to the German king. On June 1 Ludwig approved and renewed for Heinrich all of the fiefs, privileges, freedoms, and rights that

had been granted to his father and grandfather by previous kings.¥%° On June 3 Ludwig , took Heinrich, with his land, people, and properties, into his personal protection.’ At the same time he named Heinrich to his secret council and promised him twenty-four hors-

es when he served the king at court. In a document dated a week later the king bound himself to pay the landgrave the impressive sum of 13,000 pounds Heller,®* probably as | a settlement for services rendered although the document is not specific on this point. At the end of the same year, on December 23, Ludwig promised Heinrich control of a toll house to be erected on the Rhine for as long as it took to meet his demands."? In 1336 Heinrich received another financial benefit from the king, the right to collect a tax on all goods stored by merchants in Kassel.° One senses in these dealings that Heinrich’s relations with Ludwig were very much in the landgrave’s favor. Although Ludwig apparently owed Heinrich large sums of money and was slow in repayment, Heinrich parlayed these debts into important rights and privileges to solidify his financial status and prestige. In the story, the noble hero maintains full independence from his sovereign in his own territories and even takes over royal responsibilities in the defense of the realm.

, Heinrich too was able to maintain a position of strength in his dealings with Ludwig , and to structure his relationship with the king to his own advantage. In this context it 1s noteworthy that, of the three nearly contemporary Willehalm codices from the early fourteenth century, only the Kassel manuscript would have depicted the king’s funding of the hero’s cloister foundation (fol. 387r). The particularly strong emphasis on the saintly life of Willehalm at the end of the Kassel codex may also relate to Heinrich’s personal and political interests. These images likely recorded Heinrich’s perception of the saint as an ancestor, with their unusual detail thus stressing the patron’s sanctified lineage. The only evidence within the book to support this,'4" however, is unusually vague, especially if considered in the context of the codex’s other, more forcefully expressed messages and Heinrich’s explicit notation of his descent from Elizabeth on his seals. Nonetheless, the development of the hero’s familial and political concerns in the earlier parts of the manuscript coupled with the elaborate development of Willehalm’s saintly life at the end of the manuscript do suggest a positive outcome

and heavenly sanction for his behavior. In view of the parallels between the story and the landgraves’ family history, the emphasis on Willehalm’s saintly life might document Heinrich’s certainty about the correctness of his and his family’s position.

73

Chapter II Whether or not the manuscript pays tribute to Willehalm as a family ancestor, it corresponds closely in date to a series of small favors Heinrich granted to the local cloister of Williamite monks.” The presence of monks of the Order of St. William in Hesse dates from 1291, when Heinrich I supported the transfer of the church of St. Nicolas at Witzenhausen to the brothers of the Order."43 According to the documents, Heinrich IT limited his involvement at Witzenhausen to two concerns, the disposition of a wood and the patronage rights to a newly built chapel. In March 1331 Heinrich decided a legal matter over the so-called “Uslarische” wood; in 1338 the prior and convent compensated Heinrich for the gift of a property at Uslar, presumably this same wood.+ Sometime before 1333 Heinrich gave a local citizen permission to build a chapel at Witzenhausen, and in 1338 he verified the donor’s patronage rights over this chapel and freed him from taxes on the properties providing its endowment."4> As quid pro quo Heinrich expected celebration of anniversaries for himself and his ancestors there. While these gifts do not indicate extraordinary interest in or special generosity to the Williamites,"° they do provide evidence for Heinrich’s associations with the Order and his awareness of its mythical founder at the same moment he commissioned his codex.

The political and religious themes stressed in the illumination cycle of the Willehalm Codex all find close parallels in Heinrich II’s concerns of the 1330s. Although it is impossible to say whether his interest in the subject matter first arose as a result of his devotion to the saintly hero or from his understanding of the story’s themes, Heinrich conceived his commission in a way that made the book meaningful to him. As expected from the examination of the frontispiece, and verified in the final inscription, Heinrich’s codex is an intensely personal statement, reflecting interests and concerns in his life at the moment it was created.

74

Notes to Chapter III

Notes

1. Aside from the tombs for his first wife and eldest son 10. Ulrich Stevens, Burgkapellen im deutschen Sprachraum,

discussed in the next section of this chapter, the other com- University of Cologne, 1978, Veroffentlichungen der

. missions of Heinrich I and his second wife are known only Abteilung Architektur des kunsthistorischen Instituts der through documents. A modest castle, which he built in Universitat Koln, xiv, Cologne, 1978, 357. Kassel in 1277 on the site of a previous structure, could be 11. Eugéne Viollet-le-Duc, “Salle,” Dictionnaire raisonné interesting in the current discussion. Other public works de Varchitecture francaise du XI au XVIF siecle, vin1, Paris, 1866,

in Kassel, such as the bridge built over the Fulda in 1283, 74-81. the Franciscan cloister endowed and built in 1272, and the 12. The knights’ hall in Marburg at 33 X 14 meters is hospital endowed by his wife in honor of Saint Elizabeth in the largest room of its type preserved in Germany. 1297, might have enhanced Heinrich’s public image as a Compare the measurements of various imperial halls from generous and socially responsible territorial lord, but they the 12th century: Eger 24.5 X 9.8 m., Wimpfen 17.8 X 14.5

are less likely to have played a direct role in the family’s m., Gelnhausen 12.4 X 12.8 m. The Sdngersaal at the

Kunstpolitik. Wartburg measured 17 X 9 meters. 2. The standard work on the castle is Karl Justi, Das 13. Wigand Gerstenberg, Die Chroniken Wigand Marburger Schlof$: Baugeschichte einer deutschen Burg, Gerstenberg von Frankenberg, ed. Hermann Diemar, Veroffent-

Veroffentlichungen der historischen Kommission fiir lichungen der historischen Kommission fiir Hessen und

Hessen und Waldeck, xx1, Marburg, 1942. Waldeck, vm, 1, Marburg, 1909, 228. All references here are 3. Otto Grotefend and Felix Rosenfeld, Regesten der to the Hessenchronik published on pages 1—318. Landgrafen von Hessen, 1: 1247-1328, Veroftentlichungen der 14. Wilhelm Dilich, Hessische Chronica ansenglich historischen Kommission ftir Hessen und Waldeck, v1, beschrieben durch Wilhelm Dilich, Kassel, 1605, 172; Johann-

Marburg, 1929, 104, no. 278. Just Winkelmann, Griindliche und Warhafte Beschreibung der 4. Jiirgen Michler, “Studien zur Marburger SchloB- Fiirstenthtimer Hessen und Hersfeld, Bremen, 1697, 297. The

kapelle,’ Marburger Jahrbuch fir Kunstwissenschaft, x1x, 1974, wording of the texts and the dates indicate that ,

36, $3—SS. | Winkelmann used Dilich as his source.

5. Ibid., 36, 53-55. On the chronology of St. Elizabeth’s, 15. Gerstenberg, Chroniken, 240, fol. 291'; Dilich, Hessische see also Kurt Wilhelm-Kastner, Die Elisabethkirche zu Chronica, 180; Winkelmann, Beschreibung, 311. Marburg und ihre kiinstlerische Nachfolge, 1: Die Architektur, 16. Gerstenberg, Chroniken, 240, fol. 291’. Marburg, 1924, and Hans-Joachim Kunst, “Die Dreikon- 17. Benjamin Arnold, Princes and Territories in Medieval chenanlage und das Hallenlanghaus der Elisabethkirche zu Germany, Cambridge, 1991, 32—36. Marburg,” Hessisches Jahrbuch fiir Landesgeschichte, xvul, 1968, 18. Gerstenberg records the inscriptions on both sides

131-45. « of Heinrich’s seal: “sigillum Hinrici, dei gracia lantgravii, 6. Michler, “Marburger SchloBkapelle,’ 61-63. domini terre Hassie” and “et filii nate sancte Elisabeth” 7. Ibid., 73. (Chroniken, 236, fol. 289). Diemar’s note 15 verifies this

8. Michler cites the chapels at Vincennes, Riom, and against Heinrich’s seal appended to a document of March Bourges as examples (“Marburger SchloBkapelle,” 73). 6, 1272 (WyB 1, 206, no. 273). This practice continued well

g. The present parish church replaced a Romanesque into the 14th century; see Gerstenberg, 237, fols. 289 and building on the same site. The choir of the Gothic building 289’, for the use of “pronepos sancte Elisabeth” by Heinrich

was dedicated in 1297; see Arthur Wy8, Hessisches I’s sons Otto, Johann, and Ludwig; and 243-44, fols. 294 Urkundenbuch: Urkundenbuch der Deutschordensballei Hessen, and 294', for the use of “abnepos sancte Elisabeth” in the

pt. 1, vol. 1: 1207-1299, Publikationen aus den K6niglichen next generation by Heinrich I, Otto II, Ludwig II, and Preussischen Staatsarchiven, 11, Leipzig, 1879 (hereafter Hermann. Diemar verifies this only for Otto (p. 237, n. 2), cited as WyB 1), 465—66, no. 620. The church had stood whose reverse seal on a document of June 10, 1316, reads:

, under the patronage of the Teutonic Order since 1235 “Secretum Ottonis, pronepotis beate Elyzabeth” (Wy8 u,

(WyB 1, 38-39, no. 40). 221, no. 294), and for Heinrich II (p. 243, n. 19), whose seal | Documents record family donations for the family altar on a document of October 20, 1344, reads: “S. Heynrici, in the north transept at St. Elizabeth’s on April 1, 1258 abnepotis beate Elyzabeth” (Wy8 un, 533, no. 771). For fam(WyB8 1, 118-19, no. 153), September 12, 1265 (WyB 1, 166, ily members of succeeding generations, see Gerstenberg, no. 214), and January 4, 1298 (WyB 1, 476, no. 634). The 249, fol. 300' and 260, fol. 309. See also Karl Demandt, Teutonic Order made provisions for the altar on April 6, “Verfremdung und Wiederkehr der heiligen Elisabeth,” 1265 (WyB I, 164, no. 210), repeating them on November Hessisches Jahrbuch fiir Landesgeschichte, xxu, 1972, 145-46.

10, 1302 (Arthur Wy8, Hessisches Urkundenbuch: Urkun- 19. Gerstenberg, Chroniken, 231, fol. 284. Contrast this denbuch der Deutschordensballei Hessen, pt. 1., vol. 11: 1300-1359, evaluation of Heinrich’s demeanor with the modesty of

Publikationen aus den Koniglichen Preussischen Staats- the German kings (Robert Suckale, Die Hofkunst Kaiser archiven, xIx, Leipzig, 1884 [hereafter cited as WyB um], 33, Ludwigs des Bayern, Munich, 1993, 19-20).

no. 44). 20. WyB I, 115, no. 147, records the dedication to John 75

Notes to Chapter II the Baptist of the south transept altar nearest the crossing. 30 above is missing the sections that would have included Wilhelm-Kastner (Elisabethkirche) and subsequent scholars the entries for both these men.

have all used this date as a terminus ante quem for the com- 34. The standard work on the tombs is Richard pletion of the south transept and have assumed that the Hamann, Die Elisabethkirche zu Marburg und ihre kiinstlerische

north transept was completed by this time as well. Nachfolge, u: Die Plastik, Denkmaler der deutschen Kunst, 2. 21. On the early burial tradition at St. Elizabeth’s, see Sektion: Plastik, Marburg, 1929. For the bibliography on Joan A. Holladay, “Die Elisabethkirche als Begrabnisstatte— these tombs since 1929, see Alexander von Reitzenstein, Anfange,” in Elisabeth, der Deutsche Orden und thre Kirche: “Der Ritter im Heergewate: Bemerkungen tber einige Festschrift zur zoojahrigen Wiederkehr der Weihe der Bildgrabsteine der Hochgotik,’ in Studien zur Geschichte der Elisabethkirche Marburg 1983, ed. Udo Arnold and Heinz ~ europdischen Plastik: Festschrift Theodor Miiller zum 19. April

Liebing, Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte des 1965, ed. Kurt Martin et al., Munich, 1965, 73-91, and Deutschen Ordens, xvii, Marburg, 1983, 323—38. Holladay, “Tombs.” 22. On the frequent but erroneous identification of this While discussions from the roth century and earlier tomb as that of Heinrich’s mother Sophie and the over- dated these tombs late in the 14th century and associated whelming evidence for its identification as Adelheid, see them with family members from that period, modern Joan A. Holladay, “The Tombs of the Hessian Landgraves scholars uniformly include Heinrich I and Otto among the in the Church of St. Elizabeth at Marburg,” Ph.D. diss., three figures represented on the tombs. Confusion arises,

Brown University, 1982, 41-45. however, over the desire to include Johann, the eldest son 23. Lange’s excavation protocol is in the collections of of Heinrich I from his second marriage, among the men the Marburg Staatsarchiv, Handschriften H 171. Friedrich commemorated in the family necropolis. In fact, Johann’s Kiich published its most important parts in an appendix to name can be excluded on two grounds. First, the associa-

“Die Landgrafengrabmaler in der Elisabethkirche zu tion of Johann’s name with the Marburg tombs is a modMarburg: Ein Beitrag zur hessischen Kunstgeschichte,” ern invention, appearing in the discussion only in 1903 Zeitschrift des Vereins fiir hessische Geschichte und Landeskunde, (Kiich, “Landgrafengrabmiler,’ 173). Second, Johann had

XXXVI, N. $. XXVI, 1903, 215-25. no particular attachment to Marburg, and there is no reason 24. Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg, Handschriften H to assume his burial or commemoration there. Heinrich I

171 1/2, fol. 1sv. took Johann to Kassel as early as 1297 when he established 25. The transfer of Konrad’s and Adelheid’s tombs out the city as the capital of Lower Hesse. All of Johann’s activ-

, of the north transept also corresponds to changes in the ity as landgrave occurred there, as did his burial. A docuaccessibility of Elizabeth’s relics to the public (Holladay, ment of 1326 mentions Otto’s attendance at his half

“Elisabethkirche,” 332—34). brother’s funeral at the Kassel cloister Ahnaberg fifteen years 26. Kiich (“Landgrafengrabmiler,’ 168) reads the earlier (Grotefend and Rosenfeld, Regesten, 262—63, no. inscription from the top center, reconstructing the dam- 722). No sign of the tombs of Johann and his wife was aged and missing letters: ANO DOMINI MCCXC VIII IN found when the cloister was razed in 1879 (“Kloster VIGILIA BARTHOLomEI ApOSToli o(biit) hENRICUS Ahnaberg,” Die Bau- und Kunstdenkmdler im Regierungsbezirk

DOMICELLUS LANTGRAVIUS IUNIOR. Cassel, vt: Kreis Cassel Stadt, Text, pt. 1, ed. A. Holtmeyer, 27. Lange, Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg, H 171 1/2, Marburg, 1923, 136). fol. 15v—16r; Georg Landau, “Die ftirstlichen Grabmiler in Present knowledge of burial practice makes certain that

der Kirche der h. Elisabeth zu Marburg,” Zeitschrift des a painted inscription on the molding at the edge of the Vereins fiir hessische Geschichte und Landeskunde, v, 1850, slab originally identified the gisants. Since a tomb’s prima-

187—89. ry functions were to mark the burial site in preparation for 28. Kiich, “Landgrafengrabmaler,” 153. the Last Judgment and to elicit prayers for the fate of the 29. Grotefend and Rosenfeld, Regesten, 94, no. 249; 96, deceased’s soul, proper identification was essential.

no. 253; 132—33, no. 362. 35. Gustav von Bezold, “Zwei Grabmiler aus der 30. Arthur WyB, Hessisches Urkundenbuch: Urkundenbuch Frithzeit des 14. Jahrhunderts in S. Elisabeth zu Marburg,” der Deutschordensballei Hessen, pt. 1, vol. 11: 1360-1399, Mitteilungen aus dem Germanischen Nationalmuseum, 1911, 18.

Publikationen aus den K6niglichen Preussischen 36. When Heinrich, duke of Saxony and count palatine Staatsarchiven, Lxxi, Leipzig, 1899 (hereafter cited as WyB of the Rhine, named Otto of Braunschweig and Liineberg

Ill), 269—70. his successor in 1223, he set his cap (cupheo) upon the child’s 31. Gerstenberg, Chroniken, 222, fol. 278. head: “Nos ... Ottoni, duci de luneborch, tanquam heredi 32. Kassel, Hessische Landesbibliothek 4° ms Hass. 49, nostro et legitimo successori, Cupheo nostro a capite

fol. 11; ill. in Holladay, “Elisabethkirche,” fig. 21. The attri- dempto, porreximus et in proprium dedimus Brunswich | bution of this sketchbook to Dilich is based on the adapta- civitatem” (cited in Charles Du Cange, Glossarium Mediae et tion and reuse of the drawings in his illustrated Hessian Infimae Latinitatis, 1883-87; repr. Graz, 1954, I, 658, under

chronicle; see n. 14 above. cuphia, after the Origines Guelficae, IV, no. 3, p. 98). 33. Gerstenberg, Chroniken, 236-37, fol. 289; 243, fol. 37. Grotefend and Rosenfeld, Regesten, 114—15, nos.

| 294. The necrology for St. Elizabeth’s mentioned in note 310-17. See also page 43 above. 76

: Notes to Chapter II 38. Ulrike Bergmann agrees with my identification of cernant Vhistoive de art dans la Flandre, l’Artois et le Hainault the figures on the double tomb but cannot decide between avant le XV® siécle, 1: 627-1373, Lille, 1886, 202. Teresa G.

Johann and Otto for the effigy of the single tomb (Das Frisch has printed an English translation in Gothic Art Chorgestiihl des Kélner Domes, Jahrbuch des Rheinischen 1140-c. 1450: Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.,

Vereins ftir Denkmalpflege und Landschaftsschutz 1971, 113-14. Dehaisnes includes the documents relative to

1986—87, Neuss, 1987, 147-148). the tomb’s transport from Paris to the Burgundian abbey 39. Aenne Liebreich, “Kostiimgeschichtliche Studien zur of Cherlieu (p. 213).

k6lnischen Malerei des 14. Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch fiir 48. Dehaisnes, Documents, 209; Pierre Quarré, Les

Kunstwissenschaft, 1928, 87. Pleurants dans V’art du moyen age en Europe, exh. cat., Dyon, 40. See below, pages 62-65, for a discussion of the date 1971, 28, no. 3, pl. 1v. This figure, in the collection of Mme.

of the tombs. Cousin at Vésoul, is broken at the neck and the knees but 41. On figural tombs, and especially raised tombs, as pre- appears to have represented a man in secular dress.

tensions to power, see Suckale, Hofkunst, 104. 49. Gaigniéres’ extensive collection of tomb drawings 42. Covered today by an early-1sth-century raised tomb, (ill. in Jean Adhémar and Gertrude Dordor, “Les Tombeaux this slab is described by Lange (Hessisches Staatsarchiv de la collection Gaigniéres. Dessins d’archéologie du XVII*

Marburg, H 171 1/2, fols. 15v—16r, 17v) and Landau siécle,’ Gazette des Beaux-Arts, LXXXIV, 1974, 3-192) (“Grabmiler,’ 187—89) as slightly larger than Heinrich the includes only 8 examples from the 13th and first half of the

Younger’s and bearing the figure of a woman “represented 14th centuries.

in the same way.’ Both authors mention the tomb’s badly 50. Matthias Joseph de Noel, Der Dom zu Koln: rubbed condition, but both succeeded in reading the Historisch-archdologische Beschreibung, Koln, 1837, 101; Sulpiz inscription that is no longer legible today: + ANNO M. Boisserée, Geschichte und Beschreibung des Doms von Koln, CC .../...(1) KALENDAS MAII OBIIT ALEYDIS Q... Stuttgart, 1823, (20). The base was destroyed in 1802. The

/(LAYNTGRAVIA ET DOMINA TERRE HASSIE. tomb’s date is much discussed in the literature, swaying REQ(UIE)S(CAT) IN/PACE. The letters in parentheses are between the 1260s and c. 1300. See, respectively, Herbert Landau’s additions to Lange’s slightly more conservative Rode, “Plastik des K6Iner Doms in der zweiten Halfte des

reading. | 13. Jahrhunderts: Das Hochstaden-Grabmal und die 43. The tombs of Philippe Dagobert (d. 1235) and Louis Chorpfeilerskulpturen,” Rhein und Maas: Kunst und Kultur of France (d. 1260), both now at St. Denis, are examples of 800-1400, 11, exh. cat., Cologne and Brussels, 1972, 431-32, this type; ill. in Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, Le Roi est mort: and Anton Legner, “Die Grabfigur des Erzbischofs Konrad étude sur les funérailles, les sépultures, et les tombeaux des rois de von Hochstaden im Kolner Dom,” in Intuition und France jusqu’a la fin du XIII® siécle, Bibliothéque de la Société Kunstwissenschaft: Festschrift fiir Hanns Swarzenski zum 70.

francaise d’archéologie, vil, Paris, 1975, figs. 115-30. Geburtstag am 30. August 1973, ed. Peter Bloch, Berlin, 1973, 44. Henriette s’Jacob, Idealism and Realism: A Study of 265— 66, 287.

Sepulchral Symbolism, Leiden, 1954, 84, 86. 51. Rode, “Plastik,” 432. 45. The bishop in the central arcade at the head of the 52. On the possible interpretation of these figures as the double tomb must represent Heinrich I’s son Ludwig, “family” of Christ, see Joan A. Holladay, “The Iconography Bishop of Miinster, while Otto’s son and namesake, who of the High Altar in Cologne Cathedral,” Zeitschrift fiir was installed as archbishop of Magdeburg in 1327, stands at Kunstgeschichte, Lu, 1989, 495—90.

the foot of the single tomb (Fig. 89). The pallium distin- 53. See Hamann on the relationship of the tombs for

guishes Otto’s vestments from those of his uncle. Konrad and Adelheid to architectural sculpture at St. The identifications of these two ecclesiastics and the Elizabeth’s (Elisabethkirche, 65-66, 73-74). Frank A. numbers of family members included on each tomb serve Greenhill discusses the typical local production of flat as further support for the identifications of the gisants pro- tomb slabs in Germany (Incised Effigial Slabs: A Study of posed above. Although it is not possible to identify all the Engraved Stone Memorials in Latin Christendom, c. 1100 to c.

other pleurant figures on the two tombs, as Kiich tried to 1700, London, 1976, 46). . do (“Die Klagefiguren an den Grabdenkmialern des 54. Jiirgen Michler, “Marburg und Koln: Wechselseitige Marburger Lettnermeisters,’ Hessenkunst, 1922, 26 —37), the Beziehungen in der Baukunst des 13. Jahrhunderts,” sharply limited number of pleurants on the single tomb Hessische Heimat, Xxu, 1972, 73-88. corresponds closely to the size of Otto’s family, while the 55. Hamann, Elisabethkirche, 95—96.

significantly larger number of mourners on the double 56. The figures from the Gate of the Three Kings and tomb reflects more nearly the children of Heinrich I’s two the Tonger’schen Madonna, also known as the Madonna of

matriages. the Kunstgewerbemuseum, are housed in Cologne’s 46. Judith Warren Hurtig, The Armored Gisant before 1400. Schniitgen Museum.

(Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1978), Outstanding Bergmann examines in more detail the relationships Dissertations in the Fine Arts, New York and London, 1979, between Cologne and Marburg, tracing specific forms and

38, 48. details from the cathedral’s choir stalls and high altar in the 47. Chrétien Dehaisnes, Documents et extraits divers con- tombs (Chorgestiihl, 145-47).

77

Notes to Chapter II 57. See, for example, Anton Legner’s catalogue entries 80. Grotefend and Rosenfeld, Regesten, 278, no. 761; 281, in Rhein und Maas, 1, 371-75 and more recently Ulrike nos. 766—68. Otto was granted the pallium on August 8, Bergmann, Verschwundenes Inventarium: Der Skulpturenfund 1327 (p. 287, no. 784) and arrangements for his consecra-

im Kolner Domchor, exh. cat., Cologne, 1984, 41. tion were made on the same day (p. 288, no. 786). 58. WyB u, 331, no. 438. The document is dated 81. Grotefend and Rosenfeld, Regesten, 285, no. 777. February 27, 1323. The damaged seal represented a frontal 82. Ibid., 285, no. 775. female head with a lily crown. Only a portion of the 83. Jean Favier, Un Conseiller de Philippe le Bel: Enguerran

inscription remains:...E.ELIZA.... de Marigny, Société de l’Ecole des chartes, Mémoires et $9. Hans Joachim von Brockhusen, “Eine religids-poli- documents, xvI, Paris, 1963, 23.

tische Demonstration am Grabe der Heiligen Elisabeth 84. Grotefend and Rosenfeld, Regesten, 289, no. 788 beim Deutschen Orden zu Marburg im Jahre 1326: Der (October 6, 1327); 292, no. 792 (December I0, 1327). Figurenkreis des Tresorgitters,’ in Studien zur Geschichte des 85. Ibid., 294, no. 797. Preussenlandes: Festschrift fiir Erich Keyser zu seinem 70. 86. Ibid., 271, no. 738. Printed in WyB u, 363-64, no. Geburtstag, ed. Ernst Bahr, Marburg, 1963, 42—45. Reading 479. Otto either errs or willfully manipulates the facts

from left to right the figures represent Johann von about the relationship between Elizabeth and the Teutonic Dernbach, a local knight and vassal of the landgraves; Order. Her hospital did not come under the Order’s conFriedrich IV, Burggraf von Niirnberg; a musician; trol until about two years after her death. Landgrave Otto; a musician; Kuno von Dudeldorf, com- Donations of this type and provisions for anniversary mander (Komtur) of the Teutonic Order in Marburg; a masses were sometimes made at moments of ill health musician; Heinrich II of Hesse; Ludwig V of Bavaria, mar- when the donor feared his impending death. See, for exam-

grave of Brandenburg; King Ludwig; a musician; King ple, Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “The Ceremonial of Royal Friedrich of Austria; Johann I, count of Ziegenhain. Succession in Capetian France: The Funeral of Philip V,”

60. See the introduction and chap. 2 above. Speculum, LV, 1980, 273-74, and Karl E. Demandt, Das 61. Grotefend and Rosenfeld, Regesten, 258—61, nos. Chorherrenstift St. Peter zu Fritzlar: Quellen und Studien zu

717-204. seiner mittelalterlichen Gestalt und Geschichte, Veroftent62. Ibid., 261—63, nos. 721-23. lichungen der historischen Kommission fiir Hessen, xLrx,

63. Ibid., 270, no. 735. Marburg, 1985, 315. Similar concerns might have prompted

64. Ibid., 276, no. 755. Otto to commission his tomb. 65. Ibid., 277—78, no. 759. 87. See note 74 above.

66. Ibid., 280, no. 764. 88. Wy8 1, 207-8, no. 275 (June 10, 1315); 218, no. 290 67. Gerstenberg, Chroniken, 245—46, fol. 296’. (April 26, 1316); 219—20, no. 293 (June 2, 1316); 275, no. 367 68. Grotefend and Rosenfeld, Regesten, 284, no. 774. (December 20, 1319).

) 69. Ibid., 285—86, nos. 778, 779. 89. WyB 1, 334-35, no. 444.

70. Ibid., 286, no. 781. go. Ibid., 357-58, no. 468. _

71. Ibid., 288, no. 787. gi. Ibid., 383—84, no. 518.

72. Ibid., 288, no. 787A. 92. I develop the arguments in this paragraph more fully 73. Suckale agrees with this conclusion, citing my dis- in “The Willehalm Master and His Colleagues:

sertation (Hofkunst, 104). Collaborative Manuscript Decoration in Early-Fourteenth74. Except for a single donation to the Marburg house Century Cologne,” in Making the Medieval Manuscript Book: of the Teutonic Order in 1317, Otto’s dealings with the Techniques of Production, ed. Linda L. Brownrigg, Proceedings

Order were business transactions, like trading servants and of the Fourth Conference of the Seminar in the History borrowing money. Even the 1317 gift, a stone quarry of the Book to 1500, Oxford, July 1992, Los Altos Hills, offered on the recommendation of Otto’s secretary, a broth- Calif., 1995, 67—9I.

er of the Teutonic House, seems more like a business deal The association of the Willehalm Codex and the than an act of piety as the deed fails to specify motives or Wettinger Gradual was first published by Marie Mollwo compensation; WyB II, 243, no. 322. Presumably the Order (Das Wettinger Graduale: Eine geistliche Bilderfolge vom Meister

needed stone for their building projects, probably the con- des Kasseler Willehalmcodex und seinem Nachfolger, Berner struction of the facade towers at St. Elizabeth’s underway Schriften zur Kunst, 1, Bern-Biimpliz, 1944); stylistic relaat this time, and Otto met their need as they had met his in tionship between the Kassel Willehalm and Douce 185 was

a period of financial strain some three years earlier. suggested by Hanns Swarzenski in his review of Mollwo’s 75. Grotefend and Rosenfeld, Regesten, 269, no. 731. dissertation (Phoebus: Zeitschrift fiir bildende Kunst, u,

76. Ibid., 274—75, nos. 747, 748, 748a, 749. 1948—49, 45), and by Dorothy Miner (“Preparatory

77. Ibid., 275, no. 750. Sketches by the Master of Bodleian Douce Ms 185,” in 78. Ibid., 277-78, no. 759. Kunsthistorische Forschungen Otto Pacht zu Ehren, ed. Artur 79. Gerstenberg, Chroniken, 237, fol. 290'. Gerstenberg Rosenauer and Gerold Weber, Salzburg, 1972, 122). Marie erroneously names Rome, rather than Avignon, as the goal Roosen-Runge-Mollwo develops Miner’s ideas, linking

of Otto’s trip. the Willehalm Master to the Bodleian Sermologium more 78

Notes to Chapter III firmly (“Ein illustriertes Blatt in Cleveland aus dem 98. This comparison was first cited by Robert Freyhan, Wettinger Graduale,’ Zeitschrift fiir schweizerische Archdologie Die Ilustrationen zum Casseler Willehalm-Codex: Ein Beispiel

und Kunstgeschichte, XX XI, 1974, 101-4). Holladay propos- englischen Einflusses in der rheinischen Malerei des XIV.

es the entire second quire of the Bodleian Sermologium Jahrhunderts, Marburg, 1927, 30. as the work of the Willehalm Master and sees his influence The complex reciprocal relationships in early-14th-cenelsewhere in the manuscript as well (“Willehalm Master,” tury Cologne between large-scale paintings on panel, wall,

79 —83). and glass and smaller-scale works in manuscripts need a 93. Mollwo, in the title of her book cited in the previous much fuller treatment than can be afforded here. A number note, dubbed the artist of the Willehalm Codex and the first of works, such as the tiny Achatius diptych (Wallrafvolume of the Wettinger Gradual the Willehalm Master. I Richartz Museum, Inv.-Nr. 822) and the Marienstatt panretain that moniker here for the sake of convenience and els (Bonn, Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Inv.-Nr. 235),

consistency. confuse the traditional categorization of works based on

The decoration of Douce 185, left incomplete after the medium. Likewise, the unusually small number of illumiinitial campaign, was taken up again in the early fifteenth nators cited in the documents and the lack of clarity about century but dropped once again before completion. the professional designations Maler, Schilderer, and pictores 94. Mollwo (“Ein illustriertes Blatt in Cleveland’’) and make it difficult to identify the exact tasks accomplished Holladay (“Willehalm Master”) both suggest, on the basis of by each of these groups; see Almut Eichner, “Studien zur different evidence, that the Willehalm Master may have been Geschichte der Kolner Kunstler im Mittelalter,’ in Vor involved on these pages at the level of the underdrawing Stefan Lochner: Die Kélner Maler von 1300-1430, Ergebnisse der |

before the application of color by the second master. Ausstellung und des Colloquiums, Koln, 1974, Begleithefte zum 95. Patricia Danz Stirnemann and Marie-Thérése Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch 1977, 1, Cologne, 1977, 191-95. At Gousset, “Marques, mots, pratiques: leur signification et leurs other sites, such as Paris and London, and in 1s5th-century liens dans le travail des enlumineurs,’ Vocabulaire du livre et de Cologne, documents and pictorial evidence indicate that V’écriture au moyen age, ed. Olga Weijers, Etudes sur le vocab- the same artists sometimes worked in both large and small ulaire intellectuel du moyen age, 1, Turnhout, 1989, 39 —40; scales.

Joan Diamond, “Manufacture and Market in Parisian Book 99. Rainer Haussherr suggested the later date, in the Illumination around 1300,’ in Europdische Kunst um 1300, ed. 1330s, on the basis of similarities to the cathedral choir

Gerhard Schmidt, Akten des XXV. Internationalen screen paintings (“Die Chorschrankenmalereien des K6lner Kongresses fiir Kunstgeschichte, v1, Vienna, 1986, 103, 105; Domes,” in the Vor Stefan Lochner colloquium volume [cited

and Robert Calkins, “Distribution of Labor: The in the previous note], 48—49). This later date has been Illuminators of the Hours of Catherine of Cleves and their adopted by Ute Wachsmann in her unpublished dissertaWorkshop,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, tion on the choir-screen paintings (“Die Chorschrank-

LXIX, no. 5, 1979, $4—55. On the logistics of the coopera- enmalereien im Kélner Dom: Untersuchungen zur tion between illuminators and other professionals involved Ikonologie,’ University of Bonn, 1985, 59, n. 182), and by in the book trade in Paris, see Richard H. and Mary A. Frank Gunter Zehnder (Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Koln: Von Rouse, “The Commercial Production of Manuscript Books Stefan Lochner bis Paul Cézanne, 120 Meisterwerke der in Late-Thirteenth- and Early-Fourteenth-Century Paris,” Gemdaldesammlung, Cologne, 1986, 46). in Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Evidence, ed. Linda 100. Mollwo, Wettinger Graduale, 109-12. Mollwo 1s also

L. Brownrigg, Proceedings of the Second Conference of the responsible for labeling this artist the “Younger Master.” Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, Oxford, July Lucy Freeman Sandler notes the Pucelle-influenced style

1988, Los Altos Hills, Calif:, 1990, 103-16. of the choir-screen paintings (“A Follower of Jean Pucelle Other nearly contemporary Cologne manuscripts that in England,” Art Bulletin, LU, 1970, 369). Haussherr plays exhibit the collaborative participation of two or more mas- down the possibilities of a Pucelle-derived figure style but

ters include two antiphonaries (Cologne, Diézesans- notes numerous other details in the choir-screen paintings bibliothek Ms 149, and Briihl, Pfarrkirche St. Margareta) that bear strong resemblance to Pucelle’s work and two missals (Darmstadt, Hessische Landesbibliothek (“Chorschrankenmalereien,’ 52—55).

MSS 837 and 876). 101. This window dates about 1280. It was moved, with Cologne is, of course, one of the sites traditionally pro- other windows from the demolished church, into the posed for the Willehalm Master’s activity. See introduction, cathedral in the 19th century. See Herbert Rode, Die mit-

page 4, and chap. 1, pages 21-22. telalterlichen Glasmalereien des Kélner Domes, Corpus vit96. On the more distant sources for the work of the rearum medii aevi, Deutschland, Iv, 1, Berlin, 1974, 83-91, Willehalm Master, see Peter Hoegger, “The Fourteenth- 141-42, and Ulrike Brinkmann, Das jiingere Bibelfenster, Century Gradual of Wettingen,” 1000 Years of Swiss Art, ed. Meisterwerke des K6lIner Domes, 1, Cologne, 1984, I1.

Heinz Horat, New York, 1992, 30—$7. 102. Ill. in Rode, Glasmalereien, pl. 18. Rode, in the dia97. On the identity of the illuminator and the artist of gram showing the preservation of the window, indicates the initials in the Willehalm Codex, see Holladay, that the crown was replaced by new glass in the last restora-

“Willehalm Master,’ 72-74. tion (p. 60). The surrounding pieces are all original, how79

Notes to Chapter HI | ever, verifying that the crown must always have been in this Regesten der Erzbischéfe von Koln im Mittelalter, wv: 1304-1332, position. Rode dates the window to 1315-20 (p. $8). Publikationen der Gesellschaft fiir Rheinische Geschichts103. Ill. in Miner, “Preparatory Sketches,” fig. 11. kunde, xxi, Bonn, 1915, 404, no. 1662). In 1338 the arch-

104. Ill.in Brinkmann, Bibelfenster, fig. 7a. bishop of Cologne and Heinrich IJ struck an agreement, 105. Rode, Glasmalereien, 65-67. The window was suggesting that there may have been recent difficulties , moved from the chapel of St. Katherine, also known as the between them (Wilhelm Janssen, Die Regesten der Erzbischofe

. chapel of St. Engelbertus, to the chapel of St. John in 1848. von Kéln im Mittelalter, v: 1332-1349, Publikationen der Unlike the All Saints image in the Wettinger Gradual, the Gesellschaft ftir Rheinische Geschichtskunde, xx1, Cologne

Cologne cathedral window combines the All Saints and Bonn, 1973, 168, no. 617). It was renewed in 1341 (p. iconography with the nine choirs of angels according to 224, no. 817).

Dionysus the Pseudo-Areopagite. 112. See page 64 above. 106. Holladay, “Iconography.” 113. In his Parzival, written in the early 13th century, 107. The fact that only the completed miniatures have Wolfram von Eschenbach mentioned Cologne in passing, rubrics verifies this order of execution. Peter Jorg Becker referring to the quality of painting executed there: “The states that the hand responsible for the rubrics was the same story tells us that no shield painter from Cologne or as that which copied the text (Handschriften und Friihdrucke Maastricht could have portrayed him to better effect than mittelhochdeutscher Epen: Eneide, Tristrant, Tristan, Erec, Iwein, as he sat there on his charger” (Book m1, 4706, cited here Parzival, Willehalm, Jiingerer Titurel, Nibelungenlied und ihre from the Penguin translation by Arthur T. Hatto, HarReproduktion und Rezeption im spateren Mittelalter und in der mondsworth, 1980, 89).

friihen Neuzeit, University of Trier, 1976; Wiesbaden, 1977, 114. Robert Branner, St. Louis and the Court Style in 103). Karen Gould, who has graciously checked a small Gothic Architecture, Studies in Architecture, vu, London, sample for me, concludes that a different scribe wrote the 1965, 112-13, 123-37. Willibald Sauerlander develops rubrics. Robert Branner cites several kinds of evidence to Branner’s ideas about the church of St. Louis at Poissy and show that rubricators regularly worked with illuminators extends them to the sculptural decoration in the imporrather than with scribes (Manuscript Painting in Paris during tant article, “Storicismo e classicismo nel gotico settentrithe Reign of Saint Louis, California Studies in the History onale intorno al 1300,’in Roma Anno 1300, ed. Angiola M.

of Art, xvi, Berkeley, 1977, 7—8, n. 35). Romanini, Atti della IV settimana di studi di storia dell’arte 108. In their editions of the Willehalm and Rennewart medievale dell’universita di Roma “La Sapienza” 1980, texts, Schroder and Hiibner classify the language of the Rome, 1983, 861—73. See also Lieselotte Stamm, “Der Kassel manuscript’s text as Thuringian. Betty Bushey local- ‘Heraldische Stil’: Ein Idiom der Kunst am Ober- und izes the dialect of the text’s scribe in the same region Hochrhein im 14. Jahrhundert,” Revue d’Alsace, cvul, 1981, (“Neues Gesamtverzeichnis der Handschriften der ‘Arabel’ 37-54, and Michael Cothren, “Restaurateurs et créateurs Ulrichs von dem Tiirlin,’ Wolfram-Studien, VII, 1982, 245). de vitraux 4 la cathédrale de Beauvais dans les années 1340,” Becker places the text dialect in the same general area, and Revue de l’art, CXI, .1996, II—24.

adds the single notation on the language of the rubrics: 115. The defeat of the archbishop and his allies at “Schriftdialekt: mitteldeutsch, in den Bildiiberschriften (von Worringen in 1288 was the final step in the century-long Hand desselben Schreibers) mit starkem niederdeutschen erosion of his power in Cologne’s city government.

Einschlag” (Handschriften, 103). 116. On these historical events, see page 43 in chap. 2 Birgitt Hilberg’s linguistic analysis of the painter’s direc- and pages 62—63 above. tions in the Kassel manuscript, if completed and published, 117. On the mutually reinforcing roles of palaces, tombs, would likely provide additional evidence for the localiza- and manuscripts, together with written documents and tion of the successive steps in the manuscript’s production. treasuries, in the establishment of territorial residences, see

In her entry on the Kassel manuscript in Hartmut Hans Patze, “Die Bildung landesherrlichen Residenzen im Broszinski, Kasseler Handschriftenschatze (Kassel, 1985, 151), Reich wahrend des 14. Jahrhunderts,” in Stadt und Stadtherr

she notes that the directions were penned in the same hand im 14. Jahrhundert: Entwicklungen und Funktionen, ed. Wilhelm : that corrected textual errors and omissions.’ This supports Rausch, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Stadte Mitteleuropas,

the proximity of the planning and scribal steps and sepa- i, Linz, 1972, 25-27.

rates them from the illumination and rubrication. 118. The landgraves’ family patronage did not end here. 109. I am indebted to my colleague Hubert Heinen for Political and representational needs also motivated the col-

his help in interpreting Becker’s information. lection and commission of paintings by the 16th-century 110. Georg Landau, Beitrage zur Geschichte der alten Heer- landgraves Wilhelm II (d. 1509), Philipp (1518-67), and und Handelsstrassen in Deutschland, Hessische Forschungen Wilhelm IV (1567-92). Like the landgraves’ family library, zur geschichtlichten Landes- und Volkskunde, 1, Kassel and the basis for today’s Landesbibliothek, these paintings now Basel, 1958, 78, 80, and map. Landau’s essays were written form the core of the German collection at the Hessische

between 1842 and 1862. Staatsgalerie, also in Kassel.

111. See page 73 below. A document of May 18, 1327, 119. Marianne Ott-Meimberg, “Karl, Roland, Guillaume,” reports the parties in the dispute (Wilhelm Kisky, Die in Epische Stoffe des Mittelalters, ed.Volker Mertens and Ulrich

80

Notes to Chapter II Miiller, Kroners Taschenausgabe, CDLXxxIII, Stuttgart, 1984, in an unrelated matter also provides a clause detailing 93-94. See also William T. H. Jackson, The Hero and the King: arrangements “in the case of a war between Hesse and An Epic Theme, New York, 1982, on the social overtones of Mainz” (p. 266, no. 4071, dated August 30, 1337). epics and their roles as behavioral models. Jackson examines 130. Ibid., 276, no. 4123, dated February 5, 1338; 374, no.

the Guillaume cycle specifically on pp. 73-78. 4635, dated January 6, 1341. In two other documents during 120. Ernst Vogt, Regesten der Erzbischéfe von Mainz von this period (p. 398, no. 4758, dated Jan. 5, 1342, and p. 402, 1289-1396, pt. 1, vol. 1: 1289-1328, Leipzig, 1913, $68, no. 2808. no. 4773, dated February 5s, 1342), the landgrave and the

121. Gerstenberg, Chroniken, 246, fol. 297; 269, fol. 314. archbishop allied themselves against mutual enemies. Vogt (Regesten, §74—75, no. 2939) says that Heinrich defeat- During this period Heinrich II was also allied with the

ed the archbishop and his party although he cites archbishop of Cologne; see n. 111 above. Gerstenberg, 246 (“so was dess lantgraven schade aller- 131. Otto, Regesten, 466—67, no. S111; 486, no. 5194. groistes’”’) and the Oberrheinische Chronik, which also names 132. Ibid., 504, no. 5302; 506, no. 5322, dated June 24, 1345.

the archbishop as the victor. 133. Demandt, Kopiare, no. 121 and 122, from K1, BI. 122. Heinrich Otto, Regesten der Erzbischéfe von Mainz 63—64, nos. 121-122.The transcription of these two records _ von 1289-1396, pt. 1, vol. 11: 1328—1353, Darmstadt, 1932-35, into Ki occured in the last years of Heinrich’s rule or the

12, no. 2977. Throughout the first decade of Heinrich II’s beginning of that of Hermann II (p. 1). rule, Archbishop Baldewin of Trier represented Mainz in 134. Demandt, Kopiare, no. 13. All the records cited in its dealings. The cathedral chapter had elected Baldewin this paragraph appear in the first part of K1, where docuarchbishop, in defiance of the pope’s intention to reserve ments from the years 1292 to 1344 were transcribed in

for himself the appointment of Matthias’s successor (p. 12, about 1345. | no. 2978). During this period Baldewin styled himself 135. See note 82 above. , “herre und beschirmer” (lord and protector) of the Mainz 136. Demandt, Kopiare, no. 16.

See. Not until 1337 was Heinrich von Virneburg, the papal 137. Ibid., no. 18. . candidate for archbishop, accepted without dispute and able 138. Ibid., no. 17. to conduct the See’s affairs in his own name. On December 139. Ibid., no. 19.

18, 1328, the pope wrote to Heinrich II warning him to 140. Ibid., no. 20.

obey the newly elected Archbishop Heinrich von | 141. See chap. I. | Virneburg and offering to stand up for the landgrave’s 142. On the confusion of William of Toulouse and rights if he would set aside the quarrel with Mainz (p. 214, Willehalm with the 12th-century founder of the Williamite

no. 3822). order, William of Malavalle, see Kaspar Elm, Beitrdge zur | 123. Otto, Regesten, 24, no. 3016; 26—27, nos. 3023, 3024. Geschichte des Wilhelmitenordens, Miinstersche Forschungen,

See also 176, no. 3646. xIv, Cologne and Graz, 1962, 174—79.

124. Ibid., 34, no. 3047. | 143. Albert Huyskens, Die Kléster der Landschaft an der 125. Ibid., 37—38, no. 3062. | Werra: Regesten und Urkunden, Klosterarchive, Regesten und

126. On July 24, Heinrich allied himself with Gerlach of Urkunden, 1, Veroffentlichungen der historischen KomNassau against all comers, but listed the archbishop as one mission fiir Hessen und Waldeck, rx, 1, Marburg, 1916, $75,

of the exceptions “as long as our peace with him holds” no. 1440, dated December 2, 1291. (Otto, Regesten, 77, no. 3226). On August 6, the archbishop 144. Huyskens, Kloster, 578, no. 1444; 583, no. 1457.

appointed Heinrich’ uncle his captain in Hesse but warned 145. Ibid., 579, no. 1448; 582, no. 1455.A document of him against “special secrets” with Heinrich (p. 78, no. 3230). September 7, 1372 (p. 590, no. 1473), in which Heinrich On September 3, judgments were made to compensate for grants fishing rights to the convent in exchange for damages incurred when friends of Heinrich and the arch- anniversary masses, indicates the association of the chapel

bishop had broken the truce during the last peace (pp. with the convent and extends Heinrich’s favors to the

82—83, no. 3246). Williamite foundation beyond the period covered in this

127. Ibid., 114, no. 3379. book.

128. Karl E. Demandt, Das Schriftgut der landeraflich hessis- 146. Heinrich’s gifts to the Augustinian Hermits at chen Kanzlei im Mittelalter (vor 1517): Verzeichnis der Bestande, Eschwege (Huyskens, Kléster, 187—208) and those to the

3: Kopiare (K) und Lehnsbiicher (L), 1, Repertorien des Augustinian nuns at the Ahnaberg cloister near Kassel Hessischen Staatsarchivs Marburg, Marburg, 1973, no. 60. resemble closely in number and scope the grants made to

| 129. Otto, Regesten, 153, no. 3551. A document of 1337 the Williamites.

SI

Conclusion

CHOLARS HAVE LONG RECOGNIZED that the contents of devotional books varied according to the wishes of the patron or intended owner. In books of hours especially, the choice of texts and the subjects of the illuminations frequently reflected the owner's patron saints and personal devotional preferences.* Similarly, coats of arms in page borders and margins personalized these manuscripts, reminding the reader | at frequent intervals of family associations and political alliances. The very decision to commission a secular text already suggests a personal interest in the subject matter. Recent literary scholarship has demonstrated that medieval readers also perceived personal relevance in secular texts, reading the concerns and ideals of their own situations into history, biography, and didactic treatises.* The illuminations inserted into these texts heightened their individualized interpretations. In the relatively few cases where a manuscript’s original owner can be identified and his or her political situation re-created, the miniatures often suggest a reading of the text that corresponds to the owner’s interests. The illumination program emphasizes or omits scenes and adds or deletes details according to the expressed or supposed wishes of the patron. While the choice of text was the patron’s and factors immediately affecting the manuscript’s cost, like the scale of the illumination program, were also subject to his or her decision, a direct intervention in the actual subjects and emphases of the miniatures must now be supposed as well. Manuscripts produced in royal circles provide the fullest documentation for this selective interpretation. The images of the Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei, produced at Westminster in the 1250s, stress Edward’s charity and his rebuilding of Westminster,’ two of the features in which Henry III deliberately imitated his saintly predecessor. The images pay further tribute to Henry by the anachronistic inclusion of the shrine he commissioned for Edward’s remains in 1241. On folio 3or it appears as the site of a miracle that occurred at the saint’s tomb soon after his death in 1066. The dedication of the Estoire text to Henry’s wife Eleanor and the Westminster style of the images suggest that this manuscript was the presentation copy: it certainly propounds the royal viewpoint.

Two French histories designed for fourteenth-century kings have miniature cycles intended to flatter the rulers and to support their political position or their place in the royal succession. In the Vie de Saint Denis manuscript and its accompanying chronicle, presented to Philippe V in 1317, the illuminations herald Philippe’s Capetian ancestry and Paris’s prosperity under the French kings.* The Grandes Chroniques manuscript produced for Charles V in three campaigns between 1370 and 1380 includes miniatures that legitimize Charles’s right to the throne, claiming both his descent from the 82

Conclusion

dynastic saint Louis [IX and the French king’s traditional right to the homage of the English ruler.° Likewise the illustrations could adjust the abstract language of didactic texts, making them specific to a given reader. In Walter of Milemete’s treatise De nobilitatibus, sapientiis et prudentiis regum, the large images serve as chapter headings, illustrating the behavior

recommended to the king in the following text. The unnamed ruler regularly wears the coat of arms of Edward III and would have constantly reminded the young king, for whom the book was made, that the monarch illustrated was none other than himself. The book’s rich illumination may also correspond to a perceived need to keep the young man’s attention, to guide him through his reading, and to instruct him, at least in part,

with visual aids.’ , Christine de Pizan’s intervention in the illumination process of the Epistre Othéa

| also individualized the message of her text by pictorial means. Miniatures in the illumination programs supervised by Christine herself make clear not only the text’s function as a political allegory, but its personal relevance to the figures for whom the three autograph manuscripts were intended.’ Changes in the subjects chosen for illumination and in significant details, such as costume and heraldry, provided individualized encouragement for three different members of Charles VI’s family to practice wise politics. In all these manuscripts, the choice of images and their specific iconographies give the text pointed meaning. In each, the illumination cycle biases the reading of the text, presenting a viewpoint that makes it both more personal and more potent. Heinrich Il’s Willehalm manuscript must now be included in this group of luxury codices whose images were specially tuned to their first owner’s needs. Indeed, it extends our knowledge

of both the group and the process in several ways. :

Heinrich’s commission turns our attention from the rarefied atmospheres of the French and English royal courts to a provincial setting in the empire. As did nobles elsewhere, Heinrich and his forebears structured their courts like those of their betters. The German king, however, hardly provided a compelling model. Elected from Heinrich’s peer group, to a position that lacked both hereditary legitimacy and a fixed capital, the German king was less powerful in his domains than the princes in theirs. The quality and

scale of Heinrich’s commission, together with the material of the epic, indicate that , politically asute princes looked beyond national borders to find models appropriate to their goals.

, Like other adaptations of elevated prototypes to changed political settings and different local traditions, Heinrich’s manuscript does not slavishly copy its predecessors; rather, it adds a new dimension. The above examples reveal that two kinds of texts lent themselves to selective interpretation through their miniatures. Texts with an overt or couched didactic purpose carried a direct and personal message for the intended reader,

and historical texts used typology and genealogical continuity to present fitting role , models from the past as parallels to the present. While the Willehalm belongs more closely to this second genre,? it is not the history of a nation as personified by its rulers nor the life of a national saint, whose relics were venerated at the site where the manuscript was

83 |

Conclusion . | produced and used. For the first time we can extend this interpretive process to the epic. The personalized reading of the Willehalm text proposed by literary historians now finds a parallel in at least one manuscript’s illumination cycle. Indeed every aspect of Heinrich’s codex was planned to reflect and reinforce the patron’s personal involvement in his manuscript. Heinrich appears on the title page, not as the passive recipient, accepting his codex from the author or courtier, but as an

active participant in the story. He pays homage to the godhead heralded in the first lines of the poem and, by his unusual placement in the opening initial, takes personal responsibility for the text that follows. The manuscript was also intended to impress viewers with its grand scale and the richness of the planned illumination cycle.’ These outward features made the manuscript a fitting attribute of Heinrich’s well-appointed court and gave it a symbolic or representational function. Simply possessing such a book proclaimed Heinrich’s status, even before one read its specific messages. In the finished quires, significantly located at the beginning of the codex, the illuminations put forth a particular reading of the text and one associated with the patron’s recent political concerns and family interests. Finally, the style of the images, a slightly old-fashioned look

associated with a major center, not only marks Heinrich’s artistic sophistication, but may refer back to the time before his grandfather’s death and the split of Hesse that led to his own, ongoing territorial difficulties. The large scale of the illumination cycle and the mannered elegance of the painting style put Heinrich’s manuscript in the category of luxury books to which art historians devote their attention. These features give the Kassel codex an important place in the histories of German and secular illumination. In both these expanding fields, however, relatively few manuscripts provide enough information for us to situate their date or place of production with accuracy, much less discuss the patrons who commissioned them and the contexts in which they functioned. With its secure date and named patron, the Kassel manuscript allows reconstruction of a situation that may have been paralleled to some degree in other manuscripts. Ironically, such pointedly personal adaptations may have contributed to the destruction of many of the secular counterparts of the Kassel manuscript. Later owners excised pages with owner notices and erased coats of arms.*° Likewise, changing literary taste prompted destruction of some undoubtedly important manuscripts." Some of the same features that made the Kassel manuscript an object of continued family pride made other similarly personalized codices obsolete or irrelevant to later owners. Heinrich’s Willehalm Codex serves then as an example, albeit a grand one, of a larger group of works, many of which have been lost or can no longer be identified. While it is impossible to gauge exactly how typical or, conversely, how unusual some of his book’s features may be, its study might nevertheless serve as a paradigm, suggesting avenues of exploration for other less well-known manuscripts.” Heinrich’s codex provides important insights into the processes of book production and illumination, from the conception of the miniature cycle through the stages of execution of the manuscript’s decorative schemes. Comparisons with the illumination programs in other Willehalm

84

Conclusion | manuscripts allow a better understanding of the flexibility in illustrating secular manuscripts. These codices’ widely varying numbers of illuminations and their changing sizes and placements within the mise-en-page demonstrate how patrons’ needs and finances shaped illumination cycles that lacked the more established programs of devotional books. Their varied illumination programs also suggest the role of images as textual interpreta-

| tion, a fitting corollary to current reception studies that relate literary interest to patrons’ concerns. Finally, the interrelationship of all these features with the choice of artist and the patron’s familial and political situation offers a way of looking at the representational role

of manuscripts in the contexts in which they were made and used. Thus Heinrich’s man- , uscript is not an unicum but broadly illuminates the larger framework of artistic practice and purpose at small courts in the later Middle Ages.

85

Notes to Conclusion Notes 1. See, for example, Karen Gould, The Psalter and Hours of Bulletin, xvi, 1984, 97-117. The manuscript she discusses Yolande de Soissons, Speculum Anniversary Monographs, Iv, is Paris, Bibl. Nat. fr. 2813.

Cambridge, Mass., 1978. Roger Wieck also discusses several Hedeman’s book, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the books of hours in which the choices of texts and images “Grandes Chroniques de France” 1274-1422 (California Studies presuppose the patron’s intervention in the assembly and in the History of Art, xxviu, Berkeley, 1991), addresses the illumination of the manuscript (Time Sanctified: The Book of interpretive character of the images in a number of manuHours in Medieval Art and Life, exh. cat., New York, 1988). scripts and considers the relevance of these codices to the

Michael Camille’s recent work on the Luttrell Psalter patrons and owners for whom they were made. Hedeman relates several marginal images to specific concerns of the can identify the original owners for only about one-fifth patron (“Labouring for the Lord: The Ploughman and the of the manuscripts she catalogues. Social Order in the Luttrell Psalter,’ Art History, x, 1987, 7. Michael, “Manuscript Wedding Gift,’, 589-90. 423—54). Camille’s line of inquiry applied to other manu- 8. Sandra L. Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre scripts with known patrons would show that the Luttrell Othéa”’: Painting and Politics at the Court of Charles VI, Studies

Psalter is not unique in this respect. and Texts, Lxxvul, Toronto, 1986. 2. See notes 34 and 35 to the introduction. See also 9. See introduction, pages 6—7, and the accompanying

Gabrielle Spiegel, “Political Utility in Medieval His- notes. toriography,” History and Theory, XIv, 1975, 314-25, and 10. The patrons depicted on fol. 38v of the Cloisters Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography Apocalypse (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,

in Thirteenth-Century France, The New Historicism, xxI, Cloisters MS 68.174) were originally identified by coats of Berkeley, 1993. Michael A. Michael discusses the contents of arms. These were intentionally eradicated by a later owner Paris, Bibl. Nat. fr. 571 and the related treatise of Walter of of the manuscript, perhaps to obscure the specific identities Milemete and the Pseudo-Aristotelian De secretis secretorum of these figures and thus allow them to represent all future

(Oxford, Christ Church College ms 92 and London, Brit. owners of the manuscript in generic terms. Lib. Additional 47680) in relation to the concerns for 11. The manuscript of the Willehalm trilogy represented Edward’s education at the time of his accession to the by the Berlin-Munich fragments discussed in chap. 2 was throne in 1327 (“A Manuscript Wedding Gift from Philippa dismantled, and its pages were used as padding in the bind-

of Hainault to Edward UI,” Burlington Magazine, cxxvui, ings of later books.

1985, 589-90). 12. Other secular manuscripts that might lend themselves 3. Cambridge, University Library Ms Ee. 3. 59, fols. tor, to this kind of study include the Roman de toute chevalerie 16r, I9r—20v, 27r. The most thorough recent discussion of made for Jean d’Engaigne in about 1310 (Paris, Bibl. Nat. fr.

this manuscript is to be found in Nigel Morgan, Early 24364), recently published by Frangois Avril and Patricia Gothic Manuscripts, 1: 1250-1285, A Survey of Manuscripts Danz Stirnemann, Manuscrits enluminés d’origine insulaire

Iuminated in the British Isles, rv, London, 1988, 94-98. VI°—-XX® siecle, Paris, 1987, 126—38, no. 171; and the

4. Ibid., 96. Wigalois manuscript commissioned by Duke Albrecht II of

5. Charlotte Lacaze, The “Vie de St. Denis” Manuscript Braunschweig-Grubenhagen in 1372 (Leiden, Bibliotheek (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Ms fr. 2090-2092) (Ph.D. diss., der Rijksuniversiteit ms Ltk 537), published in Kunst und New York University, 1978), Outstanding Dissertations in Kultur im Weserraum, exh. cat., Miinster, 1966, no. 225.

the Fine Arts, New York and London, 1979, 126-37, 374. Like the Kassel codex, these works were made for The chronicle, which was detached from the saint’s life as known nonroyal patrons whose political and cultural con-

early as 1322, is catalogued as Bibl. Nat. lat. 13836. cerns could likely be further documented, and they exist 6. Anne D. Hedeman, “Valois Legitimacy: Editorial in other illuminated versions that could serve as comparaChanges in Charles V’s Grandes Chroniques de France,’ Art tive material.

86

Appendixes

Appendix I Simplified Genealogical Table | Hermann of Thuringia (d. 1217)

m. Sophie of Bavaria

+ I son and 2 daughters Ludwig Heinrich Raspe Konrad

(1200-1227) (d. 1248) (d. 1240) m.

Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-1231)

Hermann Sophie Gertrud

(1222—1241) (1224-1275) (1227—1297) m.

Heinrich II of Brabant (d. 1248)

Heinrich of Hesse (1244-1308) m.

(1) Adelheid of Braunschweig (2) Mechtild of Cleve

(d. 1274) | (d. 1309)

Heinrich the Otto + 4 daughters Johann Ludwig Agnes + 4 daughters

(d. 1298) m. 1310 Bishop Adelheid of of Miinster

Younger (Cc. 1272—1328) (d. 1311) (1282/3 —-1357) (d. 1335) Ravensberg

Heinrich II Otto + 2 sons

(c. 1300-1376) (Cc. 1302—1361) and

1327 1 daughter

Archbishop of Magdeburg

88

A dix II The Codicological Structure of the Kassel Willehalm Codex |

Gathering’ Formation Illumination Comments 1(1)8 I-2-3-4/5-6-7-8 Iva, 2vb, sra, va, 6vb, text begins on Iv

7b, 7va, 7vb, 8va with manuscript’s only

| scheme; images

full-page decorative

, quire, rubrics added finished throughout

II(Q) 11 Q-I0-II-12-13-14/15- vb, rorb, IIra, 12ra, images completed 16-17-18-19-stub I2va, 13ra, 14rb, 15rb, and rubricated

| I7va, 18vb, 19vb throughout;not stub does indicate missing folio since there is no missing text

III*(20) 10 . 20-2 1-22-23-24/25- 20vb, 21rb, 22ra, 22va, images completed and 26-2'7-28-29° 24ra, 25rb, 27rb, 28ra, rubricated throughout 28vb, 29va

IV(30) 10 30ra, 31ra, 32rb, 33vb, images incomplete: 35ra, 35vb, 36rb, 37vb, — gold applied and 38vb flat colors washed in; , 33v completed later

, those, |on fols. 30r— (c. 1400)

v(40) 10 4orb, 41ra, 41vb, 42va, images incomplete:

: 43rb, 44ra, 44vb, 46ra,_— gold applied and flat A6vb, 48ra, 48vab, colors washed in 49vb

VI(50) IO sorb, sovb, 53vb, s4rb, through s6r:

s4vb, 55ra, s6rb, s6vb, | compositions inked $7va, 58rb, sora, sgvb in, only frames and backgrounds colored; s6v to end quire:

oe spaces for images left empty, faint frames

drawn in

89

Appendix II

Gathering Formation Illumination Comments V11(60) 10 | 6ovb, 61vb, 62rb, 63va, spaces for images left 64va, 65rb, 66rb, 66vb, empty, faint frames

67vb, 68va drawn in; text of

Arabel ends after 14

lines on 68vb, rest of column and 69r and v are left blank

VIl1(70) 10 70vb, 7Ivb, 73ra,73vb, Willehalm text begins 74va, 79rab, 79Vva on 70ra with space for

8-line initial; image spaces throughout the rest of the codex are left blank; Appendix Iv (below) records directions to the painter

Ix(80) 10 8ovb, 81rb, 82rb, 83va, 83vb, 84ra, 85va, 86rb, 87va, 88ra, 88rb, 88va, 89rb, 89vb

X(90) IO gorb, girb, 93ra, 93vb, gsrb, 96va, 99ra, 99vb X1(I00) IO roirb, 103rb, 1o4ra | XII(1I0) 10 t1arb, 112vab, 11srab, 116rb, 118vb, 119vab

XII1(120) 10 122vb, 127rab, 127vb, 128vb

XIV(130)10 132rab, 134vab XV(I40) IO 140ra, 141rb, 141rb, 142rab, 143vab, 146rab, 147rab, 148vab

XVI(1I50) IO 1Sirab, 152rab, 153ra,

154rab, 15srab, 155vab, : 156vab, 158rab, 159rab

9O

: Codicological Structure

Gathering Formation Illumination Comments XVII(160) 10 : 16orab, 161ra, 162rab, Willehalm text, in 2

163rab, 164va, 164vb, 15-line columns, ends 166vb, 167vab, 168va, on 1631; painter's

169rb, 169vb directions indicate

| that a miniature was intended to occupy some of the large space below; Rennewart text begins

on 163va where 6 | lines are ,reserved for an initial

XVIII(170) 10 I7Iva, I7Ivb, 172vb, , 173ra, 173va, I74Vva,

1771ra, 177va, 178rb, ,

175rb, 175va, 176rb, 179rb

XIX(180) 10 18orab, 180vb, 181va, |

,

| 184rb, 184vb,188ra, 185va, 186rb, 186vb, 182rb, 182vb, 183Vva,

189rb, 189vb

XX (190) IO 191rb, 192va, 193va, © 194ra, 194vb, 19$va, 196rb, 197rb, 197vb, 198rb, 199rb, I99va

| 202rb, 203ra, 204ra, ,

XXI1(200) 10 200rb, 200vb, 20I1va, , 205ra, 20$vb, 206va, 207vb, 208vb

XXII(210)8 210-21I-212-213- 210ra, 21Ira, 212ra, bifolio missing

: missing/missing-214- 213rb, 213vb, 214rb, between present

| . missing verses | for 2 miniatures*

215-216-217 21§va, 216rb, 217YrA