The Trees of the Cross: Wood As Subject and Medium in the Art of Late Medieval Germany 0300267657, 9780300267655

Table of contents :
1 Introduction
21 Chapter 1. The Vegetable Saint
53 Chapter 2. The Spiritual Maypole
89 Chapter 3. Grünewald’s Greenery in Spring and
Summer
131 Chapter 4. The Spiritual Vintage
163 Epilogue. The Protestant Reflection of Spiritual
Greenery
172 Notes
204 Index

Citation preview

The Trees of the Cross

The Trees of the Cross Wood as Subject and Medium in the Art of Late Medieval Germany

Gregory C. Bryda

Yale University Press, New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the International Center of Medieval Art and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. This book was published with the generous assistance of a Book Subvention Award from the Medieval Academy of America. Copyright © 2023 by Gregory C. Bryda. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. yalebooks.com/art Designed by Leslie Fitch Cover designed by Leslie Fitch Set in Crimson and Cronos Pro type by Leslie Fitch Printed in

by

Library of Congress Control Number: to come ISBN 978-0-300-26765-5 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z 39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Jacket illustrations: (front)....; (back) Frontispiece:

For my parents, Debbie and Tom

Contents

vii

Acknowledgments



Introduction

1

21

Chapter 1. The Vegetable Saint

53

Chapter 2. The Spiritual Maypole

89

Chapter 3. Grünewald’s Greenery in Spring and

Summer 131

Chapter 4. The Spiritual Vintage

163

Epilogue. The Protestant Reection of Spiritual

Greenery 172

Notes

204

Index

213

Illustration Credits

Acknowledgments

I embarked on this journey in college. The three-hour studio art classes I wished to take conicted with other mandatory coursework my freshman year at Penn. So I abandoned the making of art—drawing, a lifelong hobby— for the study of historical art. I must rst thank Susan Sidlauskas, a master of ekphrasis, for persuading me to take on a bachelor’s degree in art history in addition to the one in economics I had already begun at the Wharton School. Ultimately my interest in the former would trump that in the latter. The tipping point was my senior thesis on French gothic ivories, an odyssey of academic and personal discovery that would not have been possible without Robert Maxwell, Nina Rowe, and Larry Silver. Nina graciously co-advised me from Fordham University; she has since become a dear colleague and friend. It was also during my college years that I started my relationship with The Cloisters as a summer intern. Since 2004 the sta and fellow lecturers have become a family and supportive network throughout the trajectory of graduate school and my preparation of this book. I owe a large debt of gratitude to Leslie Tait and Nancy Wu for their wisdom and encouragement over the years and for welcoming me to their world of lecturers and curators, many of whom would become some of my most beloved interlocutors in the eld, including Joe Ackley, Katherine Boivin, Julien Chapuis, Timothy Husband, Deirdre Larkin, Lauren Mancia, and Michele Marincola. In 2015 I interned for Julien Chapuis after he relocated to head Berlin’s Bode Museum, where I studied the works of Tilman Riemenschneider also under the tutelage of his predecessor, the late Hartmut Krohm. Riemenschneider also occasioned my reunion with another Cloisters colleague, Katherine Boivin, with whom I had the privilege of

co-organizing the “Riemenschneider in Situ” conference in 2017. Ambitious and at times grueling, the traveling event convened experts on Riemenschneider from across the world and resulted in a collection of inuential essays on the artist—dedicated in Krohm’s honor—that are cited throughout this book. Thanks to the Connecticut-Baden-Württemberg Exchange program, I took an unorthodox “study abroad” semester at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg during my doctoral studies and enrolled in courses in medieval art taught by Tobias Frese, David Ganz, and Johannes Tripps. Under their guidance and with the generosity of numerous gift-giving foundations, I visited what felt like every nook and cranny of southern and western Germany by train, bicycle, and Mitfahrgelegenheit. Through these research jaunts, I forged relationships with local scholars who continue to advise me on my research today. I thank Oliver Gußmann, Manuel Hagemann, Claudia Lichte, Ludwig Schnurrer, and nally the inimitable Hanns Hubach, who generously proofread this book’s chapter on Grünewald and my article on the Isenheim Altarpiece in the Art Bulletin (2018)—which represents the only previously published portion of this book. I was fortunate to participate in two back-to-back research clusters with art historians of like-minded methodological interests. During the Getty Research Institute’s Art and Materiality year (2015–16), my work was profoundly inuenced by conversations, lectures, and seminars with Natalie Adamson, Hannah Baader, Shawon Kinew, Elizabeth Morrison, Alan Phenix, Kate Rudy, Nico Vicario, and Bert Winther-Tamakai. Frank Fehrenbach graciously received me as a post-doc in his Images of Nature program at the University of Hamburg, where

my project was pushed in new and exciting directions thanks to him, Isabella Augart, Anita Hosseini, Margit Kern, Maurice Saß, and, in particular, Matthew Vollgra— the greatest friend and collaborator a scholar could ask for. It was also in that Hamburg year that conversations with U.S.-based art historians on leave in Berlin—Eliza Garrison, Aden Kumler, Christina Neilson, and Ittai Weinryb—left an indelible mark on my work. It has also been through public-facing events that the research for this book has been tested and rened. I thank Freyja Hartzell for inviting me to the German Studies Conference; Ethan Matthew Kavaler and Giancarla Periti for the chance to discuss the Holy Blood Altarpiece at the Renaissance Society of America; Martin Büchsel, Hilja Droste, and Berit Wagner for the opportunity to share my research on Riemenschneider and metalwork at the Mittelrhein Tagung in Frankfurt’s Historisches Museum; Mitchell Merback and Stephen Campbell for allowing me to present my theories about Grünewald and greenery at the Philosophical Image conference; Beatrice Kitzinger for hosting my Princeton workshop on the Kranenburg Cross where feedback from her, Cynthia Hahn, and Justin Wilson remains with me to this day; James Hawkey for the invitation to speak alongside Lord Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury, on the Isenheim Altarpiece for Westminster Abbey’s Plague and Passion Passiontide seminar series; and Kathrin Müller for sponsoring my Fulbright Guest Professorship at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where meetings with her, Horst Bredekamp, Jennifer Chuong, and Jitske Jasperse helped shed new light on my work— and provided tonics during the harsh pandemic winter of 2022. In my current position at Barnard College and Columbia University, I feel blessed to belong to a community of art historians who inspire and continually challenge me to rise to the occasion. I am particularly grateful to students enrolled in my graduate seminar, “Gothic Nature,” in 2020—specically Edward Baker, Emma Bruckner, Virginia Girard, Luming Guan, and Isabella Weiss—for helping me shape my thoughts on ecocriticism. Alex Alberro, Rosalyn Deutsch, Anne Higgonet, Jonathan Reynolds, Elisabeth Sher, Anoo Siddiqi, and Mike Waters were paragon colleagues who were instrumental in shepherding this book across the nish line. I am immeasurably grateful to Holger Klein and Noam Elcott for their comments on drafts of this study—and to

Noam for introducing me to cultural techniques and the work of Bernhard Siegert. It was my hope to publish this research with Yale University Press, to build on the legacy of Michael Baxandall and his groundbreaking work Limewood Sculptors, published by Yale in 1981. I thank my editor, Katherine Boller, for taking on the project, bringing it to life on the page, and soliciting two discerning reviewers who advised me on how best to welcome the reader into the world of medieval wood. I thank Lisa Regan for helping me nd and trust my scholarly voice; her insights on this book have been invaluable. In graduate school at Yale, where the book started in earnest, I was lucky to have cultivated friendships I will cherish for life. Roland Betancourt, Magdalene Breidenthal, Jamie Gabbarelli, Stephanie Luther, Lindsay Riordan, and Allison Stielau have all proofread drafts and translations at one point or another, not seldom under duress before a deadline. Paul Freedman, Robert Nelson, and Denys Turner played formative roles in the genesis of this study. I was also lucky to have been advised by the best Doktoreltern in the eld. For his openness and eagerness to discuss research around the clock, inside and outside the classroom, I must acknowledge Christopher Wood, who was indispensable in elevating my study’s wider contribution to the discipline of art history. I thank Jacqueline Jung, whose advisement manifests itself on and o these pages. She taught me how to use words to breathe new life into medieval art. Over the years, as I have progressed in my career, she has always lent me her wisdom and, on a few occasions when I needed it, her shoulder, too. Finally, I am grateful to my family—Debbie, Tom, Dan, and Lauren—for their unwavering support and patience during the long stretches of time I was out of the country and unable to see them. Because of the years of living abroad that the research for this book required, my family grew in unexpected ways. I gained a family crew of Nils, Kay, Hannah, Jakob, Jake, Kevin, Phillip, Markus, Nici, Maree, Sara, Danny, Josh, Fritz, and reunited with my best friend, Jenna. I met my husband and partner in life, Rudi, without whose love and fortitude this book may never have taken shape. Their and the unconditional love of my children, Leon and Romy, and their mothers, Michal and Yvonne, is imprinted on all of the following pages

Acknowledgments

IX

Introduction

At the center of a Bavarian altarpiece from around 1500, a crouching Christ strains under the weight of his cross (g. 0.1).1 Already exhibiting the ve wounds of the Cruci­ xion, Christ bears the cross at a remove from scriptural history. Rather than planted in Calvary, the cross is shown tipped to its side and recongured into a winepress apparatus situated among winemakers in the late medieval German landscape. A popular devotional motif building on viticultural themes from the Old and New Testaments, the prominent mechanical metaphor proclaims the real presence of the blood Christ shed at the Crucixion in the wine that would have been administered at Mass in front of this very painting. The altarpiece underscores the substantial equivalence of blood and wine by juxtaposing an angel collecting Christ’s blood in a liturgical chalice with a wine laborer gathering juice into his small bucket. Indeed, the juice gushing through the grape trough’s spigot and into a barrel in the foreground is constituted typologically by the blood of both sacred vegetal and human bodies; it figure 0.1  Christ in the Winepress, from The Load Bearers’ Altarpiece,

ca. 1500, painting on panel. Munich, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum (detail of gure 4.28)

oozes from Christ’s abdomen and limbs but also streams down and trickles from one of the arms of the cross, too. Besides the winepress, the altarpiece lavishes attention on other parts of the winemaking process that, for the medieval viewer, would have resonated on account of their programmatic and material likeness with the wood of the cross. The picture asserts that the barrels, ladder, hoist, and even the pruning knives in the laborers’ toolbelts are, by dint of all having been made from wood, staged in clear relation to the material of the cross. Like the press’s spindle, against which God the Father twists his son’s fate, the upright hoisting post provides the leverage by which a coiled rope can lower the heavy barrel into the churchlike wine cellar. Invoking the cross throughout the many wood-dependent steps of winemaking it depicts, the altarpiece not only declares real presence in the Eucharistic wine but also confers a sacral quality on the mundane operations that bring wine to the altar in the rst place. While the wood objects in the altarpiece appear smoothly carpentered, many of the winemaking technolo­ gies in the Middle Ages made even more direct connections to their materials because of the rough trunks they

figure 0.2  Tree press or Baumkelter, 1591. Nonnenhorn, Bavaria

typically incorporated—hence the prevalence of the word “tree” in their names. Where we see Christ’s sleekly planed cross, a medieval viewer would also have recognized a “tree press” (Baumkelter) not unlike the one that survives from the late sixteenth century in the Bavarian town of Nonnenhorn (g. 0.2). Oscillating between timber and tree lever, the altarpiece’s central winepress—placed beside a copse of trees—harkens back to the Holy Cross’s legendary arboreal origin in the Tree of Paradise. The church’s only nonhuman saint, the Wood of the Cross assumed a panoply of botanical guises apart from trees, including the grapevine itself. The cross had inextricable ties to local landscapes. One of the many associations between real wood and the wood of the crucix came into full view with the ubiquity of True Cross relics throughout Germany and their regular invocation in rituals taking place outside church walls. On feast days coordinated with farming milestones, such as Saint Urban’s Day with the planting of vines, True Cross relics were processed from altars to vineyards and elds, where their saintly woodiness was thought to

2

Introduction

inspire earthly fecundity. A similar dynamic plays out in the Bavarian altarpiece, which functioned to stage the Eucharist and, in all likelihood, from its position on the altar presided over the end point, of outdoor processions. Perhaps this particular liturgical function accounts for its amplied visual excursus on the process of winemaking and the cross’s perceived power over the annual fulllment of the vintage. Apart from those at work in the foreground, two laborers are depicted kneeling before Christ in the cruciform winepress and praying for both the souls oating in the hereafter and the grape harvest on which their communities in the here and now depended. Mediating between the devotional and quotidian, the cross not simply as sign or symbol but as a material thing facilitated an entire concept of wood and its religious, social, and symbolic associations—from growth to human intervention—that made this material unendingly resonant and polyvalent for artists, patrons, and viewers.2 The subject of this book is, most simply put, wood in relationship to religious art in late medieval Germany. But as the above example demonstrates, wood in this place

and this period embraced both multiple materials and multiple meanings. This book thus examines the artistic religious registers within which wood was instrumental, whether as a material of artworks, as a feature of agrarian life, or as symbolic of the cross—which itself has resonances with other iconographies in the liturgy—and the consciousness of artists and audiences around all of these. With these intersections and overlaps in mind, the associative resonances that made works of art function so powerfully in this period become more conspicuous. Coming into view at a moment of profound change in the materials and motifs being deployed in late medieval Germany, the overlapping registers around wood open new interpretive avenues for well-known artworks that indeed reect a much larger visual and material culture—one that allows a dierent understanding of how they functioned liturgically and socially. The conuence of forces through which wood made meaning was so pervasive that if we do not capture it, we miss how these objects originally functioned and how their original functionality bears witness to a reciprocal relationship between the sanctuary and the world outside it. Wood as Artistic Material The carvers who produced the four-meter-tall whipping post for the Benedictine monastery in Chemnitz went to great lengths to portray the torture device from Christ’s Passion as a tree in both form and quality (g. 0.3).3 Many wood-carvers engaged with the idiosyncratic materiality of wood, employing representational strategies—such as maintaining the physical integrity of the tree from which the wood derived throughout the carving process—to convey religious concepts. With its roots shown clenching the ground at its base, the tree that forms the whipping post soars upward and supports the four gures around its upper register on a sturdy wreath and against a swirling network of spiraling boughs. As if the program were not spectacular enough in the sheer intricacy of its composition—a fourth torturer from the back hoists Christ’s body up for display—the entire ensemble was carved in the round from a single oak trunk; moreover, the branches of its twin wreaths were recycled from the same tree. In so deliberately foregrounding woodiness in both subject

figure 0.3  Whipping Post, attributed to Meister H. W., 1510–22,

polychromed oak. Castle Church, Chemnitz (see gure 2.23)

Introduction

3

figure 0.4  Crucixus dolorosus, before 1340, oak (originally

polychromed), Saint Sixtus Church, Haltern am See

and medium, the artists sought to render more immediate arboreal metaphors for Christ and the Arma Christi (instruments of the Passion) that, while not new, had become more pervasive and entrenched in this period. Though fewer survive, wooden objects since at least the twelfth century could be found at the center of liturgical ritual in medieval Germany (and well beyond), forming the panels for painted retables and antependia that framed the Mass.4 Cored logs of wood were also a medium for sculpted images as early as the tenth century, as we know from Cologne’s Gero Cross.5 Serving as a matrix that was polychromed, festooned with metallic plating, gilding, ligree, and gems, or even selectively left bare, wood carving in the round rst reemerged in this early period due to complex changes in the liturgy, piety, and attitudes toward imagery, more broadly. Composed in various sizes depending on their functional context, mostly to be used in processions or set on altars, columns, beams, and even suspended by chains, sculptures from the tenth century

4

Introduction

on represented above all, but not exclusively, the crucied Christ and Throne of Wisdom Madonnas.6 There was a distinct and rich tradition of wood sculpture inside and outside churches throughout the early and high Middle Ages. But after 1300, the artistic medium proliferates in all kinds of novel directions, and in the process, a whole new attention is given to the wood material. Among some of the popular categories of wooden artworks around 1300 were the more humanized sculptures of the Madonna and Child and Pietàs (Vesperbilder) in which she cradles her lifeless adult son after his deposition from the cross. Also ubiquitous in the Rhineland and neighboring areas, where the kinds of extreme piety that dwelled on Christ’s torments thrived, was a new group of life-size crucixes that accentuated the hideously tortured body of Christ. They built on a longer history of wooden “triumphant” crosses, sometimes joined by auxiliary gures of Mary and John, which were mounted high on the church crossing, above or connected to the choir screen.7 Though there were many formal and iconographic variations to carved medieval crucixes, artists for earlier triumphal crosses tended to depict Christ’s body as staid and symmetrical, deant in the face of death. Turns to naturalistic styles, in contrast, endowed him with greater depths of psychological and physical pathos—but nothing like the expressionistic detail that would be lavished on his battered body in the aptly named doleful crucixes, or Crucixi dolorosi, coming out of the fourteenth century.8 Germane to this study is a subset of doleful crucixes that foregrounded not only Christ’s torture but also the cross’s legendary ancestry in the Tree of Life—a story whose popularity reached unparalleled levels in Germany at this very moment.9 With their knotty, forked crosses (Gabelkreuze) projecting upward as if sprouting from the ground, and conventionally painted green, the crucixes came into the world through divine intervention, following many key tropes from the Legend of the Wood of the Cross.10 For instance, in the same way that the cross resurfaced from Jerusalem’s Bethesda Pool at the time of Christ’s Crucixion, the oak crucix from the Westphalian city of Haltern, whose cross was originally green, was purportedly shed out of the Lippe River and brought into the parish church of Saint Sixtus after residents discovered it miraculously swimming against the river’s current (g. 0.4).11 Light enough to be processed, though not all were, the branched crucixes also frequently contained relics of the True Cross within

figure 0.5  High altar of the former Cistercian abbey church in Bad Doberan, ca. 1300, base story relief carvings

added ca. 1360; wooden sacrament house on the left, ca. 1350–60

Christ’s cranial or chest cavities, eectively serving as vehicles for distributing the divine splinters—and their legendary origin stories—throughout medieval Germany. The same rst decades of the fourteenth century also witnessed the emergence of a dierent kind of wooden lit­urgical accessory altogether: the winged altar cabinet, a northern European and Scandinavian phenomenon that would come to characterize the interior of nearly every Gothic church in this region of Europe (g. 0.5).12 Painted, sculpted, or both; often outtted with multiple hinged wooden panels that would conceal and reveal central shrines; supported by predellas that housed relics; and, in

turn, bearing delicate microarchitectural armatures that surged toward the heavens, late medieval altarpieces pro­ vided a backdrop for the liturgy but also, over genera­tions, became the testing ground for master craftsmen—carvers, painters, and cabinetmakers—who transformed their reli­gious commissions into dazzling works of car­pen­try. Sometimes recycled from altarpiece shrines, a host of portable wooden sculptures were en­listed in ever-­greater sophisticated forms of litur­gical pageantry, reenacting scrip­tural events from the altar proper but also radiating out from the Mass, as in the case of the Chem­nitz whip­­ ping post, and pouring out onto the streets, as countless

Introduction

5

wooden Palm Sunday donkeys attest.13 Indeed, the explo­ sion of wood sculpture was at least partially a function of the multiplication of altars in the later Middle Ages. Unfortunately, few early altarpiece ensembles survive intact. From the Cistercian abbey of Bad Doberan on the Baltic coast of northeastern Germany we can gather how the massive retable construction from around 1300, though accompanied by other wooden furniture in the sanctuary such as the sacrament tabernacle and sacristy cabinet, functions as the dominant eld of ritual spectacle, its carved and gilded outstretched wings hanging over the high altar (see g. 5).14 Stationary stone altarpieces briey reappear in late medieval France, but it is the winged wooden altarpiece that enjoyed uninterrupted favor in the Holy Roman Empire through the era of the Reformation.15 The appetite for them in German-speaking lands was insatiable.16 The Ulm minster alone possessed more than fty winged retables to adorn its myriad stone altar mensas, most located outside the sanctuary, in aisle chapels or abutting the nave’s large piers. Though admittedly catering to a much smaller audience than Ulm’s huge urban parish, the Benedictine abbey church in the neighboring Swabian town of Blaubeuren retains its original glory (g. 0.6).17 Here, the presence of wood is keenly felt not only on the high altar but also in the cleric and choir stalls, whose nely wrought leaf and branchwork tracery evoke the furniture’s arboreal origins. The central pinnacle above the Man of Sorrows in the altarpiece’s superstructure leads attention upward, grazes the boss of the ribbed vault above it, and appears to spark the eorescence of painted greenery that, along with the reanimated carved wood, en-jungles the sanctuary.18 Left unpainted, Blaubeuren’s choir stalls anticipate a new category of monochrome or “wood-visible” (holzsichtig) altarpieces that became fashionable in this very period and place.19 With their cabinets often covered in carved vegetal forms, too, they trumpeted from the altar mensa proper the layered resonances between material, representation, and meaning. These organic materials and motifs were infused with religious signicance that ultimately emanated out of the originary, saintly Wood of the Cross. The Doberan Abbey’s enormous vegetal triumphal crucix atop the cross altar is surrounded by foliate ourishes and Wood of the Cross iconography (g. 0.7).20 Towering fteen meters above the parapet to which it is axed, the crucix faces the lay side of where a choir screen once stood and no doubt served as a spectacular banner for the miraculously bleeding host

6

Introduction

wafer in the abbey’s treasury as well as the real presence of Christ’s blood in the Eucharistic wine consecrated at the altar in front of it.21 Contained within the arms of the cross and winged retable thereunder, a series of pictorial relationships pair Christ’s Passion, the Eucharist, and the cross with their typological antecedents from the Old Testament. Read along the central longitudinal axis, the crucix grows out of its roots from the Tree of Paradise, as shown in the relief panel depicting Original Sin. Like Christ as the new Adam, an unblemished God-man in the midst of fallen creatures, the Wood of the Cross was the paragon of nature in a postlapsarian world. Planted in earth from an oshoot of Paradise and reuniting with God at the Crucixion to redeem humankind, the holy wood was also a real thing in the medieval contemporary. Beyond that of the Eucharistic Holy Blood, specics about Doberan’s once vast relic inventory no longer exist.22 But a True Cross relic inspired the establishment of the Abbey of the Holy Cross in neighboring Rostock in 1270.23 In addition to their material participation in the original instrument, it was the woodiness of True Cross relics that was treasured for its unique instrumental capability to call back to life the more lowly forms of living wood still implanted in the ground—the leaves and owers in spring and fruits in fall. The insistently viticultural Doberan crucix makes particular reference to the blood of the Eucharist as well as the many iconographies and types of holy wood that intertwine to form a web of interlocking tropes. With the perimeter of its four arms studded with giant pieces of carved foliage painted lustrously in verdigris, it proclaims how the Wood of the Cross came to overlay the grape leaves and thus the other wood referenced here, that of grapevines. The Wood of the Cross is at the center of a network of iconographies that authorized a wider world of greenery as sanctied. Indeed, Mary, too, participated in the redemptive materiality of the Holy Cross.24 The Cistercian monks at Doberan make this plain to see, emblazoning a standing portrait of her carrying the Infant Christ on the obverse side of their bilateral vegetating triumphal

figure 0.6  Michel and Gregor Erhart (carving) and Hans Schüchlin and

workshop (painting and gilding), Blaubeuren Altarpiece, high altar of former Benedictine abbey church of Blaubeuren, 1494; Jörg Syrlin the Younger, choir stalls, after 1490; painted vaulting, after 1490

figure 0.7  Triumphal Cross and Cross Altar, former Cistercian abbey

church in Bad Doberan, ca. 1360/70

crucix (g. 0.8). Compared to a rod or trunk (virga) for its associations with Christ’s genealogy, the Virgin’s body on the Doberan crucix is aligned compositionally with a relief vignette of Christ appearing in the Burning Bush. While also detailing a scriptural preguration of the cross, the picture of the Tree of the Virgin (Arbor virginis) also harkens to the various accounts of people envisioning Mary in trees, almost all of which involved thaumaturgic carvings of her lodged between their branches, nearby, or within the cavities of their trunks. One of countless instances occasioned the building of the Carthusian monastery of Ahrensbök, also on the Baltic coast, in the nearby northern German state of Holstein around 1280. According to its

8

Introduction

foundation legend, the monks designated the site for their monastery where a shepherd rst discovered an image of Mary by a mighty beech (“juxta ingentem fagum”). Despite the shepherd’s numerous attempts to secure the picture in his home, the image would stubbornly return to the tree, where the local priest advised him to leave it and where, after it performed miracles, it attracted many believers to come and settle in the densely forested area.25 Though this book will analyze some surviving Marian sculptures arising out of similar stories, the Ahrensbök’s Marian picture is now lost, as are countless others like it—known only from words on the page, to say nothing of those for which we possess no record at all. The same is true for the aforementioned genre of miraculous tree crucixes. The few that have endured the test of time, and that I introduce in the following pages, have been overlooked by art historians not only because their provenance is often dicult to trace but also because of their inferior quality. In his groundbreaking study of carved artworks from the late Gothic period, Michael Baxandall wrote, “Only very good works of art, the performances of exceptionally organized men, are complex and coordinated enough to register in their forms the kinds of cultural circumstance sought here; second-rate art will be little use to us.”26 Baxandall’s value judgment rules out an entire class of miraculous images that, by denition, could not be associated with any human maker, much less well-established artistic personalities. Baxandall’s social history of art typically made selections around questions of skill, working from the art object back to its makers. In dismissing what he perceived to be ordinary works as ineloquent, Baxandall discounts how they—and the dierent registers of signicance they bring with them—resonate and shed new light on the kinds of elite objects that were of primary interest to him. Thus, while threads to Baxandall will inevitably be drawn in this book, its methodology and subject matter are quite dierently congured. The following study addresses some of the very canonical objects under his consideration, among others in dierent media in that same class, but it does so by mobilizing a broader visual culture that incorporates not only lowly art but also folkloric and agricultural practices and scientic and devotional literature. It is only by expanding the lens to draw in this wider culture of objects, texts, and rituals that we see the “very good works of art” clearly. The Chemnitz whipping post is an impressive feat of carving. But because it cannot quite claim the levels

figure 0.8  The Tree of the Virgin (Arbor virginis), reverse or Marian side

of gure 0.7

of artistry of a work by Tilman Riemenschneider, and because it falls outside of conventional genre categories like crucixes, altarpieces, or even liturgical theater, it has been left out of narrations concerned with the highest levels of artmaking. Moreover, we know little of its maker(s), and nothing of those who carved the miraculous crosses and Marian images, unlike the carefully reconstructed careers of such artists as Riemenschneider and Matthias Grünewald. But all of their products gure in this book within a shared culture of greenery that thus puts them all in implicit dialogue with one another or at least within a single frame. Wood as Medium Although Doberan’s inventory of relics has been lost and the activities taking place at its monastery church’s cross altar are dicult to trace, it is important to emphasize that

altars more generally, aside from the daily consecration of the Eucharist, also functioned as important nodes in a broader network of liturgical blessings of greenery that took place both inside the church and outdoors. Relics of the Holy Wood, processional crosses, and artworks served a critical function in such rituals. Because the ways they foreground their woodiness have not been suciently noticed, we have missed how they performed in liturgical rituals and were in fact instrumental to acts of sanctication themselves. This book thus recuperates a more colorfully embroidered picture of medieval life and the church’s role within it by looking past generic symbolic associations with wood and greenery. In reem­ bedding the artworks in their practical lifeworlds and exploring the anthropological relationships that subtend them, we ultimately expand out from the sanctuary and into elds and gardens—and in so doing, we experience how wood mediated a profound, recursive relationship between the church and nature.27 The breadth and depth of the connections between wood and other greenery with the most important religious rituals reects these materials’ ubiquity and importance in medieval German life. The fruits of orchards, roughage of gardens, and grains of elds yielded the food and drink that sustained each and every community. But the farming of crops in turn necessitated the wood harvested from trees to tame saplings, plow soil, and wattle o beds and plots from predators. Wood was also indispensable for the traps used to hunt and capture animals on land, in the air, and under water. These raw materials were often reworked into more rened goods through various manufacturing processes, from the rudimentary to the more sophisticated, such as fermentation and distillation, all of which enlisted carpentered instrumentation. That the products deriving from earth’s greenery were traded and thus fueled the medieval economy was due to the skilled coopers and cartwrights who wielded wood to store and transport them. Even the metals smithed to suture together planks were mined from the ground thanks to plumbing networks composed of wooden pipes and waterwheels. Most people lived in timber frame houses whose roofs were waterproofed with wood tar and interiors outtted with woodgrain furniture and cabinetry.28 Bouquets of herbs and owers added touches of color and sweet smells, though their presence in domestic spaces was more than ornamental. Pinned to doors, corners, and ceilings,

Introduction

9

seasonal greenery was thought to possess amuletic powers. Although protoempirical scientic inquiry bore proven medicinal benets to plants, they were the frequent locus of superstition and folklore. For example, to commemorate the sap rising again in May after long winters, townspeople and rural peasants across medieval Germany routinely caroused around trees renewed with leaves, which they decorated after felling and hauling them from local forests. From root to stem, vegetation also provided artists with a great deal of their supplies and tools. Pigments and dyes of nearly every color could be extracted from plants, though mineral compounds for their shimmery quality—especially azurite and ultramarine—could be favored. Saps and resins such as gum arabic exuding on the bark of trees, while also a pillar of medieval topical medicines and plasters, functioned as the key binding agents for mixing paints and relaying pigments onto surfaces. Artist and pharmacist alike frequented the medieval apothecary, whose globally sourced inventory might surprise the modern reader. Integral to the translucent glaze the great Franconian sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider applied to the unpainted carving he delivered to his clients was a yellow dyestu, perhaps morin, which comes from the jackfruit tree of South and Southeast Asia or the white mulberry from central Asia.29 Wood and greenery’s ubiquity in both daily and artistic life is reected also in its religious importance—and not merely in its capacity to evoke divinity symbolically but to do so in its own physical materiality. Living greenery formed the center of outdoor folkloric celebrations and bedecked church interiors on holidays, enlivening ecclesiastical furniture with color and permeating spaces with sweet smells and odors. Records from Strasbourg’s celebration of Corpus Christi in 1468 indicate that a central element of the festivities was the installation of may (Maien) inside the Saint Nicholas Church and outside along its designated part of the city’s procession route, atop which grass was also to be sprinkled.30 A half-century later in Augsburg, the rebrand Reformer Sebastian Franck recounted in his World Book of 1534, “Whenever there is an important feast, the church is decorated with tapestries and great may [grossen meyen]; the altarpieces are opened up and the saints dusted and spruced up, especially the patron of the feast.”31 Derived from the month of its spring reawakening, the German word for may, as was also the case in early vernacular English, was

10

Introduction

often employed as a common noun to signify a catchall for woods and greenery, hence its appearance in lowercase throughout this book. In the spiritual context, maywoods were inextricably linked with the Holy Wood, their eponymous month dened not only by the rst of the two chief cross holidays on May 3 but also by that month’s movable Feast of the Lance and Nails. With the advent of this feast in 1354, the rest of the Arma Christi joined the primary wooden weapon of the Cross and became enfolded into its nature-centered springtime adoration— hence the period’s innumerable pictures showing the arms of Christ’s Passion ensconced in ourishing springtime owers and plants, as can be seen in the carved bosses of Blaubeuren’s vaults (g. 0.9). The term “may” appears abundantly in period devotional literature and stood for a realm of activated greenery that matured in conjunction with but also spun out from the primary cross feasts in spring and fall.32 It is a key term that draws together a host of materials that we otherwise might not immediately associate with wood or even religion but that medieval people did. While the term is familiar to literary historians, art historians have not been attentive to the implications of the broad meaning of may or, really, plant devotion (Maiandacht), which manifests the many entrenched connections between faith, the vegetal world, and the calendar. Though rooted in the cross holidays, may devotion also encompassed the horticultural and liturgical correspondences of numerous saints and their botanical namesakes in the intervening months. Just as Holy Cross adoration was transposed over the maypole celebration and fall dressing of grapevines, so the Virgin’s body was mapped over the late summer tradition of plucking herbs from elds and meadows. Her body was thought to have imbued medicinal herbs with their healing power on the occasion of her Assumption into heaven, when her body diused sweet perfumes to those she left behind on earth. On Assumption Day (August 15), as they still do in some parts of Germany, townspeople carried their bouquets of herbs into church to be ritually consecrated at the altar (see g. 3.33). The ritual transpired in Blaubeuren’s town church, if not also among the monks of its Benedictine abbey, too, who had painted on their vaults a number of identiable species of plants—perhaps indicating some of the real examples they collected from their gardens and elds and blessed on their Madonna altar, engulfed in simulated vegetation as it is.33 An inscription on the town church attributes similarly

figure 0.9  Blaubeuren vault, detail

of church ceiling in gure 0.6, Mary praying with angels bearing whip, birches, and whipping post

painted botanical vaulting imagery to “Daniel Schüchlin of Ulm, who painted the vaultings on the Day of Our Lady, also known as the herb consecration.”34 While the concept of may devotion has largely been overlooked, the prevalence of vegetal motifs in architecture has been the greatest focus of scholarly attention to these forms.35 Studying the phenomenon of branch and leaf tracery (Ast- and Laubwerk) across scale in liturgical metalwork, wooden altar cabinets, and stone vaulting, Karl Oettinger was the rst to interpret horticultural tracery as various stand-ins for a sacred bower that functioned metonymically for the Paradise Garden.36 For him, the bower owered up as the late Gothic successor to the staid, rational, and geometric forms that structured the High Gothic cathedral into a Heavenly Jerusalem.37 Architectural historians have since justiably criticized

Oettinger’s reductive symbolic “decoding” of such a wide swath of artworks and buildings.38 Indeed, once one looks beyond mere gurative associations and takes into account the broader signicance of wood and vegetation, what becomes clear are the various ways in which artworks across media, including architecture, were all empowered by the real wood and greenery with which they were designed to coexist. Oettinger, who did not restrict his analysis to tracery, oers us a clue that vegetation proliferating in art was symptomatic of wider spiritual associations with the mundane, created world, and especially its greenery. Although he was seemingly unaware of the may devotional texts and artworks referenced in this book, Oettinger’s words have a familiar ring with Johan Huizinga’s famous criticism of vulgar late medieval spirituality, which he

Introduction

11

viewed as stooping to a coarse new low of profanity and terrible banality.39 According to Oettinger: That which is perceptible in the human world permeates all the details with its realism precisely to lend the mystical whole a power of persuasion. But as a result, the human world is given so much importance and power that it rst gains its own value in the profane and nally, to in-force its own gravitas, breaks the mystical frame even in religious matters.40

It is here where the image of the heavenly slips downward to the ground of man that we see Oettinger anticipating Ethan Matt Kavaler’s penetrating and lyrical analyses of vegetal architectural sculpture in late Gothic Germany.41 In the sunken foliage that disengages itself from the structural components in the vaulting of Ingolstadt’s Church of Our Lady, constructed in 1510–20, Kavaler discerned a formal lapse from the divine laws of immaterial, abstract geometry (as evinced in the High Gothic) to more earthly ones, chaotic and fallen from grace (gs. 0.10, 0.11). In taking a new look from a dierent angle at the intersection between popular social practice and religious ritual, this book intervenes in such debates, proposing an alternative way that medieval viewers would have under­stood greenery, whether real or gurative, within a religious setting. Rather than a hierarchy of one over the other, the architects of Ingolstadt’s complex vaulting net­ works married the earthly and the abstract, interspersing intimations of thorns and hearts with recognizable traces of the Arma Christi, from the crown of thorns to the wooden grips of the whip.42 Much in the spirit of contemporary woodcuts, the vaults exhibit broader botanical reimaginings of Christ’s and Mary’s human suering and glory, many of which paralleled folk traditions (see g. 2.19). Indeed, the vaults are now petried indicators of the living greenery that once adorned the church on the Feasts of Corpus Christi and Mary’s Assumption.43 Side by side, carved in stone and cut live from the ground, vegetation at Ingolstadt stood at the nexus of vernacular and religious ritual—an ambiguity that would have been profoundly resonant for medieval viewers and two of the chapel’s patrons, the local brewers and wine traders, who experienced plants as an essential part of daily life, and the connection of daily life to the larger calendar of seasons and, in turn, to the church. Paul Crossley has proposed the idea that verdant archi­ tectural forms evoke a nostalgia for a newly rediscovered Teutonic antiquity. At the same time that branch and leaf

12

Introduction

tracery became common in German churches, German humanists had rediscovered the tree-laden altars and forested dwellings of their pagan ancestors, as the Roman historian Tacitus recounted them in his Germania written around 98 CE.44 For German architects competing with Quattrocento Italian classicism, arboreal forms oered them a uniquely ancient German vocabulary with which to contrast against that of the Italians, whose cultural patrimony survived not just in treatises but also in physical stone. In truth, however, tree-centered traditions in medieval Germany—sacred and secular—long predated the revival of Tacitus and encompassed areas of literary and visual culture beyond architecture and humanist discourse. In their quest to assert a regional identity, architects were just as well served resorting to Tacitus’s account of trees in their ancient history as they were looking out their own windows to the present and how those traditions transformed, eroded and polished by the winds of time and ltered into Christianity. Not only predating the humanist topos, Germany’s historical involvement with vegetation and wood may have provided a symbolic, if usually concealed, substratum for it. Crossley and to a certain extent Baxandall, who in his landmark study of limewood sculpture only briey broached the folkloric signicance of the limewood tree, were hesitant to analyze artworks in the context of popular rituals associated with vegetation. “It [folkloristic practice] is uncomfortably fugitive material and it may even be better to leave it aside.”45 Baxandall’s hesitation is emblematic of a justied reluctance in German art history to reexamine the medieval and ancient legacy of nature-oriented customs, tainted as they are in modern historiography. Historical tree customs formed the breeding ground for nineteenth-century folklorists who plumbed sources to establish historical precedents for wood as a “national material” for Germany.46 Theirs was a nationalist enterprise whose embellishments and fanciful interpretations were contaminated and radicalized under ecofascist folklorists of the so-called Third Reich, who corrupted the history of rituals involving plants and trees to draw inherent connections between the German “race” and its environment.47 In their interpretation of the same medieval sources, postwar scholars who rightfully sought to de-Nazify methodological approaches also sidestepped much of the historical continuity of greenery, given its suspect ideological connotations.48

figures 0.10 and 0.11  Church of Our Beloved Lady, Ingolstadt, detail of stone vaultings in the Wine Traders’ and Brewers’ Chapels (Weinschenkenkapelle and Brauerkapelle), ca. 1510–15

The following pages attempt to look anew at such sources with historical distance and ask what can be gleaned from them despite their having been co-opted by an abhorrent politics. A careful examination of this ethnographic material, buttressed by complementary evidence in the history of science, medicine, and literature, brings into view a layered and shared discourse about wood and greenery across media, from amateurish objects to the most elite artworks hanging in museums or still in situ. What becomes clear is that the church actively domesticated trees and vegetation into its doctrine to regulate, and sometimes accommodate, the widespread observance of profane rituals that exalted greenery for greenery’s sake. This book recovers the ritual coordination among such greenery, the church calendar, and liturgical artworks that is implicit in Sebastian Franck’s description of a church bedecked in “meyen.” That the opening and closing of altarpieces, the carrying of processional crucixes, and the

reading of manuscript pictures could help eectuate the power of the Holy Wood to exact change over the lowly wood only belies the power relations of the inverse, too, as the processes around the Holy Wood were driven by the temporal conditions of the outside environment with which they were necessarily aligned. Franck’s account is therefore also illuminating for its juxtaposition of the two kinds of wood brought from the outdoors and into the sanctuary: the living wood in the form of herbaceous garlands and the reanimated wood on the altar. Elsewhere in his World Book, Franck scorns Catholics for their naive investment in the power of saints and their carved stand-ins to enact change over their surrounding environments. To this day, in the winemaking town of Rottenburg am Neckar, the Brotherhood of Saint Urban, which was founded in 1401, parades a carving of Saint Urban on the saint’s feast day (April 2) so that he intercedes for favorable meteorological conditions (g. 0.12).49

Introduction

13

figure 0.12  Saint Urban’s Day Procession, 2015, modern wood carving

based on lost original, Rottenburg (Tübingen) right  figure 0.13  Saint Urban, attributed to Jakob Russ, ca. 1500,

Parish Church of Saint Christina, Ravensburg

Recounting the holiday’s observance in the 1530s, Franck wrote, “When the weather is beautiful, [people] drag the image of Urban for wine into the tavern, set him behind a table, hang grapevines around him, force him to drink, bring him drinks, and behave as if [the weather] were because of Urban.” 50 We can imagine precisely the kind of carved picture of Urban involved in this anecdote because many survive from the period in southern Germany, such as that in Ravensburg (g. 0.13 and see g. 4.11). In them, he is invariably shown holding grape bunches, an allusion to his status as patron saint of vintners. Robert Scribner and others have written extensively about these profane encounters with religious images as inversions of sacred ritual.51 Numerous historical accounts around the time of the Reformation illustrate how skeptics sought to expose liturgical sculptures for their inadequacy to respond to quotidian concerns. Such images were removed from their original spiritual contexts, as, for example, from sculpted Olive Mount groups usually located at street level on church exteriors, only to be unmasked as fraudulent, inert matter and were subsequently destroyed or humiliated.52 To be sure, images of stone and other media were also summarily destroyed for the same reasons. But it was wood—light enough to be carried but durable enough to interact with its users in rituals year after year—that constituted most of the “manual” sculpture that was a staple of the late medieval liturgical environment.53 As I explain in this book’s fourth

14

Introduction

chapter, among a myriad of reasons, it was also owing to the festal associations with limewood trees and trees in general that such Reformers as Andreas Karlstadt and Martin Luther considered pictures and, in particular, the wood used to make them, anathema to religious praxis. In the case of Saint Urban, according to Franck, his image was dragged in the mud when the weather did not cooperate with his feast day. When a storm devastated their vineyard crops, Rottenburgers in the sixteenth century doused their Urban carving with water to remind the saint of his apotropaic obligations.54 The corollary to this equation, though, is that he—and his image—were rewarded when the weather did cooperate. They plied it with wine and swaddled it with grapevines. In their reuniting of the wooden saint holding his emblematic grapes with the corresponding living greenery and beverage it yielded, we thus encounter less of an inversion than we do a variation of church ritual. Urban’s statue nestled in vines evokes the church’s procession of Urban’s picture through vineyards as well as the carved vegetal canopies that hung over his statues in altarpieces presiding over herbal consecrations.

We must therefore also interpret Franck’s account more specically as a criticism of the materiality of such religious artworks, as Tim Ingold would dene it.55 Franck’s is a criticism of the power inherent neither to images nor to their material properties but rather to the anthropological and institutional networks that compelled people to engender matter with power or agency in the rst place. For the church, that potential for nonhuman or object power originated in the Wood of the Cross. Emanating out of the example of the cross, the paragon of nonhuman saintliness, images such as that of Saint Urban in Franck’s description foregrounded their material kinship with vegetation precisely as a means to exploit a perceived eect they possessed over it. Bruno Latour would categorize such artworks as “mediators” that perpetually weave together nonhuman nature and human culture across one “seamless fabric.”56 To mediate the ritual consecrations that governed the rhythms of the natural world, then, the artworks discussed in this book oscillate across both representational and material registers of woodiness, and in doing so they reveal an interrelated and mutually reinforcing relationship between the two—the symbolic and the real, the church and plants. Wood Mediating Church and Nature The relationship between the church and greenery was highly fraught. In a careful balancing act, the church had to reconcile the mandated disdain for nature that is inscribed in Genesis against the matter in the world it needed to establish the actual ground on which it was able to sustain itself. As this book makes clear, in late medieval Germany—and in particular the fteenth century and the years leading up to the Reformation—the church leaned into its centripetal position in the world, actively absorbing and sanctifying the rhythms of everyday life into its ritualistic system. To understand precisely how it did so is to identify its cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken), or what media and cultural historians would say are the strategies it employed to control the interactions between people and media (that is, nonhuman objects and phenomena in the environment) to establish a prevailing notion of culture.57 Time and again, the church deployed the Wood of the Cross as medium in numerous cultural techniques—in laying the cross over trees, maypoles, herbal medicines, and agricultural technologies— to attempt to put nature in its place, to recode or invert its positive and potent qualities, and, nally, to displace them onto Christian agencies. The result, however, was not

always straightforward or successful, as religious artists and writers faced many challenges in containing metaphors that were mapped over natural forms and concepts. Indeed, as we will see, the cross persistently reappears in the church’s cultural techniques to mediate with nature and assimilate it into its force eld. The cross’s wood shape-shifted into innumerable species of plants, popular cult objects to coax their growth, and carpentered technologies (some crude, others sophisticated) to transform them into mundane, usable by-products, such as medical plasters, wine, honey, and cheese—all of which, in turn, were reciprocally generative for their symbolic-spiritual value, too. The cross’s recursion inside and outside the church is a regular feature of the artworks from this period and place; recursion across nature-culture divides is also a salient marker of cultural techniques at work.58 According Bernhard Siegert, a leading media theorist in the eld of cultural techniques, recursion shows that an attempt at distinguishing nature and culture is precisely what gives cultural techniques their “constitutive force”; it is why their contingent culture is “taken to be the real, ‘natural’ order of things.”59 In resituating religious artworks in their full ritual context at the altar and outside the sanctuary, then, we experience precisely how the church performed its cultural techniques—how it laid claim to the perceived reality that there was a distinction between culture and nature and that it was the sole mediator between the two.60 Moving beyond deciphering their formal and material iconographies to witness them in their fuller cultural landscapes, this book demonstrates that this period’s artworks do more than merely perpetuate commonplace scriptural vegetal metaphors for spiritual concerns.61 They do more than abstract spiritual meaning away from the material support of their gurative language.62 Instead, the artworks—the crucixes, altarpieces, and works on paper—show how the real and symbolic, natural and cultural, and material and spiritual were perpetually producing each other. So pervasive was the concept of the cross as mechanical exemplar that the Dominican preacher Johannes Kreutzer of Alsace (d. 1468), a prominent gure in the may devotional genre cited throughout this study, compared it to the wooden strainers in which milk was reworked into cheese, with the excess uids and hardening rind compared to Christ’s blood and esh.63 Agricultural motifs abound in may devotional tracts and artworks,

Introduction

15

with the Wood of the Cross persistently functioning as the technology bridging people, nature, its manipulation, and church doctrine. Dened by the interdependence of human culture, technology, and nature, early agricultural engineering was in fact the domain from which the notion of cultural techniques originally emerged in the late nineteenth century.64 Like the agronomists who celebrated the culturing techniques of Germany’s myriad topographies as a means to elevate the political status of a newly consolidated “Fatherland,” religious writers and artists in late medieval Germany harnessed the power of agriculture—its more specialized categories (horticulture and viticulture) and their attendant technologies—to interweave nature and culture alike. They thus transposed Christian principles over humanity’s enculturation of the environment so as to be indispensable to it, to establish governance over it. It was no longer sucient to map the crucied Christ over the winepress and vine alone; the alder pole, barrel, and horse-drawn cart were also absorbed into the devotional repertoire, as were a panoply of specially harvested herbs, honeys, and cheeses. Nature— and humanity’s indefatigable use of it—would be instrumentalized to underscore the sacramental nature of Christ on the cross; likewise, the Crucixion would explain how nature operated and could optimally be tamed. At times, though, the recursive pairings between land and spirit proved so forceful and alluring that the church had to curb their problematic potential for heterodox slippage. It is no coincidence, then, that from Alsace to Bavaria the vegetal and carpentered cross recurs in close regional proximity to the printing of a new class of practical guides on medieval resource use. Indeed, the devotional and functional share a remarkable instructional character.65 For this reason, the authors working in these areas play key roles in this study. The Franciscan Nuremberg preacher Stephan Fridolin (1430–1498), to aid his spiritual meditations on the healing properties of herbs, compiled his Spiritual May (Der geistliche Mai) in Nuremberg for the Clarissan nuns he supervised alongside a copy of the Gart der Gesundheit, one in a family of botanical incunabula printed out of Mainz in the 1460s.66 For the specicity of his horticultural allegories, the Dominican preacher Johannes Kreutzer must also have been familiar with such practical guides as the reprints of Ruralia commoda by Petrus de Crescentiis (ca. 1230–ca. 1320). Printed in Germany in Latin in 1471 and in the vernacular in 1493, Ruralia commoda is a comprehensive multivolume

16

Introduction

agronomical guide with accompanying woodcut pictures to instruct its readers on the domestication of cereals, vines, and trees. It also treats such subjects as animal husbandry and beekeeping. Targeted not only at farmers and actual practitioners but also at a new, more broadly literate audience interested in the mechanics of their surrounding environment, Ruralia commoda and the Gart der Gesundheit reect this period’s burgeoning taste for illustrated instruction manuals on such subjects as gardening, hunting, bathing, and plumbing water. Both printed and handmade for aristocratic readers, the manuals exhibit an increasing desire to record and illustrate best practices for how to prot from God’s green creation. I fold many of these titles into the following chapters to show how spiritual writers and artists enculturated the land and its reuse with Christological signicance just as these scientic, agricultural, and folkloric—that is, extraecclesiastical—ideas were reaching broader audiences and gaining wider purchase. Although the manuals appealed generally to a literate public, the vast majority of devotional treatises in this genre were written for nuns. At face value, the texts comport with a period of fteenth-century monastic reform that sought to rein in what it characterized as the kinds of radical and often bodily displays of piety popularized by female mystics of previous generations.67 With women writers all but censored, confessors and preachers were the predominant authors of this period’s mystical texts, most of which were designed to organize the nuns in their care into rule-abiding communities that prized immaterial virtues. These male authors borrowed the orid visionary mode of their predecessors but instead shifted the material basis of their prayers to ordinary details from the nuns’ everyday lived environment. In Jerey Hamburger’s description of the material character of this period’s spiritual literature, every quotidian facet of convent existence possessed the same potential of a rosary bead to spur a nun’s devotion.68 But Fridolin and others also found his nuns uplifting signs outside the cloister in spaces and rituals that were forbidden to them; some of these the church outright disparaged altogether. Such are the powerful profane subjects that Oettinger, were he familiar with these texts, would say “lend the mystical whole a power of persuasion.”69 As the following pages demonstrate, surviving contemporary accounts indicate a popular, if uneasy, spiritualization of these same commonplace customs. Although it remains unclear in which domain

the tropes originated, among male authors supervising cloistered women or among a superstitious populace, they exhibit a great number of intersections between the two, which are also born out in both high art and popular visual culture, from famous winged altarpieces and paraliturgical objects to illustrated calendars and riddle books. Throughout this book I cite the words and illustrations from a specic manuscript copy of Stephan Fridolin’s Spiritual May, one such devotional treatise that spiritualizes mundane springtime life. It is special because its owner, Sister Eufrosina, was also the gardener of her Franciscan Pütrich convent in Munich. The manuscript is thus proof that the didactic exercises not only triggered devotion but also possessed a veritable trove of cultural techniques designed to ensconce the cross at the center of Eufrosina’s apprehension of and interaction with the world around her. Its opening image shows her in a window receiving the Christ Child. He knocks on her convent door and says, “I stand before the door. Open up and let me in, you, my most beloved” (g. 0.14).70 The picture is a reenactment of the Solomonic bridal mysticism that formed the biblical pretext for the genre of may devotion, which reveled in particular in the botanical imagery proered by the Song of Songs. The picture also contains the rst of Eufrosina’s many encounters with Christ and other saintly gures in her weeks-long Maytime spiritual exercises of collecting sacks of herbs, strolling through the elds on May Day, felling and decorating a maypole, facing justice under the court lime tree, dressing vines, harvesting honey, and so forth. In addition to instilling abstract moral and theological concepts, Eufrosina’s recitation of the illustrated devotional manual day by day, as gardener, would also have coincided with and spiritually dignied the fruits of her real-life labor with the earth in May—a month whose cross-centric feast days were characterized by fertility rituals, both sacred and profane. The same temporal calibration of prayer and liturgy with seasonal change we encounter with numerous texts of the same genre, including the companion treatises allegorizing the autumn vintage in conjunction with the other cross holiday observed on September 14. It is symptomatic of how the church also domesticated the calendar, imposing its cultural imprint on the rhythms of the natural world that, in turn, dictated which holidays fell when.71 Like Eufrosina’s manuscript, this book’s trajectory moves forward across time. It is organized such

figure 0.14  Christ Child at Sister Eufrosina’s Convent Door, pen and

ink on parchment, Stephan Fridolin’s Der geistliche Mai, Bavarian, 1529. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 4473, flyleaf

that the reader progresses chronologically through the calendar year. What more clearly unfolds by doing so are the many ways religious artworks staged and mediated the reciprocal relationship between the physical and liturgical seasons. The book’s primary temporal pivot points are oriented around the spring and autumn festivals of the cross, though in exploring the connection between the two we inevitably uncover the seasonality of artworks in summer and even winter, too. The book also moves forward in terms of technological sophistication, charting the evolution of the cross’s transformations from tree and folkloric totem pole to medicinal compound and carpentered contraption. As the cross’s wood is enfolded into increasingly elaborated metaphors comparing the body of Christ to plants and their manufactured by-products, the body of Christ, in turn, begins to assume ever more botanical qualities, just the same. The book also charts how

Introduction

17

artists deftly mediated green themes by various means: cross legends in carved wood, tree folklore in woodcut prints, vegetal medicine in panel painting, and agriculture in microarchitecture. The rst chapter sets the stage for the Holy Cross as the only nonhuman saint. It introduces the way that, through the hagiography of the Wood of the Cross—and the artworks through which that holy wood reincarnated itself in the fourteenth and fteenth centuries—the church was able to lay claim to the ebbs and ows of the natural world, its vicissitudes and miraculous phenomena. Starting with a history of the move from typological to legendary associations between the True Cross and the Tree of Life in Paradise, the chapter leads us to a category of carved crucixes miraculously arising out of local German trees. Their own legendary histories mirroring that of the cross, the miraculous crucixes that form the heart of the chapter—one from the Westphalian village of Lage, the other the town of Kranenburg near Cleves— also would have participated in a larger constellation of springtime rituals oriented around the Feast of the Cross’s Invention on May 3. Infused with the mystical qualities of the True Cross itself, the crucixes furnished altars inside their churches, but at pivotal moments in the agricultural and liturgical calendar they were ritually processed outside its walls to render the surrounding landscape and its vegetation with the potential for new divine intercession—which, in turn, for the people of these towns would ideally result in more wood in the form of plentiful crops. In revealing how the histories of the Holy Cross came to punctuate real-life medieval German topographies, the chapter also shows how the Virgin Mary for her genealogical connections to Christ and the cross also became miraculously manifest in nature—in her case in miracle-working waters as well as trees. The artworks in chapter 1 express to us a register beyond the symbolic, a mode of image-making that reveals how through the material of wood the church attempted to account for the agency of the nonhuman natural world and how wood, trees, and their stumps, conversely, became ensconced in liturgical practice, too. The recursion of the True Cross between church and landscape suggests an easy, even reciprocal, relationship between miraculous wood and the local environment. But this was not always the case. The second chapter explores how many of the profane rituals around the fertile springtime period that temporally overlapped with

18

Introduction

the Maytime celebrations of the Cross were reimagined as, or rather domesticated into, more orthodox Christian frameworks. In contrast to church gures who protested against their improper glorication of nature, mystical writers such as Henry Suso and others in his wake assimilated into the May month’s cross feasts—which by the fourteenth century also included a feast to the other Arma Christi—a broad range of spring secular customs, chief among them the ceremonial maypole. Centered on a ritual object that helped people structure and understand the world around them, the maypole custom honored renewal and rebirth by sacricing the nest local tree, dragging it into town, hanging ornaments from it, and crowding around it for dancing and merrymaking. Digging deeper into historical accounts of the practice and bringing to light how the understudied genre of may devotion spiritualized these folkloric practices, we uncover how religious writers and artists absorbed the maypole—and its power as a mediating instrument between people and nature—through its formal and conceptual likeness with Christ on the cross. What also comes into view is a family of visual material not previously associated with the may devotional movement. More than abstract diagrams, the numerous pictures showing a True Cross trunk anchoring the other weapons—one decorating an altarpiece for nuns in Swabia, another taking the guise of the monumental whipping post in Chemnitz discussed above—are shown in fact to visualize the specically arboreal link that may devotion drew between the cross, the Arma Christi, and the maypole. Reconguring the imagery and conceit of the profane festive trees and columns into ecclesiastical terms, the artworks in this chapter disclose the constant loops—and many tensions—between the church’s calendar and system of images and the botanical rituals of the spring season. Extrapolating from the rich, sacred metaphorics of Christ on the living Tree of the Cross, artists also attributed the therapeutic eects of the rest of earth’s greenery to the saints who performed good works in his image. Chapter 3 looks closely at how artists exploited wood’s semantic ability to oscillate between subject and medium in order to interweave the medicinal properties of the bodies of Christ and saints with those of the vegetal bodies of trees and plants. The well-known south German painter known as Matthias Grünewald (ca. 1470–1528), the artist under primary consideration in this chapter,

employed this form of meta-representation on altars, where his artworks staged the liturgical enlivenment of Christ’s body as well as medicinal herbs. In analyzing two of his major painted altarpieces, one for the Antonine canons at Isenheim and the other for Jakob Heller in Frankfurt’s Dominican Church, this chapter demonstrates how the church, through the performance of the liturgy, which centered around but branched outward from the altar table, exerted itself as intermediary or agent accounting for the healing properties of real-world plants and trees. Where the Antonites at Isenheim expressed in their painted and sculpted altarpiece a trenchant awareness of the metaphorical and material relevance of bleeding trees to their healing practices, Heller sought to express in his monochrome paintings the inner healing quality of plant medicine, the ecacy of which was rendered more vigorous on Assumption Day, the day herbs were annually blessed and the very feast day his altarpiece was commissioned to honor. Building an impasto relief o the wooden panel or applying such a thin layer of paint as to allow the panel to shine through, Grünewald cleverly simulated the performative essence of medieval plants with his paintbrush, blurring the distinctions between metaphor and practice and artice and nature. This chapter also advances across the calendar, from the spring season of the Cross to the late summer feasts of the Virgin, demonstrating a sensitivity on the part of the altarpieces’ patrons, artists, and viewers to the seasonal relationship of plants to the ritual calendar both within and beyond the walls of the church. Having just observed the Marian and hagiographic potency of wood in the medicinal quality of summer herbs, the nal chapter progresses forward to autumn, where again religious writers and artists indulged in the various semantic registers proered by the materiality of wood, whose living and carpentered conditions formed the backbone of both the season’s liturgy of the cross and the industry of winemaking. The chapter’s centerpiece is Rothenburg’s famous Holy Blood Altarpiece, whose gures were carved by the great Franconian sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider. Starting with the comparatively less-studied tethered vines of its frame carved by the cabinetmaker Erhard Harschner allows an appreciation of how the whole unpainted wooden construction relates to the wine that is the relic on the altarpiece, the blood of Christ on the altar, and the product of the land surrounding the church—all of which, in the contemporary devotional

sphere, is mediated through the sacred materiality of the Wood of the Cross. That the substance of wood was loaded with such sacred signicance allows us to reconsider the commonly held notion that Riemenschneider renounced polychromy for his Rothenburg commission as an act of aesthetic restraint anticipating Protestant iconophobia. A series of artworks belonging to the Spiritual Vintage mystical genre spins out from the Holy Blood Altarpiece to indicate an extended resonance of the cross’s sacred wooden materiality across all of the wood deployed throughout the winemaking process, spanning the entire agricultural season and both seasons of the cross, from the planting and pruning of vines and the Feast of Saint Urban in May to the harvesting of grapes and barreling of their juices in the fall. Wood thus carried substantial spiritual associations throughout the church calendar, from spring leaves and summer herbs to autumnal grapes and grains. What the last chapter also demonstrates is that as the late medieval church grew more entangled with wood and greenery, religious writers and artists became more audacious in asserting their wooden saint, the Ur-tree and Ur-machine, in its myriad vegetal and carpentered instantiations, as the archetype for an ever-increasing inventory of tools used to unleash and enjoy earth’s fruits.72 But tools, in turn, shape their users.73 As plants were spiritualized, devotion was botanized, too. As people enculturated nature, whether with their own dirty hands or at arm’s length as readers, so too did the church and the media by which it ordered people into its sphere of inuence. Overwrought with material predicates giving voice to theological constructs, may devotion spawned a rhetorical counteroensive by Reformers like Martin Luther who sought to rein in the potential slippage between greenery and divinity. This book’s epilogue enumerates their complaints that religious superstitions around plants stunted scientic progress and encroached on what constituted a pure sacrament. It shows how in their own employment of botanical and agricultural allegories they stuck rigidly to the letter of scripture, employing deliberate artistic and literary strategies to contain their signicance to an abstract, gurative register. Part of what they sought to stymie, as the following pages will make clear, was how artworks—in their knottiness and obdurate woodiness—and the real greenery they portrayed sometimes resisted the controls placed on them and exerted power over the societies in which they were implanted to mediate.74

Introduction

19

1

The Vegetable Saint

Since its appearance by 1304, the Crucixus dolorosus in Cologne’s Santa Maria im Kapitol has arrested viewers with an expressive and brutally detailed representation of the violence inicted on Christ’s body (g. 1.1).1 Thin to the point of skeletal, Christ’s battered, blood-soaked esh and bones weigh so heavily on his attenuated arms that the two spikes pierced through his hands stretch the skin of his palms past his knuckle joints. From the sunken eyes and cheeks to the bloodied laceration on Christ’s chest, the carvers commissioned on behalf of the church’s canonesses glossed over none of the sordid physical details of Christ’s torment. Rendering him almost life-size, they went to great lengths to strike a compositional balance between the jagged lines of Christ’s appendages and the hollows of his face and abdomen. In tenor and craftsmanship, the Kapitol Crucix was an unprecedented work of art when it was installed by the church’s cross altar.2 But it did comport with the spirit of a burgeoning movement of an empathy-centered piety that dwelled on Christ’s humanity, especially the physical pain he suered in death. Romanticized xations on the morbidity of these very devotional trends, however, led to modern alterations Seth Receives the Twig from the Archangel Michael, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, detail of g. 1.8

figure 1.1  Crucixus dolorosus, before 1304, polychromed

wood, Santa Maria im Kapitol, Cologne

figure 1.2  Kapitol Crucix, detail of gure

1.1 showing green underpainting on the cross

of the crucix that either caused or sustained dubious myths about its origins. Dreary layers of browned polychromy and translucent washes, for example, reinforced the long-standing misconception that this work—and the many other Crucixi dolorosi, or sorrowful crucixes, across Germany, Austria, and Italy that followed in its path—served as a cruciform talisman against the plague, which was laying waste to much of the continent at the time.3 Equally harmful to our understanding of the cross’s production and reception, though, are the anachronistic conservation measures that obscure the sculptor’s intent to represent not just the agonizing but also the redemptive side of Christ’s bloodshed. Concealed by a uniform layer of opaque drab, the original bright green cross, with its lateral beams forking outward like the limbs of a tree (hence the German term Gabelkreuz, or fork cross) and its shorn-o branch stubs glistening with patches of gold, would have trumpeted a complete soteriological picture of the Passion story (g. 1.2).4 Accentuating the cross’s typological heritage in the Edenic Tree of Life underlies the promise of salvation history, that in Christ’s death

22

The Vegetable Saint

on the tree-cross, with the last breath he drew through his mangled mouth, humankind was granted the fruits of eternal salvation. The original appearance of the Kapitol cross can be gathered from the coeval Crucixus dolorosus produced for the former church of the Order of Saint John in Lage (Osnabrück), which survives intact from around 1315 and forms the center of a cult of the cross that thrives to this day (g. 1.3).5 The branchy Latin cross aunts its arboreal ancestry—with a rich green lacquer and gilded nubs—just as its counterpart in Cologne once did. Indeed, all carved Gabelkreuze were conventionally painted green.6 Both build on a long artistic tradition of grounding the salvic power of the cross not in its carpentered cruciform but rather in its apocryphal material origins in the Paradisiacal—but earthly—tree. The Legend of the Wood of the Cross—the subsection of the Holy Cross’s hagiography in the Golden Legend devoted to its botanical source in the Garden of Eden—became extraordinarily popular in northern Europe, manifesting itself there to an unparalleled degree in word, image, and ritual.7 As the

figure 1.3  Lage Cross, early 14th century, polychromed oak, Church of Saint John

legend goes, and as was illustrated in numerous books and church interiors across German-speaking lands, the tree that ultimately yielded the wood used for Christ’s cross was born of a sprig that the Archangel Michael delivered from Paradise to Adam’s third son, Seth. Crossing over and taking root in postlapsarian soil over Adam’s grave, the saintly vegetable endures an odyssey through biblical and contemporary time, constituting the only hagiography in Jacques de Voragine’s epic compilation revolving around a nonhuman object. Far from inert and passive, the wood steers its own destiny toward reuniting with Christ at the Crucixion. It assumes anthropomorphic qualities and behaviors, emulating traits of resilience and faith exhibited by its fellow cohort of saintly people. But it is precisely for its idiosyncratic materiality among the saints as divinity in vegetal body that the cross aorded the church a medium through which it could exert control over the cross’s lowlier material and formal counterparts in the created world of greenery. This chapter explores the relationship between the True Cross, its legendary history, and a category of miraculous carved crucixes made from trees growing in the German countryside in the fourteenth century. It seeks to return the local objects to their context of spring rituals, through which they then resacralized the earth. Arising out of miracles rooted in trees in the local landscape, the two crucixes that form the heart of this chapter—one the aforementioned example from Lage, the other from the town of Kranenburg, near Cleves—were subsequently instrumentalized to empower requests for renewed divine intervention within nature. Far from ordinary, as their surviving histories recount in words, the crucixes transcended their ontological status as mere images precisely because the autochthonous trees from which they derived reenacted many of the key tropes rst exemplied by the True Cross. Imbued with the mystical qualities of the True Cross itself, the crucixes furnished altars inside their churches, but at pivotal moments in the agricultural and liturgical calendar, they were ritually processed outside its walls to render the surrounding landscape and its vegetation with the potential for new divine intercession—which, in turn, for the people of these towns would ideally result in more wood in the form of plentiful crops. In revealing how typologies of the Holy Cross came to punctuate reallife medieval German topographies, the chapter further shows how the Virgin Mary, on account of her genealogical connection as a rod (virga) to Christ and the cross, also

24

The Vegetable Saint

became miraculously manifest in the natural elements—in her case not only in trees but also in water. Still, for all the power these wooden artworks could claim over the lowly wood, their own wood was always carefully partitioned from that of the True Cross, laying bare the risks and challenges posed by reincarnations of the cross legends in local landscapes outside the sanctuary. For their material and typological linkages with the supernatural trees and waters that produced them—but whose powers they also, in turn, eectually reinforced— the artworks addressed in this chapter inhabit an ambiguous position as objects that exceed representation but that do not equal the divine vegetable they represent. Lying somewhere between art and relic, they helped enact the link between the cross and the living environment. In doing so, they also provided an outlet for peoples’ anxiety about the fragility of farming and the church’s anxiety around inexplicable phenomena occurring in and potentially improper veneration of nature. Ultimately, they demonstrate the existence of a path radiating out of the church and the altar, more specically—one that absorbed the surrounding land into the orbit of the church and one that became most apparent with the seasonal celebrations of the cross. Perhaps because neither stands out as particularly technically rened, especially the example from Kranenburg, the crucixes addressed here have not been given considerable attention by art historians. But once they are put in dialogue with the broader visual culture of the moment and region, they reveal the pervasiveness of the devotion to and religious power of the Wood of the Cross, which the church both harnessed and contained. Typologies Versus Reincarnations of the Cross Legends The Golden Legend narrative accrued additional force in German-speaking lands, where it was already quite popular, after Kaiser Sigismund transferred the Imperial True Cross relic and other regalia to Nuremburg in 1424 in light of the Hussite Wars. But it and the objects that drew on it also relied on a much older and densely layered arboreal tradition in Christian theology that dates back to the patristic period.8 Origen, Gregory the Great, and Hippolytus of Rome, among others, compared the Tree of the Cross with the Tree of Life (Lignum vitae) from Genesis chapters 2 and 3. This was conceived as a cosmic tree at the center of the universe, a link between heaven and earth, and a foil to its fellow paradisiacal

figure 1.4  Detail of Original Sin and the Crucixion, Bernward’s

Doors, before 1015, bronze, Hildesheim Cathedral

tree mentioned in Genesis 2:9, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Lignum scientiae boni et mali)—the one from which Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit.9 Although the legendary accounts concentrating on the actual, material heritage of the cross’s wood were far from consistent, naming or even conating both of the Edenic trees (or inventing new ones) in their genealogies, typological renditions of the Holy Rood—those that instead prized analogic connections between the Old and New Testaments—tended to overlay Christ’s crucixion more discretely on the Tree of Life.10 Take for instance Bishop Bernward’s bronze doors at Hildesheim (g. 1.4).11 Within their monumental twocolumn program juxtaposing humankind’s downward lapse on the left versus its upward redemption on the right, the doors propose the cross as the Tree of Life using visually plain, typological parallels. In addition to Christ and Mary as the “new” Adam and Eve, undoing original sin, the branchy cross from which Christ’s redemptive body dangles must represent the “new” arboreal version of the perilous Tree of Knowledge—that is, the Tree of Life. Bonaventure (d. 1274) adhered to the same typology in his devotional treatise of the same name.12 In following its structure of a twelve-branched tree, each a chapter that bears four fruits from the virtuous life of Christ and all together comprise the tree on which Christ will be crucied, readers nourish themselves with stories of divine grace to correct the eects of Adam and Eve’s transgression under the Tree of Knowledge. Pacino da Bonaguido’s illustration to Bonaventure’s popular text for the Convent of Santa Maria di Monticelli in 1310–15 (near Florence) pictures Christ nailed to a giant Tree of Life, whose organic quality is abstracted into a diagram of

branches and circular, Host-like medallions, that is rooted in the center of Paradise and sandwiched between tiny vignettes of Temptation and the Tree of Knowledge along the bottom ground line (g. 1.5).13 It is important, however, to draw distinctions between the well-known allegorical or associative devotional conceptions of the cross as Tree of Life popularized by Bonaventure and contemporary apocryphal legends that were becoming ever more popular in Germany and Flanders that purported direct, unmediated historical connections between the Wood of the Cross and paradisiacal trees. Indeed, simple equations of the arboreal crucixes in Cologne and Lage, and as we will see in Kranenburg, with the Tree of Life topos discount the way that the Legend of the Cross and its sacred ancestry had come to be reinscribed in the medieval landscape itself, creating a circular chain of cause and eect such that the cross could be carved of wood that already, by dint of that reinscription, arose out of a sacralized notion of the landscape and its fertility. More than just being illustrated in books and monumental wall paintings, the legend’s account of the cross’s heritage took root in the soil of northern Europe, coming alive in trees native to Germany and regions of Flanders. Particularly resonant in Germany, the arboreal themes of the Wood of the Cross carried over into the rest of the legend’s episodes and the rituals dedicated in their honor. The Feasts of the Cross’s Invention (May 3) and Elevation (September 14) were celebrated in conjunction with numerous outdoor customs, such as cross processions meant to ward o adverse weather conditions. As we will see, the cross’s divine wooden constitution also functioned as the auspicious medial conduit through which to conjure earthly fecundity.



The Vegetable Saint

25

figure 1.5  Pacino da Bonaguido, Bonaventure’s Lignum vitae, ca. 1310–15, tempera on wood. Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence

The Legend of the Vegetable Saint The miraculous local crosses from Lage and Kranenburg drew on a regional engagement both with the Golden Legend’s narration of the story of the True Cross and with the actual relics of the True Wood from that story, which were processed in the landscape and associated with local churches.14 In southern Germany, two likely instances of such ritual processions would have taken place against dramatic visualizations of the cross’s hagiography and its horticultural heritage in the Old Testament. Monumental wall painting programs in Duttenberg’s tiny Cross Chapel (ca. 1485) on the banks of the Neckar and Wiesendangen’s Holy Cross Church (before 1498) on the Swiss side of Lake Constance chronicle the Finding and Exaltation of the Cross as well as their typological precursor in the Legend of the Wood of the Cross (gs. 1.6, 1.7).15 Their painted stories recounting the Golden Legend brought the True Cross into an encounter with local ritual. Though neither Duttenberg nor Wiesendangen permanently housed relics, their remote locations and conspicuous dedications to the Holy Cross indicate that they served as either terminus or intermediate waypoints (Wegekapelle) for pilgrimages and processions related to the cross particles possessed by their governing institutions. The Church of the Holy Cross in Wiesendangen fell

figure 1.6  Legend of the Holy Cross, ca. 1485, wall paintings, Holy Cross Chapel, Duttenberg

26

The Vegetable Saint

figure 1.7  Hans Haggenberg, Choir of the Holy Cross Church,

Wiesendangen, Legend of the Cross, Wiesendangen, before 1498

within the sphere of inuence of Constance Cathedral; its bishop, Hugo von Helandenberg (d. 1532), probably commissioned the Zurich-born Hans Haggenberg to paint the church’s monumental fresco program.16 For over a century prior, Constance had been in the possession of a processional cross bearing trace relics of its formal referent. The Constance cross particles were also venerated in the nearby parish church of Eriskirch, where the Finding and Exaltation of the Cross were memorialized in stained glass windows of the choir (1408).17 Duttenberg’s chapel fell under the auspices of the Dominican monastery of Wimpfen, which, dedicated to the “Holy Cross” since 1270, counted the Elevation and Adoration of the Cross among its most treasured feast days, on which cross relic processions were organized.18 Charters of the imperial city of Wimpfen dated to 1475 and 1483 rst mention the Duttenberg Chapel and its dedication to the Holy Cross in terms of markers in the landscape; it can be found “near the vineyards on the chapel way” and “by the cross elds.”19 The internal decorations of the chapels were thus in dialogue with a broader ritual tradition centered on cross relics and the embracing of a wider regional landscape.20 More or less hewing to the cross’s authoritative hagiography from the Golden Legend, the artists in Duttenberg and Wiesendangen must also have been inspired by a great variety of coexistent cross legends in German circulation, which, having rst surfaced almost two centuries earlier, were attracting more pilgrims to the region’s cult images than ever before.21 Adam and Eve apocrypha in Latin and the vernacular, which embroidered the scriptural account of their postlapsarian lives and expounded on the history of the Holy Rood and Seth’s role in it, were more popular in late medieval Germany than elsewhere. A lyric variation of the apocrypha—four thousand lines in Middle High German rhymed couplets— composed around 1300 by a poet named Lutwin survives in a copy from the mid-fteenth century, testifying to the persistence of the narrative in German-speaking lands over time.22 Fully illustrated with biblical personages donning courtly garb, the Lutwin manuscript would have been read aloud and shared in a communal setting by its Alsatian patron in Haguenau, much in the way a world chronicle would have been, thus keeping present in popular consciousness the important role of Seth in the cross’s origin story. Seth, as Adam’s son, represents the transition for the wood out of Eden and into the hands of a fully fallen humanity waiting to be redeemed.

28

The Vegetable Saint

In the immediate environs of Kranenburg, where, as we will see, the dukes of Guelders professed a deep devotion to the Wood of the Cross, Catherine of Cleves (1417–1476), Countess of Eu, commissioned a sumptuous book of hours in which she broke with convention and lavished the pages dedicated to the Holy Cross with halfpage miniatures chronicling its apocryphal ancestry. How immediate and accessible the cross’s material history must have seemed to Catherine and other devotees is evinced by Seth’s attire (g. 1.8). Dressed as a pilgrim, holding his sta and wide-brim hat in one hand, he accepts the sprig proered by the angel at the Gates of Paradise—a place not in the eye of the mind or beyond reach but, like other conventional loca sancta such as Bethlehem and Jerusalem, a physical location that had been charted on pilgrims’ travelogues to the Holy Land.23 Water undulating through a grate on the bottom left signals its position at the intersection of four rivers as well as the trope of the Fountain of Life—a type that was not only associated with baptism but was also, as we will see, woven into the arboreal themes of the cross’s legendary history.24 Derived from one of the two prominent trees from scripture—and shown here poking above Eden’s fortied walls—the branch given to Seth is no regular shrub normally found on Seth’s worldly side of the gates. Bearing an iridescent sheen, this threepronged twig beheld simultaneously by Michael and Seth, who regard it with adoring gazes, is destined for a saintly life. Breaking the frame with his elbow, Seth must hurry back to his ailing father and send the Holy Cross o on the next leg of its journey. It is on these variegated traditions around the Legend of the Wood of the Cross that the monumental mural cycles in southern Germany are building. In narrating the story, the murals rehearse the tropes of the Holy Wood that then resonated for viewers when the True Cross itself appeared in these spaces. As is more or less uniform across the written and visualized accounts, the story of the holy timber’s organic roots painted on the walls of Duttenberg and Wiesendangen begins with an encounter at the threshold between Paradise and the postlapsarian world: Seth, consigned to the latter topography, beseeches the Archangel Michael for salvic botanical medicaments from the Garden of Eden with which to treat his father, Adam, who lay on his deathbed (see g. 1.9).25 Here the Golden Legend, which compiled other accounts and would have been the source most familiar to readers, mentions divergent versions of the story based on dierent

figure 1.8  Seth Receives the Twig from the Archangel Michael, The

Hours of Catherine of Cleves, ca. 1440. New York, The Morgan Library, MS M. 917/945, fol. 85r

apocrypha. Regardless of its vegetal form (a branch, oil, seeds) or arboreal parent (the Tree of Life, Knowledge, Mercy), the angel’s handing over of the sacro-biological trace to Seth—in the case of Duttenberg, it takes the shape of a sprig—marks the moment in all of the apocrypha at which divine greenery from Eden crosses over into the territory of fallen humankind. Immediately thereafter, and conforming to the conventional trajectory of the apocrypha, Seth is shown in the Duttenberg murals planting the sprig in the earth atop his father’s grave. From there, until it reunies with the crucied God in the same spot on Golgotha, over Adam’s skull, the foreign tree must overcome a number of obstacles, both natural and

30

The Vegetable Saint

manmade. Hovering over the center of the following two episodes depicted in the Duttenberg program, a cross protrudes upward out of a tree’s trunk between two leafy branches, bombastically rearming this as the mature holy plant deriving from a scion of Paradise (gs. 1.9, 1.10). In two back-to-back episodes, the giant cross-embedded tree has blossomed and is subsequently cut down. top of page figure 1.9  Seth Receives the Twig and the Twig Grows from Adam’s

Tomb, Duttenberg, detail of gure 1.6

below figure 1.10  The Tree Is Felled and Solomon’s Laborer, Duttenberg,

detail of gure 1.6

figure 1.11  Solomon Orders Temple Construction, Wiesendangen, detail of gure 1.7

The murals then move the narrative forward in time, portraying the conversion of the Holy Wood, generations later, into shaven-down beams for King Solomon’s Temple (gs. 1.10, 1.11). The lumber proves uncooperative with Solomon’s building project, stubbornly shifting in shape and size. Discarded, the intractable wood serves as a simple footbridge to Jerusalem, all but ensuring its rediscovery as sacred material by the Queen of Sheba, who must traverse the bridge on her journey to meet Solomon (gs. 1.12, 1.13). The queen extends her hand in recognition and veneration of the wood as the lignum crucis in both mural cycles; it pregures the later, postscriptural rediscovery of the cross by the empress Helena (d. 330), who, in light of her son Constantine’s conversion and sighting of the cross at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, travels to Jerusalem to retrieve it. Prevalent throughout the legend, the act of spotting the Wood of the Cross is a motif that recurs in the miraculous medieval crosses. For both programs at Wiesendangen and Duttenberg, Helena is shown kneeling in a chapel-like setting, with either a lone attendant or a group of laypeople, all of whom adore the cross

as a devotional object that stands proudly on an altar (gs. 1.14, 1.15). Propelling the narrative ever forward, out of the Bible and hagiography and into the present, the murals stage a temporal mobility of the True Cross that then culminates in the contemporarily present relic—and, as we will see, new wooden objects miraculously materializing in northern Europe. Helena’s altar draws an analogy to the kind of devotional setting occupied by the cruciform carvings in Lage and Kranenburg, which adorned altars dedicated in their name since the fourteenth century.26 As the murals visually portray it, the Golden Legend attributes the cross’s resilience on its journey through time, from Paradise to Golgotha, then to Persian hands and ultimately back to Jerusalem again, to its ambivalent materiality. The wood is ostensibly earthly but—delivered by an angel from Eden—is supernaturally resistant to decay, water-logging, and even re.27 The primordial tree is reworked into beams, but they refuse any architectural arrangement that might compromise their fate for Christ’s Crucixion. That is, the divine material of the cross confounds the design of humankind, the otherwise



The Vegetable Saint

31

top of page figure 1.12  The Queen of Sheba at the Bridge,

above figure 1.13  The Queen of Sheba at the Bridge,

Duttenberg, detail of gure 1.6

Wiesendangen, detail of gure 1.7

left figure 1.14  Adoration of the Cross,

Duttenberg, detail of gure 1.6 below figure 1.15  Adoration of the Cross,

Wiesendangen, detail of gure 1.7

perceptible properties of wood, and thus lowly artistic reproduction. The only nonhuman saint resists being an object; it has behaviors, an ornery personality, even. Therein lies the paradox or tension of the sacred but terrestrially familiar True Wood. For this reason, when miraculous crucixes of wood emerge from local trees in Germany, certain pictorial strategies are deliberately employed to underscore the privileged ontology of True Cross relics that were scattered widely about the empire. As the illumination from The Hours of Catherine of Cleves makes plain, the True Wood may resemble ordinary wood, but it is indeed shinier, glistening, in a league of its own. Curbing “Excessive Mimesis” in Miraculous Crucifixes of German Trees Repeating many familiar motifs from the Legend of the Wood of the Cross, the Lage Cross’s origin story—the “Ratione sanctae Crucis in Lage”— centers around the local tree from which its forms were carved.28 This legend, along with an indulgence for pilgrims who traveled to the town for the Feast of the Elevation (September 14), must have stimulated the cult around the cross. According to its text, in the year 1300, Rudolf and Johannes, two brothers of the Saint John’s Order, experienced a vision of Christ’s cross while on a sunny afternoon stroll through the countryside. A voice called out and commanded them to seek out wood (“ligna quaerere”), to fabricate a replica with the image of Christ (“perfecisset Crucem una cum imagine Jesu Christi”), and to erect it in Lage’s Church of Saint John. Taking their time to scrutinize the surrounding grounds, they nally settled on a unique tree (“arborem illam insolitam”) in the district of Riest, on the border



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of the yards belonging to two men named Sube and Hundewinkel. Sprouting red leaves of no apparent earthly species, the tree pleased them in the end because its inner wood (“lignum interius”) quite resembled that of an oak. Having stripped the trunk of its branches, as foresters do by custom, however, the two could not fell it on their own. They were successful only after Hundewinkel “converted” to believe their story and loaned them his horses. That is, the tree submitted only when it gained another convert. Once the men installed the completed sculpture in the church, it performed miracles for centuries thereafter for the sick who prayed to it or paid homage to the stump (“trunco”) of the once-living tree that gave way to the crucix’s wooden core.29 Its cult therefore revolved around a reciprocal, performative exchange between the object in the church and the place where the stump stood in the surrounding landscape. The “Ratione” and its insistence on the discerning eyes of Rudolf and Johannes—a persistent topos from the Golden Legend exhibited by the empress Helena and the Queen of Sheba before her—seem to be borne out in the physical evidence. In reference to the cross xture itself, the wood selection must have been made with great knowledge and care, for the exceedingly long upright post (or stipes) exhibits no signs of curvature or twisting, despite the centuries-long duress of carrying the crossbar and Christ’s heavy wooden corpus.30 Consistent with the “Ratione” text, and with the species’ indigeneity to Westphalia, the boards each comprise one quarter of an oak’s trunk. While the specic year of 1300 is unlikely, stylistic analysis and the historical record point to the sculpture’s production within the rst few decades of the fourteenth century.31 Integral to the legend of the Lage Cross, and that of the True Cross, is not only the nd but also the bringing down and miraculous transformation of the tree into a carved crucix. Instead of the organic curves of fork-shaped crosses like that from Cologne, the distinctly carpentered aspect of the cross’s history is manifest in its branchy but unusually shaped beams, which are evenly planed and shaven to form octagonal logs. First, much in the way that King Solomon’s laborers encountered trouble when attempting to integrate the cross’s wood into Solomon’s Temple, the two Johannite brothers, enlisting help from Hundewinkel and his horses, required disproportionate force to fell the ornery Lage oak. The Solomon motif is not unique to Lage; it also plays out in the story of

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the founding of the Church of the Divine Savior in the Flemish Brabant town of Hakendover. Carved into its Three Virgins Retable (ca. 1401–10), two men chop at the base of a hawthorn in vain, for, as the story goes, it will necessitate the power of twelve to cut down the tree, which an angel had marked to the people of Hakendover (in the model of the angel marking the tree to Seth) as the spot for their new church (g. 1.16).32 As opposed to Hakendover’s altarpiece, which contains a mere representation of the miraculous tree at the center of the church’s founding, the Lage Cross notably preserves the sacred tree’s wood as the work of art itself. To assure the faithful that the wood’s holy status was not compromised in the process, the legend insists the image’s facture deed or, at the very least, eluded handiwork. Once their divine mandate is made clear, Rudolf panics, professing to his brother that neither possesses any knowledge in woodworking. Johannes rearms, exclaiming, “The one thing is true: I have never had the tiniest skill to make or complete something out of wood, much less something as beautiful and honorable as the image of Christ on the cross.”33 Yet Brother Johannes died happily once he realized all but Christ’s left arm, which once Brother Rudolf nishes also comes to pass for him. Ultimately, the brothers’ hands become willful instruments of God’s artistic expression, as the voice from their vision had foretold their peaceful death once the work was complete. What sets the story in motion in the rst place, though, was their vision of the True Cross—the Ur-wood, a unicum that inherently cannot be reproduced. To draw on its potent originary status as well as the tradition in the Golden Legend by which it traveled across space and time, particles of the True Wood were ensconced in the Lage crucix.34 But as was the case for all the Crucixi dolorosi across Germany in which physical traces of the original cross have been identied, when the particles were inserted inside the ensembles, they were housed exclusively in the body of Christ—either in his cranial or chest cavity, along with other relics—rather than in the carved, branchlike crosses that represented them in vigorous arboreal language.35 To have stored True Cross relics in cross-formed containers was far from unprecedented, as the golden and silvered cross gemmed reliquaries from earlier in the Middle Ages demonstrate.36 Jewels were better at approximating the divinity of the True Cross, whereas wood carved to simulate a gnarly tree, especially in light of its miraculous actions, stood

figure 1.16  Three Virgins Retable, with a detail from its founding, ca. 1401–10, carved oak

(polychromy removed), Church of the Divine Savior, Hakendover, Belgium

at greater risk of idolatrously reinstating the True Cross. That is, problems of potential slippage seem to have come about when reliquaries began to share an apprehensible iconic and substantial likeness with the cross relics they contained.37 Indeed, the relics lodged inside the carved branched crucixes are often described in inventories or on surviving authentics as “the wood of the Lord.”38 Materially similar to the carved oak in which they are encased, the wooden fragments labeled as such rise above metaphor and artice as ontological equals with the cross, but not without asserting their material kinship with earthly timber, too. While in the case of Lage the fragments call to mind the local tree where the cross’s legend was miraculously rehearsed in the German landscape, even drawing a material connection to it, it is nevertheless the representation of the body of Christ that is privileged to house them. Wooden Cross and wooden cross, despite the latter being made of special or supernatural wood, are tellingly separated in Lage, as they are in all the crucixes of the genre—a deliberate decision that takes its most pronounced expression in the case at Kranenburg. On the other side of the Rhine from Westphalian Lage, with the Kapitol Crucix situated between them, the miraculous wooden crucix of Kranenburg, near Cleves, also participates in a contemporary reinstantiation of the Legend of the Wood of the Cross, which involves a miraculous wood carving arising out of the local landscape (g. 1.17).39 Like the Lage Cross, its performative ecacy is

predicated on its woodiness, but certain pictorial strategies are deployed to delineate between supernatural wood and the True Wood. The local legend is carried down in the “Historia Sanctae Crucis Cranenburgensis,” which Johannes van Wanray, deacon of the Kranenburg church, transcribed in 1666 from a now-lost original of 1308—the same year an indulgence from the bishop of Utrecht was issued to visitors of the Kranenburg church.40 The legend traces the beginning of the cross at Kranenburg to a nameless shepherd from the nearby village of Neuenhof. Conforming to church rules, the shepherd took the sacrament at Easter Mass but, for an unknown reason, was unable to ingest it; instead, he held the Host in his mouth until he returned to his sheep in the Reichswald. There, he climbed up a tree and stashed the wafer “between two branches,” eectively planting the body of Christ on a tree-cross and foreshadowing the story’s climactic end.41 Overcome with regret, the shepherd subsequently confessed to Heinrich of Guelders, the priest in Kranenburg, who at once took to the forest with a monstrance to fetch and secure the consecrated bread, to no avail. As he went to touch it, the Host “sank into the tree, so that he no longer saw it.”42 To repent, Heinrich scaled back down to earth and on bended knee, facing the site of the disappearance, pleaded with God to keep him alive long enough to see what God had in store for the Host-embedded tree. Heinrich is thus a cipher both for the Queen of Sheba, who foresaw the



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figure 1.17  Kranenburg Crucix, early 14th century, carved wood,

Church of Saints Peter and Paul

sacrality of the holy timber before it took the form of the cross, and for Helena, who exalted and knelt before the wooden beams that once carried Christ’s body. God granted Heinrich his wish, and twenty-eight years later, the tree brought to bear its miraculous fruit. Unbeknown to them, when Heinrich sent Meyerich, a sexton of Kranenburg’s church, to fell a tree for Christmas rewood from the local forest, the invisible hand of God guided Meyerich to chop down the one that had absorbed the Host. Meyerich brought the tree to the churchyard, but because the tree was so large, only small portions of it were burned on Christmas. “A large piece of it remained”— harkening both to the gurative triumph of the cross over re recounted in the Golden Legend and to the Infant Christ’s escape from Herod’s massacre of the innocents. Only months later, on the Wednesday before Palm Sunday, when Meyerich was supposed to cut what was left of the tree into smaller pieces, did he witness an amazing transformation, a resurrection of Christ’s Eucharistic body in the season of Easter. “As he hacked the tree, it split in two, from which emerged the Holy Cross in form and manner, just as it is seen nowadays. And never did a knife or tool for carving or working ever make contact with it, and it grew and sprouted out of the same tree in which the Holy Sacrament had sunk.”43 The artwork emerged from the part of the tree fused with Christ’s body. On the one hand, the Kranenburg legend follows the formula of late medieval host desecration narratives, in which the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is proven by its miraculous resilience to a range of hazards, mostly pernicious in intent. As opposed to the wafer that bleeds, as is often the case with abuses committed by Jews, the piece of Christ’s body that the shepherd negligently hid between two branches, which Heinrich sought to secure in a monstrance, fused with the tree, and after growing for twenty-eight years, it miraculously mutated into a carved image of the crucied God.44 The consecra­ ted wafer equals God, who according to the story “did not want his body to lie in vain without exaltation in the tree.” On the other hand, the tale from Kranenburg, like that of Lage, builds o the archetypal ancestry of the True Cross—but with important modications. In a multi-episodic narrative, the Holy Rood, whose destiny is preordained by God, avoids obstacles to arise at the exact opportune moment: in the spring just before Holy Week, at the time of the Crucixion and Resurrection. Its inception is reminiscent of Seth receiving and planting

figure 1.18  Pilgrim’s Drawing of the Kranenburg Crucix, 1745, ink on

paper. Museum Katharinenhof, Kranenburg

the divine sprig that would grow into the tree yielding the Wood of the Cross. At Kranenburg, though, the story and resultant artwork stress the role of the transubstantiated body of Christ that Heinrich tucked into the local tree and that miraculously merged with it. It is the “holy cadaver in the tree”—the Lord, the Eucharist, the Host—that spurs on the miracle in this variation of the legend. The wooden carving still regarded as the original indeed depicts only the Corpus Christi; the cross is left implicit thanks to the form and material Christ’s body assumes. It is more aptly a semicrucix. Its appearance more or less comports with that laid out in the legend. “So the Host metamorphosed into an image and gure with its head bowed, arms outstretched, and feet atop one another.” It also resembles the artwork that a pilgrim drew in 1745; the cross to which the corpus is tied in the drawing is likely not original to it and is no longer extant (g. 1.18).



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Whereas God intervened to guide the unskilled Johannite brothers from Lage, the Kranenburg Crucix grows organically out of the tree without the aid of carving tools but “through the holiness and power of the Holy Sacrament.”45 The Kranenburg Crucix is thus an arboreal acheiropoieton—“a portrait formed after Christ’s humanity,” humbly hewn in reduced forms to eace creaturely authorship. Although it bears no visible trace of the Host, it derives from the section of the Reichswald tree into which the Eucharist sank; the wood and the forms carved into it are ontologically imbued with Christ’s real presence. The tree is thus a vehicle or means, whose woodenness is fundamental to the artwork’s origin story and its ritual use, but also an “accident”—like the bread of the Host. The artwork’s ontological emphasis remains on the real presence of Christ over that of the True Cross—hence the deliberate omission of the cross armature, for fear of asserting a dangerous material contiguity between Wooden Cross and wooden cross. The alternative would have presented the viewer with what Louis Marin and Bernhard Siegert have called “excessive mimesis,” a mode of representation such as trompe l’oeil that “overshoots its own target.”46 The ambiguity between miraculous wood and True Wood would have been a bridge too far, potentially tricking the viewer into seeing something in the cross, carved miraculously without human hands, that was not really there. The Lage and Kranenburg carvings demonstrate the church’s eorts to manage carefully the potential for saintly wood to appear in natural or even supernatural wood. Although they reinstantiate its legend, their reproductions of the cross are delimited from the True Cross itself. Given their peculiar provenance, one is tempted to postulate that they came into existence to stave o or direct into more acceptable Christian terms lingering heterodox attitudes toward animacy in nature. Regardless, the artworks both foreground their origins from local trees, which in both legends were fully chopped down and eliminated so that they could not remain for veneration. But the miraculous carvings from their wood and the bald stumps that indexed their locations did survive. The opportunity to reunite the two in the absence of their originary trees enabled the church to establish ritualistically the hierarchy of divine wood over the lowly wood, and, just as important, to contain one away from the other. Along the way as they were processed from inside the sanctuary to their stations of supernatural creation and back, the wooden crucixes functioned to bless the elds

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figure 1.19  Site of the Miraculous Kranenburg Oak, “Heilig-

Kreuz-Stock,” Kranenburger Reichswald

and vegetation outside the city walls with their miraculous aura in the liturgical seasons of the cross. Like that in Lage, Kranenburg’s cross was processed outside the sanctuary, and one of its stations was likely its ndspot. According to the “Historia,” as a gesture of restraint and humility in response to God’s heavenly sign, the cross was not elevated the rst year it was stationed in the church.47 As early as 1370, on the occasion of the Feast of the Elevation in September, it appears to have adorned an eponymous cross altar.48 Pilgrimage activity spiked in the early fteenth century, attracting the attention of esteemed gures of the church and nobility. In 1412, the archbishop of Cologne sponsored the reconsecration of the cross altar after a vault collapsed and damaged it.49 Two years after the Duchess of Guelders paid a special visit to the cross in 1414, Count Adolf II of Cleves funded the observance of a new Mass in the name of God, Mary, and the Holy Cross, “which stands in our church in Kranenburg and demonstrates great signs, miracles, and graciousness every day.”50 In 1419, the city of Kalkar dispatched ten representatives to Kranenburg’s

figure 1.20  Procession of the Kranenburg Crucix, Feast of the Cross, September 2017

cross procession.51 Although there is no surviving proof, it is dicult to imagine that such outdoor processions did not retrace the place of its nativity, which a landmark (Heiligkreuzstock) has honored since 1414, perhaps earlier (g. 1.19).52 Today, the Kranenburg Crucix, protected in a velvet encasement, leads the local clergy and townspeople through the streets and alleys of Kranenburg on the Sunday following Elevation Day in September (g. 1.20).

Processing the Holy Wood to the Earthly Wood The miraculous German woods’ bridge between contemporary timber—and its harvesting—and the legendary wood of the True Cross both reected and spurred a broader cultural seasonal performance around wood in the form of outdoor processions. Indeed, that these holy wooden crosses—and the relics of the True Wood elsewhere in Germany, as we will see—led the very springtime



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farmland processions designed to, in turn, stimulate the growth of more earthly wood or crops was precisely their point. The crosses have thus far not been studied in light of church rituals meant to intercede with acts of nature. Art historical considerations have not yet overlapped with those of church ritual or folklore historians, who have been the primary researchers into weather-related cross processions that were particularly beloved in Germanspeaking lands.53 Reconstructing the role of the carved crosses in such processions reinscribes them within their cultural moment and revivies the agency their mystical origins provided for a local landscape that on the one hand was tended to seasonally and on the other was at the mercy of an unpredictable ecosystem. Named interchangeably for what they aimed to protect or thwart, farmland, storm, and hail processions were commonplace rituals that usually, but not exclusively, coincided with the capricious weather of the spring months.54 While they certainly predated the Lage and Kranen­ burg crucixes, the oldest weather processions (“hagelfuûr”) explicitly documented as such were cele­brated in Constance around midsummer, as they usually were, on the Feast of Saints John and Paul (June 26), in 1441.55 Aligned with midsummer like the pilgrimage processions to miraculous Marian trees, as we will soon see, the Lage Cross was carried annually on Saint John’s Feast Day (June 24) from the church and outside to “the upper cross area” where the miraculous tree from which it was carved once took root.56 As has been mentioned, we can surmise that the site of the tree at the heart of the Kranenburg cross’s history constituted a station in the late medieval outdoor processions that we know transpired there. By carrying the crosses out of the church to reunite with the origin point of their sacred contact with earth, the processions recharge the crosses’ sacred power to bless the landscape from which they were taken. It is the processing that activates the link between the church and the land. Seen from a dierent point of view, the processions also functioned as a means by which the church demarcated itself as the exclusive agent to bless nature and determine the selective instances of true divine intervention with it. Elsewhere in Germany, the most spectacular of these cross-centered weather processions would have conventionally transpired in spring and summer—that is, on the major Rogation of Saint Mark’s Day (April 25; litania maior) and each of the three minor Rogation Days (litanae minorae) leading up to Ascension Thursday.57 Their Latin

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and German names reecting their supplicatory function (rogare and bitten mean “to ask”), the Rogations before Ascension also came to be known as the Cross Week since a processional reliquary cross invariably led the stream of participants and onlookers through the annual outdoor observances. Parishioners in fteenth-century Nuremberg sung behind the cross while marching from church to church, from Saint Sebald to the Holy Ghost Hospital, and into the elds during the Cross Week in the season of the Ascension.58 Given their central role in the Rogations’ weather services, the processional crosses sometimes acquired appellations of the very climatic calamities, like hail and rainstorms that they were instrumental in warding o. 59 Processions were always deeply ingrained in Christian practice, dating back to the stational liturgy in Rome, when the clergy and pope paraded and gathered the faithful in various churches throughout the city not only to stimulate the cult of early martyrs, among other objectives, but also to exert ecclesiastical control of the cityscape.60 Rogation processions, in particular, may have been appropriated from preexisting pantheistic or animistic fertility rites, which were then absorbed into the Christian calendar. First celebrated under Bishop Mamertus of Vienne in 470, the Bittwoche processions, as they came to be known in German, had already been established by Pope Liberius (r. 352–66) to Christianize the Ambarvilia, a Roman agricultural fertility rite held at the end of May in honor of Ceres.61 As Sebastian Franck critiques it in his World Book of 1534, “After [Easter] comes the Cross Week, when the whole city goes on a pilgrimage with the cross, outside of the city, for instance to a village to a saint, in order that he may protect the crop, and to secure cheap time before God.”62 Elsewhere he recounts how in the days leading up to Ascension, people in Franconian villages would swarm into churches with crosses and sing various cross hymns.63 The Cross Week, Rogation, and Ascension processions thus broadly sanctied the land and spilled out well beyond the church. They involved entire communities, such that the local relationship to seasonal weather was deeply bound up with the cross through the woods of their local landscapes. The family chronicle of Count Froben Christoph von Zimmern of Swabia (d. 1566) mentions in its entry for 1508 the massive eld processions on the Ascension, which took place “um den Esch” or Ösch—an Early New High German word for plowland or tilled earth.64 Townspeople of the parish also partook;

traditions in Bamberg and Mainz required that every household be represented by an adult present at the Rogation processions.65 Indeed, the prevalence of the cross in the spring liturgical calendar alone indicates its perceived apotropaic power at the fragile moment when nature’s bounty was predicated on favorable meteorological conditions.66 Cross Week, which followed the fth Sunday after Easter, almost always took place in May, and on May 3, Christians ocially celebrated the feast of Empress Helena’s (d. 330) Invention or Discovery of the Cross. This feast also came to be associated with Masses that were specically dedicated to averting crop-destroying storms, and records since the twelfth century point to the planting in gardens, elds, and vineyards of crosses that had been blessed on the holiday, with the hope of averting oods and bursts of hail.67 The Elevation of the Cross, commemorating on September 14 the restoration of the cross to Jerusalem following the Battle of Nineveh, provided an autumnal opportunity to invoke the cross on behalf of the harvest of fruits and vegetables, namely grapes—the subject of this book’s fourth chapter.68 To energize the seasonal rituals at a local level, the church awarded indulgences to pilgrims who traveled to Lage for the two dates on which miracles related to the Lage Cross took place, the Elevation and Saint John’s Day—the latter, while suitable for the town’s Johannite church, also coincided with midsummer, the longest day of the year, one tied with pre-Christian rituals, and the same day that occasioned cross processions to the miraculous Marian oak and image at Eicha, as we will soon see.69 Although we cannot be sure when the Lage Cross was rst used in medieval processions, a fteenthcentury wall painting inside the local church portraying a lone Christ shouldering the heavy wooden planks testies to the vitality of the region’s cult of the cross well into the late Middle Ages (g. 1.21).70 Perhaps continuing an age-old tradition, members of the local parish can still be seen carrying the hulking crucix, weighing 150 kilograms and measuring 3.25 meters in length, to the legendary Kreuzberg on the evening of Rogation Monday before Ascension (g. 1.22). Rogation processions were conventional in late medieval Westphalia. Just ten kilometers from Lage, they streamed “through the corn elds and farms of Bramsche,” imploring divine intervention for “good crop[s]” in the days leading up to Ascension.71 Historian Otto zu Hoene has shown that in Bramsche as

figure 1.21  Christ Carrying the Cross, wall painting, ca. 1440–1525,

Church of Saint John, Lage

figure 1.22  Rogation processions of the Lage Cross, 2014



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figure 1.23  Arbor virginis, Germany, late 15th century, colored

woodcut. Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin

elsewhere the paths of these outdoor processions inevitably irritated farmers, whose formal complaints against the church and other spiritual institutions, while acknowledged, were continually rebued by local courts.72 The processions thus also involved the church in demarcating the boundaries of property. That is, at multiple levels they regulated the landscape, spiritually and politically, rmly placing it in the hands of the church. Mary as Rod and River This chapter has thus far focused on the cross and how through reenactments of its legendary history, local miraculous wood was imbued with its sacred aura and then instrumentalized through processions and rituals to bless elds and other communal environments. Next we will explore how Christ’s mother, Mary, was also incorporated into the cross’s legendary history. As the stock, or virga, from which Christ sprang forth into the world, the Virgin Mary was also entangled in the miraculous

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manifestations of sacred wood in medieval Germany.73 By this time, Christ’s family tree—the Tree of Jesse—had grown out of the realm of scriptural prophecy, becoming an autonomous arboreal entity unto itself, and assuming ecacious qualities that were interchangeable with those of the Wood of the Cross. While there are countless religious gures with ties to nature, it is in the ways the Virgin’s body came to be implanted in real space in the landscape, particularly over special trees, that the resonances between her as rod and the Wood of the Cross become clear. Like the miraculous carved crucixes, the Marian artworks demonstrate a move from the legendary to the contemporary. From the altar and through the medium of wood, they sought to intercede with sitespecic natural phenomena—in this case, local weather as well as miracle-working waters. Synergies between the cross and the Jesse Tree are apparent in Wiesendangen. Looking up to the church’s vaulting, one moves from wall paintings representing the Legend of the Holy Cross to a diagrammatic array of half-length gures tucked into chaliced owers, each occupying his own webbed surface bound by the connes of the vaults’ stone ribs (see g. 1.7). Depicted here among strewn roses are the twelve apostles, who together with God the Father surmount the choir to form a tree of the Apostles’ Creed.74 Although an unusual motif to depict at all, the creed tree can be considered a variant of the Tree of Jesse, which itself is more directly resonant with the cross’s hagiography.75 A favorite iconography among master glaziers and illuminators, Jesse Trees populated cathedral windows and manuscript pages throughout Europe, visualizing the roots of the church in the genealogy of Christ starting with Jesse of Bethlehem and continuing all the way through Mary: “And there shall come forth a rod [virga] out of the root of Jesse, and a ower shall rise up out of his root” (Isa. 11:1).76 In late medieval Germany, Jesse Trees came into renewed fashion alongside and in conjunction with the cross’s legendary arboreal history, enfolding the Virgin’s body into it.77 A family of pictures of the so-called Tree of the Virgin (Arbor virginis) abbreviates the Tree of Jesse to underscore the blurring together of the cross’s lineage and the genealogical tree of Christ’s ancestry. A south German woodcut and a painted panel from the wings of an altarpiece for the Cistercian nunnery at Heggbach play on the idea of the Virgin as virga (gs. 1.23, 1.24).78 Foregrounding Joachim and Anna in solemn prayer, the pictures arm

figure 1.25  Arbor virginis, 1482, woodcut from the Geistliche

Auslegung des Lebens Jesu Christi, printed in Ulm

figure 1.24  Detail of the Arbor virginis from the Heggbach Altarpiece

(closed), see gure 2.24, Swabian, ca. 1510, painted panel. City Museum, Ulm

that physical and spiritual contemplation rooted in the heart owers into an ardent compassion with the ultimate sacrice of Christ and his mother, his co-Redeemer, the “trunk” of his branches, who suered as he did at the foot of the cross.79 Where in other pictures the lial tree sometimes loops around a central Virgin and Child, in these it penetrates through the Virgin’s upright body, ramifying out from her heart and bifurcating into the two branches from which Christ hangs. They concretize the arboreal metaphors of her immaculate stock and scion, but they also incorporate Mary structurally into the history of the Tree of the Cross. A woodcut from a printed Swabian volume of 1482 that contains a copy of the Spiritual Maypole—discussed at greater length in the next chapter—portrays a slight variation of the Tree of the Virgin (g. 1.25). Springing from the recumbent patriarch, a tiny two-branched sapling houses two Old Testament forebears in both of its oshoots. At the top center where they cross we see not Christ but a bust of Mary crowning the arboreal cruciform that lurks not so subtly behind the iconographic shadows. A corollary to her as tree is Mary as life-giving water. Among the numerous scriptural bodies of water with



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figure 1.26  Matthias Grünewald, The Aschaffenburg Madonna, 1514–16,

oil on panel, Parish Church of Mary’s Coronation, Stuppach

figure 1.27  The Sick and Inrm Healed in the Piscina Probotica,

Wiesendangen, detail of gure 1.7

which religious writers compared her were her prominent associations with Miriam’s well at Ein Kerem outside of Jerusalem.80 Countless springs and wells throughout medieval Germany that were credited with healing powers were named in her honor.81 The topos was so prevalent that Matthias Grünewald painted Mary perched on the edge of an empty cistern as the central panel of an altarpiece commissioned by canon Heinrich Reitzmann of Aschaenburg (g. 1.26).82 Their source of moisture dried up, the plants are nourished instead from Mary and Christ’s dominating presence as personied fountains; a double rainbow appears in the illuminated mist above their bodies. But Mary’s seated posture also echoes the subtle curves of the prominent pomegranate tree spanning the height of the panel. Water and wood are mutually reinforcing horticultural themes that here conjure up their typological antecedents in the Tree and Fountain of Life in Paradise.83 Just as Christ and Mary are positioned as the New Adam and Eve, the tree springing from the well before the Alsatian cityscape points to the New Tree of

Life, the Holy Cross, which traversed out of Paradise and into the here and now. Indeed, a primary instance of miraculous water on this side of Paradise’s walls occurs in the cross’s hagiography—and it is the Holy Wood that infuses the water with its restorative properties. After his meeting with the Queen of Sheba, Solomon casts the wood into a ditch, which wells up into a miraculous pool (Piscina Probotica), later referred to as the Pool of Bethesda. Imbued with the wood’s aura, the pool becomes renowned for curing the sick (g. 1.27). Resisting rot for generations, the wood oats above the water at the fortuitous moment of Christ’s Passion. In one putative case, a carved crucix reinstantiates this particular episode of the cross’s hagiography in the local German landscape. Part of the same family of forked crucixes emanating out of the Rhineland in the early 1300s, the oak crucix from the Westphalian city of Haltern was purportedly shed out of the Lippe River and brought into the parish church of Saint Sixtus after residents discovered it miraculously swimming against the



The Vegetable Saint

45

above figure 1.28  Schöllenbach Altarpiece, early 16th century, polychromed

opposite figure 1.29  High Altar of Amorsbrunn Chapel, early 16th century,

limewood and pine, Erbach Castle, Erbach im Odenwald

polychromed limewood and pine, Amorsbach

river’s current (see g. 0.4). Until 1570 the Lippe coursed directly under the church that housed the crucix.84 The genealogical, arboreal, and aquatic themes of the Cross Legend all intersect and come to life at the altars of two so-called fountain churches located in Germany’s Odenwald, a tract of forested low mountains in western Germany (gs. 1.28, 1.29).85 Their place-names bearing witness to the natural resource attracting pilgrims to their doorsteps for centuries, the chapels at Schöllenbach and Amorsbrunn were designed to integrate healing springs into their oorplans. Although Schöllenbach’s church has since been reduced and modied, its late medieval footprint resembled that of Amorsbrunn, where today visitors can still experience the chapel’s orientation to the stream coursing beneath it.86 A hatch opens from the chapel’s oor directly to the holy water, whose curative properties have been appreciated since at least the eleventh century, if not earlier, before the arrival of Christianity (g. 1.30). They are two of a number of such fountain churches in the Odenwald. But unlike the others, the late medieval retables fastened to their high altars survive. Both are astonishing works of carving that are unparalleled in their foregrounding of the materiality of wood in their monumental portrayals of the Tree of Jesse.87 Because of its grander size, scholars assume that the Schöllenbach Altarpiece was completed before that in

figure 1.30  Hatch to the healing spring beneath Amorsbrunn Chapel

48

The Vegetable Saint

Amorsbrunn, in the years shortly following the marriage of its patrons Count Eberhard VIII von Erbach and Maria von Wertheim in 1503. Their identical subject matter and idiosyncratic manner of its representation speak to their shared function of not only staging the Eucharist but also signposting the miracle springs in their immediate vicinity. Indeed, their contiguity with their physical environs, seemingly sprouting out of the holy water below them, is further thematized by the unusual but calculated decision in the Amorsbrunn case to preserve the wholeness of the Jesse Tree itself. Untruncated, it traverses from Jesse’s abdomen in the predella through a hole in the cabinet’s oorboard, self-consciously defying the conventional compartmentalizations of the typical German winged retable. In both cases, it appears that the tree is hardly worked with a knife. Flat across one plane but divaricating out and upward to illustrate the schematic ancestry of Christ and his mother, the Amorsbrunn Jesse Tree, in particular, maintains its physical integrity as a singular body of wood. Rather than carving and joining multiple pieces, it must have been espaliered or tamed into appropriate shapes ahead of time, while it was still alive—or at least was constructed so as to give this impression. Taken out of the world, it is reworked—and silvered and gilded—to become an extraordinary tree on the altar. While their manner of representation diers, the conceit of both ensembles in Schöllenbach and Amorsbrunn is unmistakable. The holy springs produce healing eects because they are brought into the physical orbit of the church and its altar and, given the very deliberate programs decorating it, through the roots of Christ’s Marian lineage in the Tree of Jesse—itself a type for the Wood of the Cross and the Tree of Life, which sprung in Paradise from the stream of living water.88 More than as symbols, the typologies here became pretexts for the recurrence of biblical and legendary miracles that are made ever present in the medieval contemporary—in the Odenwald, as healing springs—through the material of wood. Independent from water and typologies associated with the Fountain of Life, there are countless examples in medieval Germany of miraculous wooden Marian images produced out of or in immediate proximity to trees. In the early Middle Ages, as in Ahrensbök on the Baltic coast, which is laid out in this book’s introduction, the miraculous often functioned as the grounds for church and monastery construction in areas both rural and urban. In the

figure 1.31  Pietà (Mariengnadenbild), ca. 1480, Chapel of Mercy,

figure 1.32  Mother of God on the Mulberry, ca. 1445 with Baroque

Pilgrimage Church of Hessenthal

embellishments, Pilgrimage Church of Mary’s Birth, Schneeberg

later Middle Ages, they stimulated pilgrimage activity. In none of the surviving miraculous carvings is Mary shown alone; she is paired with Christ, whether he is shown as infant or adult, to emphasize her role as mother, as genealogical link. Two of many tree-centered Marian cults in late medieval Germany stand out for their documentation in the historical record and because the wood sculptures around which their legends are oriented still exist. The town of Hessenthal, mentioned rst in 1293 as “Hesilndal” in a document by the archbishop of Mainz, takes its name from the hazelnut bush forming the heart of a legend around a miraculous statue of Mary, a later medieval version of which is still venerated in the very pilgrimage chapel its appearance occasioned to build (g. 1.31).89 Skeptical of miracles, as the legend goes, a knight stabbed the bush, which then bled and yielded the carving of Mary holding the deposed Christ. A miraculous Marian statue also attracted pilgrims to the Franconian town of

Schneeberg (g. 1.32). Pilgrims were so keen to see it in the fteenth century that the Würzburg prince-bishop Rudolf von Scherenberg (1466–1495), whose marble funerary portrait the artist Tilman Riemenschneider would later carve, consigned a local bishop from Amorbach monastery to verify its legitimacy. He did, and in 1470, the prince-bishop granted Schneeberg’s pilgrims indulgences for the trip.90 A local account written in 1739 describes the reason for the expansion of the chapel in the early sixteenth century: “As we heard from our parents, great parents and ancestors, around 1521 this picture was in the church on the high altar, which was found every morning on an elder tree outside the church; and so it was carried into the church, the next day always stood again on the tree, whereupon the chapel was built on this place and the picture was placed where the tree stood.”91 Two miracle-working Marian statues of wood that populated trees in Saxony drew the ire of Martin Luther in his



The Vegetable Saint

49

Table Talks from 1525.92 Pilgrims swarmed to both locations until the Reformation came into full swing and cast doubt on their legitimacy. After a miraculous appearance of Mary in one of its pear trees in 1502, the town of Rötha became a magnet for Christian travelers who sought a glimpse of her image, which was kept in the eponymous chapel built as a result. Decades earlier, in 1454, and probably the prototype for Rötha, the Church of Our Lady in nearby Eicha was constructed on the place where the Virgin manifested herself on an oak—as the place-name suggests—and came to the aid of a cart driver who was stuck in the mud. From the wording of the oldest written version of the legend, narrated by the Dominican historian Johannes Lindner (d. 1530), it is unclear whether an image of Mary miraculously appeared in the oak to help him or he called on an image already hanging in the tree for help and Mary miraculously materialized thereafter to rescue him.93 Either way, the oak tree and its accompanying Marian picture elicited religious fervor from both pilgrims and various ecclesiastical communities in Saxony. The Antonine Order of monks, to whom the chapel was given in 1490, successfully promoted pilgrimage through the early 1520s. As early as 1483, priests from all the surrounding villages—some traveling “up to six or seven miles”—were leading processions on the Feast of John the Baptist (midsummer) to pay homage to Our Lady of the Oak (Eicha) to avert a bad harvest that was expected because of drought.94 Mary’s body as the trunk from which Christ bloomed, comparable to the Wood of the Cross bearing the Corpus Christi, was seen to govern the tempo of the seasons and to restore their natural ow when they were disrupted—hence the coordination of the processions with Saint John’s Day, the longest day of the year, a felicitous moment on which to conjure Mary’s inuence over the landscape. Marian liturgical rituals in Saxony—and almost certainly in other locations around Germany—wound their way from the church to rural outdoor sites where the Virgin had intervened with the natural world in the past. Drawing from the aura of honoric trees and often the aura from their attendant wooden images through which her visions occurred or which her visions left behind, the processions were carried out—indeed, went through literal great lengths—to beckon through the medium of wood her continued propitious intercession to secure the healthy growth of greenery. The source recounting the long-distance processions to the Marian tree and image in Eicha indicates that they

50

The Vegetable Saint

were led by relics. The relics of which specic saints are unknown, though as we have seen, most such apotropaic, meteorologically centered paraliturgical rituals were oriented around the Wood of the Cross, its relics, and feast days. Indeed, in bearing such resemblance to the arboreal and horticultural themes more commonly associated with those of the cross, the aforementioned Marian examples testify to how deeply entwined she and tropes of her genealogical ancestry were to cross rituals and artworks, to trees rooted in the ground and installed in altars at the center of sanctuaries. The Trees of the Altar The divine carving of the Kranenburg and Lage crucixes in the decades after 1300—based on the exemplar of the True Cross—speaks to the popularity of, and perhaps anxieties around, parading wood as a sign of earthly fecundity and molding it to furnish the altars of local churches. By the end of the fteenth century, as the wall paintings of Helena and her companions kneeling before the cross attest, German artists portrayed the Wood of the Cross as a prototype, if not a precedent, for the kinds of intricately carved wooden retables—such as the examples in Schöllenbach, Amorsbrunn, and Hakendover—that so regularly adorned the late Gothic altar mensa. In Duttenberg, the upright, wood-grained cross, set atop a platform by itself, soars over its audience and toward the Gothic vaults above, much as the superstructure of a fteenthcentury carved altarpiece would have (see g. 1.14). In Wiesendangen, the cross is positioned in an altar niche as it would have been on innumerable cross altars throughout the Middle Ages (see g. 1.15). According to the internal logic of the image, the True Cross, venerated by Helena as a primary relic in its own right but also a contact relic from the Passion, functions as a material stand-in for the Crucixion and is embellished visually, embroidered into a narrative, by the appearance of John and another male saint painted on the retable positioned behind it. Among the primary justications for the decoration of altars in this period was to clearly label or vividly expound on the dedicatee of an altar mensa, which normally contained an eponymous relic. Relics of the cross, which would have likely been placed atop the very altars before the murals in Duttenberg and Wiesendangen on feast days, would have conjured up the real presence of the Holy Wood in its physical and sacred wholeness in a way that artistic reproduction was inherently unable to.

But while the Lage and Kranenburg crosses appear to us rst as representational objects, in their mimicry of the Legend of the Cross they become something more than mere representation. Bonded to the True Cross through their material and their narrative resemblance to the legend, which also allows them to activate their surrounding landscape, they create a connection to living and miraculous trees in a way that no regular picture could have done. In a similar vein, artists for the fountain churches at Schöllenbach and Amorsbrunn deliberately enshrined trees—in Amorsbrunn, in all its wholeness—as a means to materialize what would have been recognizable typological overlaps among the Tree of Jesse, the Tree of Life, the Fountain of Life, and the Holy Cross. Miraculous trees or curative waters existing in the world were folded into the church and either demarcated by the altar and its retable decoration—as in the fountain churches and Hakendover—or they were brought into the church themselves to furnish the altar mensa or to ow directly below it. What we encounter, therefore, is a reciprocal relationship, a feedback loop between sacred or miraculous wood and the actual landscape, whereby each feeds the other’s sacred potential. But it is a relationship that necessarily ends at the altar. The altarpieces and the artworks discussed in this chapter draw together biblical time and the present,

allowing the former to be reborn in the latter. That this happens seasonally allows drawing on that sacred potential when it is most needed—at the time of fertility and of the risk that that fertility is cut o by bad weather. What the artworks all express is more than symbolic, but rather a mode of image-making that reveals a densely layered religious meaning in the lived environment through a single material—wood. What they also show is that in its exploitation of wood as medium and its “vital materiality,” the church was able to enculturate not only the physical ground but also the time with those passing greenery transformed and, in doing so, exerted a profound inuence over people’s lives.95 Spring, the seasonal marker of rebirth, proved the most fraught for Christianization. In subsuming land and time into the cross’s hagiography, relics, and liturgical calendar, the church had to contend also with a host of folkloric, nonecclesiastical customs that the overwhelming power of warming weather and rejuvenation of the earth had compelled out of people—chief among them, the celebration of local esteemed trees and the erection of maypoles.96 It is to the complicated and fascinating story of festive springtime trees where this book now turns—how religious writers and artists either renounced them altogether or worked to reframe the profane tradition with its pagan associations as an image of the crucied Christ.



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51

2 The Spiritual Maypole e

“Wer sich deß Meyens wolle” e

“Who Longs for the Maypole”

Er hat umb unsert willen

He has for our sake

gelitten Schimp und Spott,

suered scorn and ridicule

dazu den bittern Todt.

to the bitter death.

Wer sich deß Meyens wolle

Who longs for the maypole

zu dieser heiligen zeit,

at this holy time,

der geh zu jesu Christo

he goes to Jesus Christ

So gehen wir zu dem Creuze So we go to the Cross

da der Meyen leidt,

since [Christ] suers on the maypole,

und sehen den Meyen an:

so sindt er wahre freud.

such is pure joy.

Den Meyen den ich meine,

The wood that I love,

das ist der liebe gott:

that is the good Lord:

The recursion of the True Cross between church and landscape that we encountered in the previous chapter might suggest an easy, even reciprocal, relationship between symbolic wood and the local environment. But this was not necessarily the case. Many of the rituals around the fertile springtime period that temporally overlapped with the Maytime celebrations of the cross were local and of only tenuous Christian character. With the greening of the earth, the blooming of ower petals, and the budding of branches, May, which also hosted the Feast of the Cross’s Invention, became the month during which festivals were ocially planned to commemorate the harsh winter months giving way to the start of a new cycle of warmer, sunnier spring weather. At the heart of those festivals stood the crude art objects that the populace made of revivied trees—emblems of rebirth so entrenched in the popular culture, landscape, and climate of northern Europe that the church had to contend with them. Springtime merrymaking in Germany that revolved around trees has very deep roots. Given the arboreal symbolic associations with life, rebirth, and virility, as the Dominican mystic Henry Suso (1295–1366) reminds us

Whipping Post, attributed to Meister H. W., 1510–22, detail of g. 2.23

e

and we behold the maypole:

Er steht in voller blute,

it/he stands in full bloom,

den uns Maria gebar

which Mary bore us

on allen wandel zwar.

indeed free of all aws.

in his Clock of Wisdom (ca. 1335), young men in his native Swabia were known to have plucked resplendent owers and chopped greening trees in the forest to fasten to the doors of their beloved as signs of their love and loyalty—traditions that more or less continue to this day in some parts of Germany (g. 2.1).1 The great minnesinger Neidhart von Reuental (c. 1190–after 1237), who composed poetry in Bavaria and Austria in the early thirteenth century, tells us that as sap rose again after long winters, a village’s grandest lime tree came into bloom and awakened the local people, too, stirring them to wild exuberances in song and dance—the likes of which Hieronymous Bock had famously memorialized in his herbal book of 1539 (g. 2.2).2 Illustrated by David Kandel in his accompanying woodcut, the central, stocky tree with its busy network of foliating branches dominates the upper two-thirds of the picture, providing cover to the musician and revelers who, with the help of the jug of booze, persist throughout the day, so overcome are they with the joie de vivre of carousing alfresco—a welcome alternative to dark, cramped taverns in the winter months. Maytime pair-dancing beneath a tree’s natural awning must also have been a French

figure 2.1  Timbered house with maypole, 2011, Königswinter

tradition, since such vignettes, like the one in The Hours of Charles d’Angoulême, often adjoin the Annunciation to the Shepherds to introduce the third (“terce”) hour of the Little Oce of the Virgin in French books of hours (g. 2.3).3 A nineteenth-century copy of a lost print from 1609 illustrating Anthoine du Breuil’s Le sandrin; ou, Verd galand, an eclogue ruminating on the pleasures of rustic life, shows the same kind of merrymaking—this time with such trophies as a purse, globes, and a dagger slung from the central tree’s branches (g. 2.4).4 Villagers would also honor the annual cycle of renewal and rebirth by sacricing the nest local tree, felling it, dragging it into town, delimbing it to its crown, and decorating it with wreathes, owers, streamers, and other ornaments on May Day—hence the English term “maypole” (as opposed to the German Maibaum).5 The early ethnographer Johannes Boemus described the ritual from personal experience in his On the Ceremonies of All Peoples, published in Augsburg in 1520. “At the time of Saint John’s Day adolescents of villages felled pine trees, whose lower branches were severed but whose upper ones were decorated with glass mirrors, wreathes, and owers. In some of the regions, the tree stood throughout the summer.”6 Brought from the forest into town, often its market square, the giant vegetal votive was staged and folded into the wider panoply of amusements played throughout the spring and summer festivals to reenact the spirit of reaping gifts that people sought back from nature in the form of good harvests. The emergent, adorned trunks towering over villages were thus instrumentalized to usher in, if not intervene with, the transformations in the natural environment that brought them about in the rst place. As part of a game pictured in Albert Glockendon’s Nuremburg breviary from the 1530s, above the pairs on the ground a peasant man can be seen clambering up the maypole’s smooth trunk to attempt to capture the prized rooster surmounting it (g. 2.5). Though shorn from the ground, the maypole still thrives, as attested by its bushy crest. Dangling with glass trophies, it contrasts with that of the lone desiccated and fruitless tree of the owl, a harbinger of death and misfortune.

opposite figure 2.2  David Kandel, The Lime Tree Dance, 1551, woodcut for

Hieronymus Bock’s Kreuter Buch, printed in Strasbourg

54

The Spiritual Maypole

figure 2.3  Robinet Testard, The Maypole Dance, The Hours of Charles

figure 2.4  Village Dance, 1863, Brussels, modern lithograph of a lost

d’Angoulême, French, 1480–96, painting on vellum. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ms.lat.1173, fol. 20v

woodcut printed in Anthoins du Breuil’s Le sandrin; ou, Verd galand (Paris, 1609)

As unassuming and innocuous as they may seem, maypoles and other springtime ceremonial trees were in fact taboo objects of contention throughout the Middle Ages, especially in German-speaking lands where the tradition was popular. Because the maypole encouraged a heathenlike veneration of nature qua nature and intimated a barbaric perversion of the Crucixion, composed as it was of a sacriced, treasured wood hoisted upright and draped with gifts, the church frowned on or at least had a fraught relationship with it. Secular political gures also criticized the Maytime festivities because the trees they involved were too often stolen from their property by overzealous peasants. Lords and even Saint Louis of France expressly forbade the poaching of manorial forests and gardens of their “Maien”—a Latin term absorbed into the medieval German vernacular that was used interchangeably as a proper noun for the month of May and a common noun for the various forms of greenery that sprouted during it.7 Henry Suso is the rst religious gure we know to have absorbed the maypole and tamed the folkloric object

into Christian ideology. The idea, in fact, proved so popular that it spawned a new brand of mysticism that modern scholars now call may devotion (Maiandacht), which in the centuries following Suso’s death reenacted the wider panoply of seasonal festivities and rituals that rejoiced in the teeming plant life of spring as expressions of Holy Cross adoration.8 All the reasons that imperiled the maypole to other clerics—its structural, material, and conceptual resemblance to Christ on the Wood of the Cross in the season of spring—endeared Suso to it. He took hold of the totemic tree that proved irresistible to his fellow Swabians in southern Germany, bleary-eyed from the fatigue of winter, and redirected its perceived power as a mediator between people and nature into proper devotional

56

The Spiritual Maypole

opposite figure 2.5  The Maypole Celebration, Albrecht Glockendon’s Breviary,

1537–40, painting on vellum. Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek Hert. Ms. 9.2°, fol. 24r

orthodoxy.9 With the physical calendar married to the liturgical, Suso enfolded the popular tree into the saintly one, enshrining any putative ecacy to tradition in theological precepts. The aftereects of his and others’ strategies were far-reaching and are borne out in the epigraphic poem introducing this chapter. Printed in German hymnals in Mainz and Paderborn in the rst decade of the seventeenth century, “Who Longs for the Maypole” calls on its singers to reimagine their precious, ceremonial tree as the sacred timber on which their Lord bitterly suered and died. While heir to a much older tradition associating the cross with trees that dates back to Venantius Fortunatus (530–609) and the very origins of Christian hymnology, as well as the hagiography of the Wood of the Cross from the Golden Legend, the hymn draws more specically on a series of devotional maypole poems from the fteenth century.10 Likely sung during outdoor processions in the springtime Rogation Days, the “Who Longs for the Maypole” hymn allegorized the cross as the folkloric tree just as it invoked through the sign of the cross God’s divine protection and stimulation of the domesticated world in the form of good crops.11 It is not actually the maypole the singers serenade, though it functions as a familiar springboard, a pristine object of sacrice, to the consummate, divine image of joy suspended from a tree: Christ on the cross. In spiritualizing the array of folkways and farming practices meant to ensure a fecund May, artists and writers working in the may devotional mode seized on the overlap of that month’s liturgical observation of the cross and, as we will see, the other Arma Christi, some of which, like the crown of thorns and Saint Peter’s cock, quite resembled prizes won from pole games played in the spring season. No maypole from the period survives. But from the authors and artists discussed in this chapter, what can be gathered about medieval maypoles is a sense of their phenomenology and of the eorts that went into taming them. Once the maypole is in view and we understand the Christian resonances laid atop its form and function, a range of iconographies whose signicance is predicated on the ritual celebration of trees comes to light. The numerous pictures showing a trunk anchoring the other weapons—one decorating an altarpiece for nuns in Swabia, another taking the guise of a monumental whipping post in Chemnitz—visualize the specically arboreal

58

The Spiritual Maypole

connection that may devotion drew between the cross, the Arma Christi, and the maypole. In reconguring the imagery and conceit of the profane festive trees and columns into ecclesiastical terms, the artworks in this chapter disclose the constant loops—and many tensions—between the church’s calendar and system of images and the treecentered rituals of the spring season. The Medieval Maypole as Pagan, Idolatrous Offense Many of the sources on which we rely to recuperate the maypole practice from the period also indicate the church’s discomfort with a perceived potential of the maypole to draw out heterodox attitudes toward nature and non-Christian ritual objects. From the verbal sources it is clear that the maypole was feared to conjure worship of nature itself, or ritual objects made to honor nature and the natural world, especially because the maypole, a mighty tree sacriced from the forest, an object people climbed and adorned with trophies, was so congruent with Christ and the Arma Christi hanging from the cross.12 Clerics did not miss this formal and functional overlap; they either shunned the practice altogether or claimed the rituals for the church and associated them and their use of wood with the cross. In addition to texts, though, it is in fact a group of artworks not often associated with maypoles—some produced within church circles—that help us recover the existence and fault lines of the secular medieval tradition. The Cistercian monk Caesarius von Heisterbach (ca. 1180–ca. 1240) was the rst to document the oldest known maypole in medieval Germany. In his Eight Books of Miracles, he denounces the “erection of a wreath in Aachen” in 1224.13 This wreath, which would have been issued as a prize, and the tree from which it was suspended were the latest in a number of enwreathed maypoles that the city’s priest had ordered cleared away. By the time Caesarius arrived in Aachen, the local townspeople had had enough. They vigorously protested and even struck the priest, and under the direction of the town’s baili they raised an even taller tree (arbore altiora) to spite him. As many predicted, however, God leveled a severe punishment because of the shame done to him and his priest, and within a few days, according to Caesarius, a giant conagration laid waste to all of Aachen. Indeed, the city was struck by a re that year on August 1—that

is, during summer, through which point maypoles often remained standing.14 Caesarius more than subtly compares the ceremonial springtime tree with the Golden Calf—the supreme idol of the Old Testament—by couching the Aachen story between others railing against heretical conduct and persistent pagan practices. Just before he travels to Aachen, Caesarius chronicles the wrath that befell the nearby people of Hertene for their show of idolatry (species ydolatrie): dancing in a circle around and bowing their heads down to a sculpted ram spruced up with silk bands on a tree post.15 The calls of the local clergyman, who threatened excommunication and “the plague of the sons of Israel who danced around the Golden Calf,” fell on deaf ears. Consequently, a vengeful God struck down the festival with a violent thunderstorm, devastating the entire area and smashing the idol into smithereens. In a dierent account from Caesarius, God also intervened in a festival game involving a wreath prize, not unlike the one suspended from the Aachen maypole; a priest who won it and hung it from his house died because of the oense.16 From these stories, it is clear that God retaliated because people bestowed undue honor to the sculpted ram and the maypole garlands for the things themselves and their perceived power to bring good fortune or perhaps even to mediate between them and the invisible forces that governed the plants and animals inhabiting their lived environment. Whether the ritual objects were mere tokens of superstition, giant toys for play and ribaldry, stand-ins for nature deities, or even thought to possess their own animate spirits we will never know and is almost beside the point.17 The maypole, in particular, was an idolatrous, non-Christian image because it was selfconsciously crude and appreciated precisely for its earthly makeup rather than as a simulacrum signifying something else. Worse yet, in its celebration, the maypole custom mocked the supreme Christian image of the Crucixion, inverting the formal and functional resemblance to veneration properly bestowed on the ultimate trophy, the body of Christ, hanging from the saintly Wood of the Cross. Even clerical gures determined to claim the maypole for the church invoke its pagan associations. In his allusions to the maypole and love garlands from a sermon he delivered in Strasbourg in 1500, the preacher Johannes Geiler von Kaysersberg (1445–1510) touched on the slippage between earthly and spiritual observance: “As today

is May Day, the day on which one plays with greenery, props up maypoles, and places [them] in front of the houses of their sweethearts, I am of the spirit, to place in your hearts the greenery and maypole of seven green branches, upon which one can see Jesus.”18 In likening the Wood of the Cross to May Day greenery, Geiler also embellishes the arboreal character of the cross featured in the life of Saint Philip, whose feast is on the same day. “[Today] is the day of two saints Philip and James, the former of which cast down the Mars idol in Scythia and propped up the tree of the Holy Cross; he was also hanged and stoned on a cross.”19 An overt extrapolation from the account in the Golden Legend, the “propped up tree of the Holy Cross” alludes specically to the contemporary ritual of erecting a maypole on May Day, which Geiler positions as an uplifting Christian counterpoint to the heathen idol of Mars that Philip struck down.20 His sermon also reveals that the church, by overlaying the saints on top of pagan rituals, attempted to claim wood for the cross in the face of its lingering unorthodox associations with a pre-Christian worldview. In the same spirit as Caesarius, other religious gures at the time were less inclined to shine a positive light on the Maytime exercises that exalted vegetation. A short verse from 1473, “A Nice Lesson Against Dancing and the Maypole,” written in a mix between Middle Dutch and Middle Low German, inveighs against the maypole custom as an inversion of the Crucixion, casting the indecent behavior of revelers against the supreme exemplar of Christ on the cross.21 The exuberance of the dancers, with their widespread arms, turned-up heads, and jubilant warbles are caricatural laughingstocks compared to Christ’s nailed hands, sunken face, and howling imprecations for God’s mercy. They dance in a circle, the surest sign of the devil’s model, which the author syntactically counters with a composition of chiastically rhyming couplets:22 So wan gy gaet dantzen so blidelike, When you dance so cheerfully Myt yuwen armen vtgestrecket, with outstretched arms, [think of] Vnde deme konynghe van hemelrike the arms of the King of Heaven [which] So vngenedelike weren vtgherecket were so mercilessly stretched



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Syne arme ouer des cruces holt over the cross wood, Vnde dornagelt so vnbarmhertelike and so mercilessly nailed Vnde dor gewunt so mannichuolt. and so often wounded. Vnde gy gaet singen so blidelike [When] you sing so cheerfully, proudly, An deme dantze myt houerdien, during the dance, [think of] Vnde cristus sanck so barmelike Christ hung so pitifully An den cruce to den tyden, on the cross at the time, Do he sanck de seuen worden when he spoke the seven crosswords Int ende syns leuens so bitterlike, at the end of his life, embittered Dat em al syn adern schorden when all his veins were torn, Vnde reip vp an dat hemelrike. and he called up to the Kingdom of Heaven, Vader, sprack he myt groten harmen, “Father,” he said in great distress, So beuele ick hude mynen geist! “I commend my spirit to you today!”

As the title suggests, the author directs his scorn at peoples’ gestural corruption of the imitatio Christi as well as the maypole’s terrestrial perversion of the imitatio crucis. It was an idol, provoking from Christians the same kind of feverish adulation of material objects and physical displays of unbelieving, if paganlike, ignorance as the Golden Calf (dat gülden kalf) seduced out of the children of Israel.23 From the Nuremberg Chronicle’s depiction of it, in which gures in fteenth-century dress whirl hand in hand around a central column topped with a sculpted animal, it is no wonder that the verse’s author compared the maypole ritual—and Caesarius of Heisterbach mentioned it in conjunction—with the Israelites’ adoration of the Golden Calf (g. 2.6).

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How the verse describes the ritual’s secular debasement of the holy—juxtaposing the maypole with the high altar, the carousers with a choir, the homely utes with an organ—also betrays a perceived hazardous likeness between the two. Rather than outside in the open air, uninhibited and celebrating nature around a worldly tree cult object of their own making, people should be within the walls of the controlled environment of the Mass, where liturgical instruments are properly deployed to direct veneration to Christ on the cross. One can also identify a thinly veiled critique of the maypole as a corrupted aberration of the Crucixion— and other Catholic iconographies—in a group of early sixteenth-century prints by the Beham brothers of Nuremberg. Sebald Beham’s expansive panorama of the church anniversary holiday (Kirchweih or Kirmes) features an almost encyclopedic array of revelrous activities that took place at outdoor festivals in the German countryside (g. 2.7).24 While ordered and restrained activity—a couple weds below a devotional image of the Virgin and Child—is set before the towering cross-crowned steeple on the left side of the composition, a maypole carrying a rooster counterbalances it on the right (g. 2.8). Here Beham relishes in the parodic potential of the scene. A lone man above the fray has made a break to claim the trophy; he indecorously wraps his body around the trunk to shimmy upward, crossing one ankle over the other. A crowded mass of peasants below beholds his achievement, their lances and pitchforks intimating those of the Romans and the centurion, whose echo gallops away on horseback above. In the foreground, the arm gestures of the players on the bowling green hearken to those wagering for Christ’s unhemmed garment, just as those of a woman yanking her husband away from a swordght do to the Magdalene mourning at the foot of the cross. In many such woodcuts from Sebald and his younger brother Barthel Beham, the scenes of peasant life literally and compositionally radiate about a central delimbed tree.25 In the case illustrating the so-called Nose Dance, the upright post is shunted into a small mound of earth not unlike the way the cross’s vertical beam (the stipes)

opposite figure 2.6  Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, Dance

Around the Golden Calf, 1493, painted woodcut from Anton Koberger’s Nuremburg Chronicle

figure 2.7  Sebald Beham, The Village Fair, 1535, woodcut

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The Spiritual Maypole

figure 2.8  The Maypole as a Mockery of the Crucixion,

detail of gure 2.7

is often depicted by artists (g. 2.9). Its short crossbars bearing rewards—like the pole behind it—give the post the air of an impotent dummy compared to the one on which Christ was crucied. As Protestant artists, the Behams sought to spoof not only the behavior exhibited at Catholic festivals but also the very nature of festivals more broadly, which honored saints and their relics—like the Holy Cross—with vulgar pageantry, artworks, and extrabiblical liturgical blessings of things. Their satirical analogizing of maypole and crucixion might also be interpreted as a critique of how the church had in fact absorbed the maypole and a host of other folkloric rituals

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The Spiritual Maypole

involving plants into their devotional and liturgical system. A century earlier, may devotion had been popularized in Nuremberg and across southern Germany and would have been familiar to the artists.26 It seized on the temporal coincidence with the May month’s liturgical observation of numerous cross-oriented feasts—principally the Feast of the Cross’s Invention on May 3 but also the Cross Week and, by the fourteenth century, a feast to the other Arma Christi, too. Against the backdrop of the Reformation, by which time the maypole had been thoroughly assimilated into Christian ritual via its resemblance to the cross, the Behams understood and mocked

the ritual underlying it, still evident that it remained at this later date. Indeed, regardless of the origins of the pole games and the rationale for the form of their ornaments, the Behams’ prints make light of the festive stand-in for the cross as well as the resemblance between the prizes they proered and the Arma Christi—such as Saint Peter’s cock, the crown of thorns, and Veronica’s veil, which, as we will see later in this chapter, adorned as devotional trophies a host of columnar artworks that spiritually allegorized the secular maypole. As Geiler’s sermon shows, criticism of the displaced glorication of the springtime may greenery, however, ran up against a multitude of mystical writings and pictures that intended to claim the maypole for the church. These attempted to assimilate into the May month’s cross feasts and devotional orthodoxy what were a broad range of springtime secular observances. Some of these rituals were perhaps pagan in origin, but all were at least not of the church’s design and therefore, as the historical anecdotes we have seen make clear, not originally representative of its ideology.

Henry Suso’s “Image” of a Spiritual Maypole Not until the fourteenth century did a church gure seek to harness the power of the maypole as an arboreal monument to sacrice and rebirth. For the same formal and conceptual overlaps that triggered the condemnation wrought in the aforementioned texts and pictures, Henry Suso in a highly syncretic fashion absorbed the maypole into the Crucixion and the springtime season of the cross, leaving recognizable to the nuns reading between the lines of his devotional treatise many elements of the original popular practice. His process of assuming control over the May festivals and its central ritual object, however, was far more complex than simply mapping the Christian over the folkloric, for it risked reinscribing divinity in nature rather than taming it. In many ways, Suso was the ideal gure to incorporate the maypole into his meditational practice, singular as he was in his rapturous praise of nature’s eects as righteous signs or “images” approximating the divine. Building on long-standing theological traditions, Suso engineered his own syntax rooted in a Neoplatonic notion of the “image” to insulate himself

figure 2.9  Sebald Beham, The Nose Dance at Fools’ Town, 1534, woodcut



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from the growing accusations of heresy and pantheism that had become a feature of the fourteenth-century mystical landscape. In his “Life of the Servant” from the Exemplar, Suso describes several devotional exercises that his protagonist, the Servant, follows through the liturgical year.27 In chapter 12, Suso’s disciple and spiritual daughter Elsbeth Stagel, who may have compiled the text for him, explains how the Servant celebrated May Day: On the night commencing May he usually set about by erecting a spiritual maypole [saste einen geistlichen meyen] and honored it for a while once every day. Among all of the beautiful branches that ever grew he could nd nothing more like the beautiful maypole than the blissful bough of the Holy Cross [wúnneklichen ast des heiligen crúzes], which is livelier with graces, virtues, and the most beautiful adornments than any maypoles ever were.28

Rather than a rooted ceremonial tree, Suso makes clear, this tree is a maypole “set” up.29 It is an altered object forming the center of a ritual whose central purpose— often to the church’s chagrin—was to “honor,” to use Suso’s word, the imminent reawakening of nature and all the material benets thereof. But he channels his observance into something proper. In addition to his insistent crucixing of its formal and material appearance, with its beautiful branches and blissful bough, Suso serenades his Spiritual Maypole with a hymn whose rehearsal positions his exercise temporally with the springtime cross holidays.30 “And he spoke and sang in his vision before the maypole the hymn Salve crux sancta: ‘Hail the heavenly maypole of eternal wisdom, on which grows the fruit of eternal salvation.’”31 Attributed to Bishop Heribert of Eichstätt (d. 1042), the hymn was popular in southern Germany throughout the Middle Ages and, just as is assumed for this chapter’s epigraphic late medieval hymn, was routinely sung for the springtime Feast of the Invention of the Cross on May 3.32 Moving beyond generalities of the cross as metaphoric Tree of Life or as apotropaic sign, which abound in the eleventh-century hymn, Suso, the self-proclaimed “Son of Swabia,” found in his fellow countrymen’s revelrous salute to springtime an exemplar for the proper adoration of the Holy Cross: a chopped-down tree that is remounted and showered with decorations and song.33

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The Spiritual Maypole

Even as he continues to allegorize ever more features of the springtime custom, including the tree’s ritualistic adornment, Suso reminds his readers of the critical distinction between his spiritual exercise and “earthly” ones. Instead of all kinds of bright and colorful owers that any heath or eld, woods or pasture, tree or meadow has ever produced, or ever would or will, my heart oers you a spiritual kiss . . . Instead of all the decorations that adorned any maypole on earth, my heart raises [erhebt] you today with a spiritual song, and I bid you, blessed maypole, to help me so praise you in this brief existence that I shall be able to enjoy you, living fruit, forever.34

Here we encounter a hallmark of Suso’s traditional meditational practice, in which he negates the ecacy of worldly images only after indulging in them. After contemplating the decoration of his maypole cross with “the most beautiful things summer could bring forth,” going so far as to mention garlands of roses and lilies (which Swabians in his day probably used as adornments), he internalizes it and then changes his oerings to abstract virtues, such as love and humility.35 As opposed to a group of men and a horse-drawn vehicle, it is Suso’s heart with a spiritual song that “raises” the trunk of the May Day maypole in the eye of his mind. Necessarily beginning in the familiar world, his meditative image of the Spiritual Maypole is abstracted from an actual maypole (also an image) in an attempt to approximate the beauty of the cross, which can never be seen except through such dim lenses. Suso’s meditation on the Spiritual Maypole is consistent with what many have identied as his orid, “image”centered mystical language.36 Inextricably linked with the Neoplatonic topos of man, and the whole universe, created as image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26–28), an image (imago /das Bild) for medieval theologians and mystics comprised any creaturely instantiation or reection, albeit dim, of the prime mover. Suso was an avid apologist of images, in every sense of the word, especially in their capacity as devotional aids for beginners in their journey to mystical ascent from the material to the immaterial world.37 He is unique in his lavish use of nature metaphors—roses, wild deserts, high clis, living stones, sprawling meadows, and wilderness—as necessary stepping-stones on the road to being ultimately released

figure 2.10  The “Rose Tree” Vision and Man

of Sorrows / Melancholic Christ Before the Whipping Post, Henry Suso’s Exemplar, 1370, painting on vellum. Strasbourg, Bibliothèque National et Universitaire MS 2929, fol. 109v

(gelassen) from them, the word he often uses to describe the nal step toward transcendence.38 His is the kind of rhetoric that enamors art historians, in particular, since he not only enlists imagistic traces of God’s creation in nature but also manmade pictures he himself commissioned, such as the wall paintings for his convent in Constance and illustrations for the Exemplar as devotional paragons for his disciples.39 Scholars have linked one of the eleven standardized iconographies—what I will henceforth call the “Rose Tree” iconography—found in the Exemplar to Suso’s May Day prayer. As was the case for the Exemplar’s entire program of eleven images, the “Rose Tree” remained more or less static in bound manuscript and incunabulum copies made in the late fourteenth through the fteenth centuries. In

the motif’s oldest example, one that likely best approximates the original production of the Exemplar supervised by Suso himself, we see Suso, donning a halo chaplet of roses and bearing the divine monogram IHS inscribed on his heart, envisioning a boy Christ embedded in rose branches sprouting from wooden planks on which his adult self is crucied (g. 2.10).40 Important to note is that the “Rose Tree” motif in all its medieval and early modern incarnations, painted and printed, does not neatly map onto any one verbal record but rather recombines multiple vignettes from many of the books that comprise the Exemplar, including, as Edmund Colledge has asserted, Suso’s spiritual exercise on May Day.41 In maypoles (whether actual trees or poles), however, the vegetation hangs from the top, whereas in the “Rose Tree,” in the



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manner of a traditional arbor vitae cross, it springs from the bottom, where it is irrigated by Christ’s blood. While there is some overlap between the image and the May Day episode, not until the fteenth century will artists build upon the “Rose Tree” in their spiritualizations of maypoles, as we will see later in this chapter. Rather than the Tree of Life, the cross as the springtime maypole thus occupies a unique but tting position in Suso’s devotional repertoire. Though seen only in the eye of his mind, the image he conveys in his May Day prayer is surely based on maypole celebrations he himself witnessed in Swabia and likely Cologne, where he studied under Meister Eckhart. Not unadulterated stu of the natural world, the maypole is a manufactured ritual object of the medieval life world: vegetation that a community carefully rearranged and used to commemorate, if not appease, the changes in the season that brought it about. In using this vivid imagery, Suso not only gives us a contemporary picture of the maypole as a popular, profane object but also transforms it, reworking it into a second image—that of the Crucixion. It is thus hard to imagine a more suitable—and, given its non-Christian associations, more theologically fraught—exemplar for Suso’s particular brand of image-oriented mysticism. Perhaps this is why not until well after his death, in light of the new printing medium, and outside the connes of Suso’s bound treatise, was the devotional maypole not made into a physical, visualized image. On the one hand, Suso’s embrace of nature can be interpreted as a straightforward assimilation of Domin­ ican Neoplatonism with Franciscan naturalism. He read the sensible world as a Book of Nature that could lead to greater knowledge and love of the invisible God, which was a commonplace in medieval Christian allegory.42 Indeed, he alludes to Aristotle and other “virtuous pagan thinkers,” who in “pondering the course of nature” deduced from its order “one single Ruler and Lord of all creatures.”43 In this regard, Suso is also building on Paul’s classic description of the visible world as a mirror of invisible divinity from Romans 1:20. Jerey Hamburger has traced the historical usage of Romans 1:20 among mystics, attributing to it their positive, quasi-sacramental view of the natural world.44 Suso was no exception, and indeed paraphrases the Pauline verse in chapter 50 of his Life, where he fully explicates his “speculative” form of mysticism. “One can see [the divine being] in its eects, just as one recognizes a good master by examining his

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The Spiritual Maypole

work. As Paul said, ‘Creatures are like a mirror in which God is reected.’ And this knowledge is called speculating (ein speculieren).”45 Unlike that of his predecessors, most notably Eckhart, Suso’s variation of “speculation” is not a self-centered, anthropological one. Instead, Suso expounds on the meditative potential of the perceptible objects around humanity—that is to say, its surrounding environment. Later in the same chapter, he instructs his reader to “look further . . . examine the four elements— earth, water, air and re—and the utter miracle that in them are all sorts of dierent men, animals, birds, sh and wonders of the sea.” It is “from this speculating” of the world that “there soon arises in a sensitive person a heartfelt jubilation,” a term often used to describe an ecstatic state reached by pious nuns.46 Suso was aware that his vociferous glorication of creation could be misconstrued as pantheistic, so he employed rhetorical strategies to preemptively fend o criticism.47 He was operating at a moment when the church was openly confronting rebrand mystics and mystical ideas emerging out of unregulated religious groups such as the beguines. Closer to home, Suso could not have been immune to the ripple eects of the accusations of heresy leveled against his teacher Meister Eckhart, whose apophatic practice is keenly felt throughout Suso’s writings.48 Indeed, literary historians have identied in the subtext of Suso’s works a vigorous defense of Eckhart’s controversial mysticism of the ground, which Suso believed had been misunderstood, at best, or deliberately corrupted both by guardians of church doctrine and by radical anticlerical gures such as the so-called Free Spirits.49 On their quest to release from the material world, mystics like Eckhart traditionally took as their starting point the human being for its imagistic likeness with the Godhead. Suso, by contrast, as has already been made clear, was far more prone to dwell on the imagistic potential of the nonhuman world humans inhabited.50 Instead of plumbing the depths of the self, Suso turned outward to the physical ground of nature—and in the case of the maypole, an artwork made to commemorate if not manage its sometimes volatile transformations—as bridges and mediating processes to transcendence. Where Eckhart is said to have scandalously, autotheistically identied the ground of God with the ground of one’s own soul, Suso, by the same measure, edges into pantheistic territory by en-souling or locating God in the ground of the created earth—a terracentrism to what has been described as

Eckhart’s anthropocentrism.51 At face value, as Bernard McGinn has exclaimed, “The Servant himself appeared to be a Free Spirit!”52 Suso’s prayerful celebration of the maypole, then, functions in his paradigm as a nexus between a natural form consisting of God’s created images, a manmade image as springtime ritual object, and nally a mental image of Christ on the cross that leads the prayerful into transcendence and the immaterial. In many ways, the folkloric maypole perfectly encapsulates Suso’s speculative use of nature and images as springboards to the divine. An artwork made of nature’s stu—usually an eminent trunk donning a crown—the maypole recalls the more proper image of Christ on the Wood of the Cross. Itself an image of something no longer present and thus visible only in the eye of one’s mind, the Crucixion is decoupled from the original tangible sign from which it was referred, lest the maypole be left as an object of worship. Suso’s careful balancing act, spiritualizing a folkloric custom with pagan overtones without reifying nature, must have proved successful, for those who follow in his wake build on his mystical methods, embroidering may devotion with ever greater vivacity from everyday life. The Blossoming of May and Maypole Devotion Following Suso’s template, writers and artists in the following century from Alsace to Franconia exalted in more orid detail the Christological valences to blossoming trees and the traditions marking the springtime season that made folkloric artworks of them. Written primarily for nuns, the illustrated may devotional tracts exploit the very overlaps between the maypole and the Crucixion that were considered anathema to the religious gures cited earlier. From their enclosures, nuns’ devotions were spurred on by an expanded repertoire of Suso’s imagistic, speculative observation of the springtime physical and cultural landscape. Though always apprehended in the eye of their mind and choreographed to the liturgical season of the cross, the prayers arm nature’s enduring inuence over devotion, so entrenched were its seasonal commemorations in the secular sphere that church gures instead of eliminating or evading them did just the opposite. While there were many actors propagating these ideas in Suso’s image, some anonymous, others identiable, the Nuremburg-based Franciscan preacher Stephan Fridolin (1430–1498) stands out because in his text, in particular, the shadow of the profane observances is most visible;

he brings them into view to allegorize, if domesticate, them to an unusually explicit degree.53 Made famous by his Schatzbehalter of 1491, which, like the Nuremburg Chronicle, was printed by Anton Koberger and illustrated with ninety-six woodcuts by Michael Wolgemut, Fridolin is less known for his springtime devotional treatise, The Spiritual May (Der geistliche Mai), which he wrote for the Franciscan nuns of Saint Clare in Nuremberg while he served as their confessor from the 1480s until his death in 1498.54 The text proved to be quite popular in its own time, as averred by the numerous extant manuscripts and codices printed well into the Counter-Reformation.55 Like Fridolin’s autumnal devotional allegory, The Spiritual Autumn (see chapter 4), dedicated to the Feast of the Cross’s Exaltation on September 14, The Spiritual May was intended to coincide with the liturgical calendar and so was meant to be read in conjunction with the Feast of the Invention of the Cross on May 3. Following the same structure as its autumnal counterpart, The Spiritual May consists of roughly a month’s worth of daily prayers, each reclaiming the season by recasting contemporary activities in Christo- and cross-centric light. It begins with the invocation of the season of spring and its rituals. Fittingly, and echoing Geiler’s sermon, Fridolin bids his readers to commence the tract “on the feast of Saints Philip and James, the rst day of the natural, delightful May, in which the ground is renewed, and the leaves and grass turn green, the trees bud and the lovely owers bloom, and people take a stroll on the green meadows, and sense in their eyes the wonderful May.”56 At face value, Fridolin revels in the natural, sensible imagery of the ripening spring landscape. His fteenth-century readers, however, would have recognized beneath the surface how he assimilates into a Christian context the May or Easter Stroll, when local townspeople would have formally ambled about the perimeter of their districts on May Day, Pentecost, or Ascension.57 A therapeutic exercise to be sure—Fridolin’s allegory conrms as much—the seasonal wanderings, whose purpose lay entirely outside the bounds of faith, functioned to reassert physical boundaries, as walkers would monitor ground stones and other posts that demarcated properties.58 Captioned “Waldumgang 1514,” the illustration on a bank note printed out of Kaiserslautern in 1923 is a copy of a lost early modern depiction of the custom (g. 2.11); gures variously punctuate the heavily wooded area, which breaks into an opening deep in the background. As the inscription claries, “The



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figure 2.11  Forest Stroll, 1923,

graphic print based on 1514 woodcut, Kaiserslautern

youth should remember the forest boundaries; when not, the paddle helps to strengthen one’s memory.”59 Later in his introductory May Day prayer, Fridolin spiritualizes the rst critical step of the maypole custom: the discovery and sacrice of the nest of local tree specimens. Just as ordinary people did on May Day, he entreats his nuns “to enter the large forest of the heavenly Father,” which contains a very exceptional gift out of the overowing grace of God.60 To help them discern the right and delightful wood, the readers are led by saints to the spot “where the most desirable may-branch grows and for which their souls most yearn.”61 Along the way, the nuns encounter a variety of trees from scripture that approximate the beauty of the “high branch” and “blooming tree of the Holy Cross.”62 From the cypress of Sion, the palm in Cadiz, and the olive on Calvary to the cedar of the Lebanon mountains, Fridolin grounds the virtuousness of Christ’s wooden cross through scriptural typologies. The nuns’ spiritual objective, though, is to “seek out” and “choose” the tree most representative of Christ’s beauty and holiness—itself a parallel to what would have been the familiar and local wood-gathering rite on the eve of May Day, also known as Walpurgis Night.63 While it mostly conjures up images of dancing and singing around bonres, among other revelrous acts meant to exorcise the residual wintry, if demonic, presence from nature, Walpurgis Night was also the occasion on which commoners were granted unfettered access to raid the otherwise restricted forest of its prime product. A letter from the abbot of the Swabian monastery of Minderau (now Weißenau) describes the scene:

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“You are all well aware that young fellows in this district in particular have always had the tradition and habit of chopping down trees and shrubbery [mayen] on May Day for the sake of propping and pinning up the greenery for houses. Such felling has been so devastating, that on such days from two to two hundred trees or pines [mayen oder tennelin]—and the prettiest and sturdiest, at that—have been chopped down.”64

Key to real-world and mystical tradition was that the maypole be composed of the most beautiful and best of trees. Having discovered and felled their perfect tree, that which is elided with the cross, the nuns on their second day of prayer are instructed to prepare it in the same way as one would a conventional maypole—namely, by hanging prizes and decorations from it. Echoing their real-world counterparts as we have seen in numerous verbal and visual accounts, the mirrors and love garlands with which Fridolin has his nuns adorn their Spiritual Maypole function as devotional trophies for their speculative and directed modes of internal prayer. Starting with the mirrors, the nuns decorate all four ends “of the high maypole of the Holy Cross,” which formally represent the four appendages of Christ’s body stretched across the Spiritual Maypole.65 Once hung, it is in the mirrors’ reected light that the nuns spring from the image of the Crucixion to trophies of symbolic and abstracted signicance. From the rst mirror, which they string from the “height of the maypole’s crest, they should perceive the divine Eternal Wisdom.”66 From the next, which should adorn the right side of the tree, they

the Swiss village of Schüpfheim (g. 2.13).70 Nestled under the lime tree’s wide cover, Peter Amstalden (labeled as such), Schüpfheim’s governor and innkeeper, dines and conspires with fellow villagers about their impending rebellion against the city of Lucerne. In the foreground, an ocial from Lucerne records the sworn testimonies of traitors to Amstalden’s cause. In the second half of the day’s prayer, the mirrors shift to stand in for tangible ecclesiastical objects. As opposed to the Low German lyric, which points to the maypole as a negative, secular ritual that threatens proper Christian veneration, Fridolin showers the object with symbols of Christ and neuters any heterodox, if pagan, resonances by

figure 2.12  Court Linden Tree by Saint Michael’s Chapel, Kirnbach,

over ve hundred years old

perceive the ultimate gift: salvation in the favored side of God’s supreme justice.67 In mapping a Christ of Judgment over a May Day tree, Fridolin is more than subtly alluding to the court lime trees (Gerichtslinden) under whose canopies local magistrates would carry out judicial sentences during this same time of year. In fact, the court limes (oak, spruce, elm, and ash are also documented) were sometimes the same tree around which the townspeople celebrated the May Day festivities.68 Often massive in size, these trees sometimes served as points of reference for the small towns over which they towered. Sources from 1507 allude to “Kirnbach . . . under dem Lindenstock”—the largeleaved lime that still abuts a small chapel dedicated to Saint Michael and commands the hilly Baden landscape around it (g. 2.12).69 A miniature from Diebold Schilling der Jüngere’s Schweizer Bildchronik of 1513 visually recounts the activity that once took place around the court lime in

figure 2.13  Court Linden Tree, Diebold Schilling der Jüngere’s

Schweizer Bilderchronik, 1514, painting on vellum. Luzern, Zentralbibliothek HS. S. 23, fol. 127v



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71

enlarged Fig. 2.14 is now only 244 dpi. Is hwi res available to fill column?

figure 2.14  Villager Climbing to the Crest of a

Maypole, detail of gure 2.5

imposing the church’s particular institutional structure onto it. From popular ritual to full-blown Mass, Fridolin summons his nuns to delight in the Spiritual Maypole’s hanging mirrors’ reections of the altar where Christ held his rst Mass, the preacher’s pulpit, and even the monstrance, in which the holiest of holies was contained. Decorating the Spiritual Maypole with liturgical and Christological eects hearkens to their illustrations in the mystical genre, a topic to which we will soon return. But before he springs them to the level of allegory, Fridolin the spiritual ethnographer avails himself of the real-life, ribald, if sensual, signicance ascribed to the mirrors he would have observed swinging from Franconian maypoles, reminiscent as they are of those pictured in Glockendon’s manuscript (g. 2.14). Like the mirrors young men bestowed on their beloved maidens, as Neidhart recounts in his courtly love poems, Fridolin’s nuns are rewarded

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mirrors as devotional prizes from their cherished bridegroom in Christ crucied on the maypole.71 While not specically a Spiritual Maypole, the greenery around which Nuremberg’s observance of the Feast of Saint Urban (May 25), the patron saint of vintners, indicates that Fridolin was not alone in his grounding of devotional imagery in the familiar and worldly. Also echoing contemporary maypoles, a small, handheld tree is pictured in a drawing of the city’s Urban’s Day procession around the year 1550 (see g. 4.10). The small reective ornaments hanging from its branches comport with accounts that wine tradesmen and barsmen in Nuremberg plucked glass balls and mirrors from the tree leading Urban’s Day processions and presented them to the boys and girls of the town, respectively, as gifts.72 In reconciling, if not exploiting, the coincidental metaphorical potential of mirror prizes hanging from maypoles with the sacred image of Christ suspended from the cross, Fridolin most explicitly recapitulates Suso’s “speculative” mystical methodology. It is in this very prayer that he invokes Saint Paul as “the highly learned, seer [spyegler] doctor” for Paul’s scriptural endorsement of empirical “seeing” as a bridge to transcendental union with the Godhead.73 Because they are recognizable from everyday life, the mirrors that dangled from Fridolin’s Spiritual Maypoles can function as stepping-stones, though only illusory, on the continuum leading nuns toward their immaterial contemplation. They impossibly hang from the earthly tree-formed ritual object, which in the face of the Crucixion is also always in and of itself a mere reection—no more substantive than the long, spectral shadow it casts. While they intimate the presence of an author (in this case, God), mirrors in the practical sense also conjure up the spectators who look into them.74 Indeed, Fridolin beseeches the nuns to take pleasure in what they see of themselves—for fteenth-century convex mirrors, only spectral likenesses75—the world and their own role in it. In the mirrors that hang on the branches, the nuns “will delight in looking with all their eyes at the noble and variedly beautiful nature and quality of the holy cross.”76 In the nal, twelfth mirror with which they adorn the maypole, they behold the culminating image, also in line with Suso, of Christ’s body and his limbs pinned to the cross.77 Instead of reecting back the vain world, mirrors are “seen through” as part of the speculative mechanism by which salvation is obtained. But to trigger that

figure 2.15  Heinrich von Breslau Receives a Wreath, Codex Manesse,

figure 2.16  Christ Child Proffering a Wreath of Forget-Me-Nots,

ca. 1300–1350, painting on vellum. Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, cpg 848, fol. 11v

Stephan Fridolin’s Der geistliche Mai, 1529, pen and ink on parchment. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 4473, fol. 46r

mystical journey, both Fridolin and Suso wax lyrical about a profoundly secular and nonecclesiastical cult object. In the same vein as the mirrors, Fridolin reframes love garlands and wreaths, tokens of maypoles and other Maytime courtly gestures, in proper devotional terms for the nuns’ prayer on the Feast of the Cross’s Invention on May 3. With their devotional maypole trimmed and decorated, Fridolin’s nuns pray the heavenly rosary and invite a chorus of heavenly saints “to help carry the graceful May-wood through all the alleys . . . and [during] this stroll to sing a beautiful little hymn.”78 They post their love garlands on the doors and windows of the Heavenly Father in spiritual reenactments of courtship rituals. “But rst of all out of lial love, which you should above all have in your Heavenly Father, stick the may of the holy cross for the door that is for the eyes of God the Heavenly Father.”79 Taking either the form of saplings, young trees,

or wreathes, such as those Neidhart describes, or the verdant crown the court lady confers on a tournament’s victorious knight in the famous Codex Manesse, love woods (Liebesmaien) would have been given to sweethearts in May (g. 2.15 and see g. 2.1).80 As a manuscript copy of Fridolin’s treatise demonstrates, in return for his nun’s Maytime devotional exercises, and as a sign of her spiritual marriage to him, the Christ Child rewards her with an allegorical mirror of the prize a festivalgoer—like those pictured in a Beham print—would have coveted: a wreath of forget-me-nots, a oral play on the Eucharistic utterance, “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me” (g. 2.16; Luke 22:19).81 In addition to the rosary, Fridolin and the author and woodcut artist for the frontispiece of The Spiritual Maypole (Geistlicher Maibaum), printed in Ulm around 1482, also analogized the crown of thorns atop Christ’s head with



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figure 2.17  Frontispiece to The Spiritual

Maypole, 1482, woodcut, printed in Ulm

the owery trophy that encircled the bushy crests of late medieval maypoles (g. 2.17).82 “Above on the treetop of this maypole is the lovely and beautiful rosary / ringlet of roses, delightful to admire, but completely painful and cruel to receive, when it bore through the head of the noble Sponsus with its sharp thorns.”83 Like Fridolin’s tract, The Spiritual Maypole transposes the redemptive beauty of Christ’s Passion—rather literally—on outdoor springtime rituals intended to invoke bountiful harvests. But these are always already mental, internal images and processes. The doors and windows where Fridolin’s nuns stick their love greenery always double as immaterial, spiritual thresholds through which they are able to see with their minds’ eyes “God’s only beloved son hanging on the maypole.”84 At face value, then, Suso and Fridolin’s allegoresis of nature has the eect of taking the world—in all of its messiness and embodiedness, and its raucous rituals—and reconceiving of it as means toward interior, epiphanic

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vision. The nuns literally rethink the maypole, and with it the physical world, into a series of refracting images in their mind. Paradoxically, the prayers allow us to reconstitute, make physical again, the absent maypole, the object lost to history because of its seasonal, ephemeral quality, even as for the nuns the prayers served to make the alltoo-material world into a spiritual portal. But it is precisely the folkloric, decidedly nonecclesiastical frame of reference that distinguishes the Spiritual Maypole allegories from other exteriorized “imagistic” mystical language. On the one hand, it was the perceptual quality of nature’s eects as manifestations of God’s creative footprint, like mountains, owers, and trees that served as a devotional impetus for Suso’s speculations. But it was an entirely dierent matter for Suso, Fridolin, and others to spiritualize a ritual object like the maypole, which was manmade, of non-Christian origins, and would seem to honor, if not be instrumentalized to enact,

auspicious changes in the springtime environment.85 Rather than fulminating against it, as other clerics had, mystics like Suso and Fridolin exploited the opportunity the maypole proered as a rudimentary intermediary between nature and culture, a product of the irresistible joy that the springtime greening and warming of earth coaxed out of people yet also an object people fashioned to make sense of or govern its vicissitudes. In their speculation of this secular custom, mystics highlighted the salient correspondences with Christian forms, topoi, and liturgies to draw their readers from the material to immaterial world, ultimately negating all earthly things and reinscribing Christ and the Godhead as the supreme, invisible actors mediating among humanity, earth, and all creation. Suso, an “exemplar” for his readers, and Fridolin, a guide of them, reoriented but still maintained the driving principle behind the maypole tradition in their mystical allegorizations: that a community’s cultural expression of their entanglement with nature could possess devotional utility in spurring on the meditative process. Standing before and serenading the Spiritual Maypole as the Holy Cross on May Day, Suso dignied a spiritual worldview in which the interdependence of nature and culture could help lift the pious to higher realities. In doing so, his mysticism paved the way for a new generation of religious art and literature, whose material basis for allegory expanded to include not only the visible beauty of the trees and vegetation God created but also the manmade, folkloric objects from a cultural landscape in which the lives of humans and plants were enmeshed.86 In the next section, we will bear witness to how Suso and Fridolin’s spiritualization of the springtime ritual proved so popular that it radiated outward and appealed to broader monastic communities, male as well as female. The Passionate Trophies of the Spiritual Maypole The Christianized maypole appears most clearly in numerous extant devotional writings from fteenthcentury Germany that bear a variation of the title The Spiritual May or Spiritual Maypole. While some of the devotional texts are illustrated, there remain pictures that have not yet been brought into the iconographic fold of may devotion because the late medieval tracts in the genre have not been adequately studied and because the ethnographic materials that they allegorize—the festive trees themselves—were inherently temporary objects and do not survive. In the following pages, a range of late

medieval painted and printed pictures will emerge that bear the footprint of Christ’s cross as a ceremonial tree from which hang the instruments of his Passion much in the way maypole prizes did. Alongside those images, lifesize paraliturgical sculptures of Christ’s whipping post— one in the form of a tree—began to appear throughout Germany. Festooned with the Arma Christi and installed outside sanctuaries, they invite multiple, complete circumambulations not dissimilar from the kinds of directional movement the festive maypole was erected to encourage.87 One depiction also appears on a convent’s altar mensa. Though they are not direct illustrations of the rituals, the artworks, taken together with the may devotional writings, allow for a reconstruction of the secular medieval maypole and its prizes and their entwining with the Wood of the Cross, the other Arma Christi, and their conjoined observance in the Maytime liturgy.88 Assimilating the imagery and conceit of the profane festive trees and columns into ecclesiastical terms, they disclose the constant loops—and tensions—between the church’s calendar and system of images and the springtime maypole rituals, whatever their historical origins. What the images also show is an anity with the folk objects used in the modern era—a fact gone unnoticed in part because of the maypole’s fraught place in modern German historiography. It stood as the emblem par excellence of the nation’s putative preternatural connection to the forest and trees, which was rst reported by the Roman historian Tacitus (ca. 56–120), then reinforced by Charlemagne destroying the Irminsul and Saint Boniface chopping down the socalled Thor or Donar oak in their campaigns to convert the Saxons.89 Much of what is known about the medieval maypole tradition was rst uncovered by the systematic studies conducted by nineteenth-century ethnographers, the propagators of a romantic, sylvan idealism. Early folklore historians such as Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823–1897) and Wilhelm Mannhardt (1831–1880), as well as the polymath philologist Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), all plumbed an immense corpus of textual records to advance a fatuous homogenization of ancient, medieval, and modern rituals involving trees.90 Though painstaking and rigorously cross-disciplinary, their research made gross generalizations of variegated histories and traditions in German-speaking lands and was also largely motivated by its own nefarious brand of nationalism and primitivist fetishism of the German peasantry and its mystical and



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racial connection to the land—a dangerous combination that opened the eld of folklore studies and its research to radicalization by National Socialists and their blood and soil propaganda.91 Broadcast in lm, radio, and other propaganda media, the annual erection of Berlin’s swastika-crowned maypole—and its less monumental copies throughout the so-called Third Reich—sought to stir up an enduring, ethnonationalist fantasy that intrinsically linked a pure, pre-Christian German Volk with their surrounding environment.92 After 1945, though, postwar scholars who rightfully sought to de-Nazify methodological approaches in their interpretation of the same medieval sources also set aside the fuller picture of tree-centered customs taking place throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period, given their suspect ideological connotations.93 For fear of perpetuating the bogus and dangerous continuity narratives of previous generations, they at the same time overlooked some revealing parallels between medieval and modern maypole traditions. Although it was an animosity toward cities as “the domain of Jews” and the “tombs of Germanism” that drove his research into popular customs of rural Germans, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl tells us in his study of maypoles from 1860 that all were made of trees and that their adornments consisted of a mixture of secular and religious symbols.94 In addition to crests of patrician families and emblems of local trade, he observed that the Arma Christi were an “indispensable component” to maypoles across Bavaria.95 The inscription on the maypole from Königsdorf in 1894 signals its role as a marker of God’s municent intervention with the physical world: “You diligently care for the health of souls with heavenly means and divine nourishment [Speis]; make our minds prone to it, where the direction this maypole shows us.”96 The cross is conspicuously absent among the range of arma represented on the maypole that Bavarians erected in Ellbach bei Tölz and Kochel in the nineteenth century, Kochel’s maypole topped o with a rooster; its relation to Saint Peter or festival games remains ambiguous (g. 2.18). In the modern period, too, the secular, folkloric maypole stood for the holy cross itself, before which the townspeople, much like Fridolin’s nuns under their “Spiritual May,” paid tribute to the divine forces at work in the springtime harvest—the lifeblood of the German countryside. What the drawings of modern maypoles indicate is that at some unidentied point the maypole came to be

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figure 2.18  Gabriel von Seidl, Maypoles in Ellbach bei Tölz and

Kochel, ca. 1910, engraving

associated with the Arma Christi. For some clues about the origins of this association, we can look back to the year 1354, when in German- and Czech-speaking lands the Feast of the Lance and Nails was introduced into the May liturgical calendar in the season of the cross, oering a temporal overlap of these various feasts.97 With the arrival of this feast, the rest of the Arma Christi joined

figure 2.19  New Year’s Greeting, 1480–1500, painted woodcut. Berlin,

Kupferstichkabinett

the Ur-weapon of the cross and became absorbed into its nature-centered springtime adoration, expanding on and embroidering the aforementioned spiritual allegorizations of the maypole ritual. It is unclear when or if the arma actually adorned medieval maypoles of secular celebration. At least by the sixteenth century, though, in Sebald Beham’s satirical comparisons of maypole and the Crucixion, of festival prizes and the Arma Christi, we bear witness to his mocking not only of festival culture but also of religious artworks that specically contain maypole resonances within them. Such columnar images, which hinge on the instruments of the Passion, would have been anathema to Beham as a skeptic of devotional images and the Catholic Church’s embrace of folkloric culture. First, before exploring the artworks evocative of the Spiritual Maypole, it is helpful to understand that although the arma were a xture of medieval devotion generally, they had particularly deep roots in

German-speaking lands, where they became a regular xture of the springtime liturgy. Their popularity rst came about as part of a deliberate campaign by Charles IV – (13161378), Holy Roman Emperor, who sought to amplify popular fascination over his expanding treasure trove of relics, in particular the Holy Lance and one of the nails used to execute Christ.98 Emblazoning his own personal arms and even the small pilgrim tokens for those who attended its lavish public exhibition, the nail-embedded lance formed the crown jewel of Charles’s collection in Bohemia. Though Pope Innocent IV (r. 1352–1362) granted the pious emperor with a feast dedicated to the two special relics (festum lancae et clavorum Christi), to be observed on the rst Friday after the Easter octave, the holiday was never incorporated into the Roman Breviary and remained idiosyncratic to the empire.99 Never particularly popular in Bohemia, the feast endured in southern Germany long after Charles’s death, most likely due to the relocation of the imperial relics to Nuremberg in 1424 and the acquisition of a thorn relic by Ludwig the Bearded (c. 1368–1447), Duke of Bavaria-Ingolstadt.100 In addition to the Chron­icle of Hirsau Abbey, a large two-volume work nished by Abbot Trithemius in 1514, early sixteenth-century missals from Mainz, Speyer, and Strasbourg point to the holiday’s recognition on the rst Friday after Quasimodo Sunday.101 By this time, though, the feast was known variously as Spear Friday, Lance Fest, or the Feast of Christ’s Wounds. Sometimes more universally dedicated to the Arma Christi, as it was in the bishopric of Mainz, the movable feast was most often observed in late April, more or less in tight temporal proximity with the sister springtime holiday that celebrated the discovery of Christ’s chief instrument of death on May 3.102 It is this calendrical coincidence that accounts for images that visualize the Arma Christi perched on opened owers, often accompanied by an Infant Christ wishing a Happy New Year (g. 2.19).103 For its association with warm weather and regeneration, the conceit of the newborn Christ as the new sun, the recurring light after the vernal equinox was often extrapolated from the season of Christmas and Epiphany to that of Easter and the Cross festivals—hence the New Year’s greetings brought also by the small Christ proering a oral chaplet in Fridolin’s Spiritual May (see g. 2.16). The convergence of spring and the arma also explains the specically arboreal link that the Spiritual Maypole topos drew between the cross and a tree with gloriously adorned branches. Printed nearby



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figure 2.20  Melancholic Christ in a Tree, 1412,

woodcut on concluding page of Geistliche Auslegung des Lebens Jesu Christi, printed in Ulm

in the Swabian capital of Ulm, from the same corner of southern Germany where Suso died, a little-known woodcut shows Christ sandwiched in the fork of a tree from which an expanded arrangement of the arma is arrayed in a way that evokes the decorated festive trees discussed earlier in this chapter (g. 2.20). Appearing at the end of the same printed book from Ulm that contained the Spiritual Maypole text, this picture also participates in the may devotional genre and is iconographically related to that treatise’s frontispiece, in which an outstretched Christ is nailed to a tree inhabited by birds (see g. 2.17).104

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Here, a Melancholic Christ balances the weight of his thoughts on his left arm and leg, which he plants atop a stump. Propping his heavy head on his hand, he pensively exchanges gazes with the rooster perched on the same branch supporting the birches, hammer, and slip-knotted rope. Known also as a motif of the Calm Lord or Christ in Repose, the iconography of a crestfallen Christ, which seldom appeared in the fteenth century, became commonplace across German-speaking lands after 1500.105 In contrast to the ahistorical Man of Sorrows, the Melancholic Christ functioned more as a devotional

antecedent to the likewise extrascriptural Pietà, for it represents Christ ruminating on his impending death as the Romans gather the rest of their instruments of torture—including the lance, sponge, and ladder—and prop up his cross on Golgotha. With all but the nal episode of his execution having transpired, the image marks an anticipatory caesura in the Passion narrative to invite contemplation of the arma that nearly always appear alongside him. For instance, a picture from Hans Holbein the Elder’s Gray Passion Altarpiece (ca. 1500) centers on a wistful Christ sitting on the cross amid a urry of actors eager to raise it (g. 2.21); in the meantime, in a pocket of inertia various weapons litter the foreground for the viewer to meditate on before the culminating crucixion event takes place. In the Ulm print, despite the inclusion of some of the more peripheral objects related to the Passion—such as the lantern, dice, and ladder—the cross is saliently missing. That is, unless the oak itself, known for its bifurcated trunk, functions as its stand-in. Cradling Christ and the arma and growing out of the earth like the

adjacent chas of wheat in the foreground, themselves not without Eucharistic symbolic import, the tree is the most literal visualization of the festive tree as the cross adorned with ornaments of the Passion—though there are others. Instead of the cross, the Melancholic Christ is also often portrayed next to the whipping column, the other upright, structural instrument of his Passion. The origins of the motif are murky, but from its earliest instantiations, within illustrated copies of Suso’s Exemplar, an image of the Melancholic Christ “appearing to the right hand of [Suso] as he was unbound from the pillar” is juxtaposed near, sometimes on the same page, that of the “Rose Tree” picture in which Suso envisions Christ crucied to a owering tree—an iconography that after Suso’s death is drawn closely into the orbit of may devotion (see g. 2.10).106 By the fteenth century, monumental sculpted programs of Christ in Repose with whipping posts emblazoned with the arma invoke the cross and the open-air maypole customs often cited to symbolize it. Painted and carved in wood and thus materially evocative

figure 2.21  Hans Holbein the Elder,

Melancholic Christ from the Gray Passion Altarpiece, ca. 1500, mixed technique on panel. Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie



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figure 2.22  Melancholic Christ with Whipping Post, 1486/1500,

polychromed oak, Brunswick Cathedral

of trees, crosses, and maypoles, the portable ensemble now installed inside Brunswick Cathedral may well have been transported outdoors for the liturgies of the cross, Arma Christi, and Passion in the spring (g. 2.22).107 The crouching, forlorn Christ serves as a model for the viewer, who is left to walk about and reect on the kaleidoscope of torture wrapped around the tall freestanding columns. The placement of Saint Peter’s cock at the top, along with the centrifugal movement they invite, call to mind the festive springtime stas—and thus, by an inverted set of associations, the cross itself, so thoroughly had it, its material, and its celebrations come to be layered over the rituals of May. A spino of the genre and attributed to the same sculptor, Hans Witten, as the Brunswick tableaux, a massive, four-meter-tall carving of Christ bound to a tree trunk, which was designed for the Benedictine cloister in Chemnitz, clearly invokes the Wood of the Cross to promulgate arboreal associations with the other Arma Christi, chiey the whipping post and the crown of thorns (g. 2.23).108 Staging its spectacular gural composition around all sides of a colossal tree trunk encircled with wreathes of branches, the carvers of the whipping post sought to evoke the same kinds of associations between the Wood of the Cross and the maypole that we see in the may devotional genre. Though primarily shorthand for the cross, the Spiritual May-Wood as it appears in texts also gures as the scourging column and the crown of thorns, among the other weapons deployed to execute Christ.109 It also calls to mind the side-by-side comparison of vegetal crucixion and Melancholic Christ illustrated on the pages of Suso’s Exemplar (see g. 2.10)—a copy of which, we know, belonged to the Chemnitz library.110 Following the profane custom, where the maypole represented the most beautiful tree sacriced and honored to usher in warm weather, at Chemnitz we encounter in the whipping-post-as-tree oering the best and most perfect example of humanity in the gure of Christ and his sacrice at the Passion. The spectacular gural program, save the protruding appendages of the agellators and the swirl of Christ’s tunic, emerges in exquisite relief from the rind of a broad oak trunk measuring 1.2 meters

opposite figure 2.23  Whipping Post, attributed to Meister H. W., 1510–22,

polychromed oak, Castle Church, Chemnitz (see gure 0.3)

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in diameter. Around 120 years old at the time of its felling, the tree would have required special dispensation to be removed from the local forest. The top still shows signs of being chopped o with an ax, the bottom with a saw. A great exception to the rule of late Gothic wood sculpture, which was almost always produced from logs sliced longitudinally, the tree sourced for the Chemnitz post is worked around its entire circumference and was thus not required to be hollowed out to prevent cracking. In fact, the artists were so committed to the material integrity of the prized tree cut down from the nearby forest that they recycled real oak branches, shaved them, and twisted them around the trunk to form two wreathes that hearken to the oral and leafy garlands that decorated medieval maypoles. A hybridization of the cross and column, the freestanding ogging tree that ramies upward into four coiled trunks also thematizes the crown of thorns and its organic properties.111 Separated into a bottom register by one of the branchwork wreathes, the soldier beneath Christ and at eye level with the viewer contorts the bundle of thorns like a rope around his shoe to form the mock crown. His kneeling for leverage to bind the branches is representative of the greater push-pull of the tangled composition, which viewers must circumambulate to unwind. To counteract the backward thrust of their wound-up arms, the two soldiers ogging Christ from both sides also kick him with their feet. The one to Christ’s right tugs on his hair. From this oblique angle, we have an ideal vantage point of Christ, who is elevated upright by a rope from underneath his arms that binds his praying hands. Following that rope upward compels the viewer to move laterally about the column to catch a glimpse of the fourth and nal torturer, who straddles the trunk to hoist up Christ’s body for display. Besides its formal and material construction, then, it is also in the whipping post’s reception and conditions of viewership where the maypole resonances become salient. Archival evidence substantiates what the columnar composition of the artwork implies—chiey, that it originally inspired circular movement and was meant to viewed on all sides. Like a modern maypole, it was festooned with a coat of arms—this one referring to the family of Abbot Heinrich von Schlenitz, who commissioned the artworks as part of his larger campaign to expand Chemnitz’s Benedictine cloister at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Originally installed just northwest of

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the church in the middle of what was called the Scourge Hall, which is not a common architectural element in a monastery, the whipping post was accessible to both the lay public and monastic brethren.112 Its subject matter demonstrates that devotional allegories of folkloric practice around trees, which with the writings of Suso originated in the domain of female piety, were assimilated more globally among monastics by the later Middle Ages and into the early modern period. We do not know its specic function, and cannot be sure, as some have assumed, that it served as a model for postconfessional self-agellation.113 The oak’s central placement, however, suggests that its use was not solely modeled after reenactment of scripture—as the ubiquitous carved Christs mounted atop donkeys restaged his entry into Jerusalem— but also all the profane customs in which a tree served as the spoke for radially oriented springtime revelry. This is not to imply that monks sang and danced about the whipping post. I wish instead to point out that the devotional texts allegorizing Christ’s Passion as the decorated maypole inspired spiritual imitations not only in mind but also physically in image and practice. Composed formally and materially of a distinctive trunk felled and emblazoned with wreathes and a family’s crest, the Chemnitz ogging tree conjures up the cross, its decoration with the arma, and thus the maypole. The circular movement the agellation post invokes—which of course is true to its own story—becomes conated with the ritualistic movements around the maypole in the season of the celebration of the cross and Arma Christi. That these layers are endlessly recursive is the point: they are eectuating a complete imbrication of the imagery of Christ’s death with the seasonal rituals surrounding it. That is, whether praying, ogging themselves, or engaging in contemplation around the tree carved in gural and organic iconography, the sculpture’s viewers would have been reminded of how Christ’s bloodshed at his death redeemed the entirety of God’s cosmological dominion, of humankind and all the earth. Rhizomatic Transplantation: A Devotional Festive Tree Takes Root on an Altar Now that we have encountered resonances of the maypole and festive trees in the Arma Christi and the carved whipping posts, it has become evident that the springtime ritual objects were deeply imbued in and resonant across a range of objects that might not, at rst glance, refer to

secular practice at all. Another unidentied instance in which artists audaciously interwove the folkloric tree with the symbols of the cross—this one likely commissioned to decorate an altar in the Cistercian nunnery at Heggbach—can be traced to a workshop active around 1510 in Ulm (gs. 2.24, 2.25).114 Ulm is where Henry Suso ended his career, and the inuence of his spiritualized maypole seems to have ourished unabated in artworks from the area, which took on new forms with the popularization of the arma feast and the advent of printmaking. For example, on the Heggbach Altarpiece’s outer wings, a large oaklike tree on the bottom left panel impossibly sprouts rose petals and carries the Arma Christi from its branches (g. 2.26). Planted in Gethsemane, the fantastical vegetation does not stand for the cross, which is ensconced in its canopy, and lacks scriptural precedent. More specic than a diagrammatic variant of the Tree of Life or springtime arboreal metaphor for the Passion and Resurrection, the picture’s complex representational scheme emerges from a visual tradition surrounding Suso, picking up and building o from the mystic’s devotional invocation of the maypole and May Day custom. As we will see, the altarpiece opens up a set of materials connected to the maypole and seasonal celebrations of the cross and the Arma Christi—a fact that has gone unrecognized until now due to a focus on pairing it with illustrations from Suso’s Exemplar rather than how it also evinces later generations of may devotional representations in print, which grew out of but evolved away from the bound manuscript pages of Suso’s treatise. The picture of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane is one of four painted on the altarpiece’s outer shutters, all of which center around motifs of the heart, vegetation, and the Passion.115 In three of the images leafy branches ll the background, appearing as real trees (rather than decorative motifs); the fourth centers on a giant crown of thorns between whose braided stalks are interposed various Arma Christi, with the cross upright in the center and Saint Peter’s cock perched on it. In the lower left panel, the arma reappear, this time swinging from or above left figure 2.24  Heggbach Altarpiece (closed), ca. 1510, painted panel. Ulm,

City Museum left figure 2.25  Heggbach Altarpiece (open), ca. 1510, painted wood. Ulm,

City Museum



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figure 2.26  Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, Heggbach

Altarpiece (closed), detail of gure 2.24

lodged among the limbs of a tree sparsely budding with leaves and rose petals. How the painter renders the noose, lance, crown of thorns (at the apex), and even sideways cross as real objects adorning the broad canopy of a tree is reminiscent of the woodcut artist’s treatment of the Melancholic Christ seated on the Spiritual Maypole with its Passion ornaments, which was printed in Ulm decades earlier (see g. 2.20). The painter, however, modied that print’s composition by displacing Christ and the tree from the immediate episode of the Crucixion to the night before in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Christ could be depicted kneeling in prayer before the chalicebearing angel (and visions of Mary and Saint Augustine) as well as a tree, his right hand hovering over its trunk. Where Albrecht Dürer in his engraving of 1515 and other artists before him had established Christ praying to God the Father in the presence of overgrown olive trees, the hybrid rosebush-cum-tree depicted on the Heggbach Altarpiece is of no discernible species, much less one of the olive variety.116 The choice of rose was to accommodate yet another of the composite picture’s iconographic quotations, which delivers us back to Suso. Seemingly an exception amid the symbols of violence, the motif of the Infant Christ clutching a rose from the tree’s covering with an inscribed banderole parallels the same motif found in the “Rose Tree” iconography (see g. 2.10). Besides the rose-clutching Infant Christ, however, the rest of the Heggbach picture mostly deviates from that illustrating Suso’s Exemplar. Less important than the substitution of Christ for Suso is the salient dierence in the Heggbach’s densely foliated tree, which is bedecked with the Arma Christi. The devotional trophies hanging from the spiritualized Maytime tree represent an update in Suso’s May devotional practice, as the Feast of the Lance and Nails had been inaugurated only shortly before his death in the middle of the fourteenth century. Indeed, by the time the Cistercian abbey commissioned an altarpiece, its artists had at their disposal, spurred on by innovations in woodcut technologies, pictures that reected developments in may devotion independent from Suso’s original teachings as well as those that had spun o from the standardized Exemplar iconographies to take on lives of their own outside the bound pages of Suso’s treatise. The youthful Christ from the “Rose Tree” pictures is an example of the latter scenario; its evolution in the print medium helps us uncover how the Heggbach painting of

figure 2.27  Saint Henry Suso, 1475–80, painted woodcut. Berlin,

Kupferstichkabinett

Christ beneath a tree dangled with weapons of his Passion reinstantiates the Spiritual Maypole on an altar. One late fteenth-century woodcut awkwardly entitled Saint Henry Suso and endowing Suso with a halo (he was never beatied) demonstrates how the Christ Child plucking and showering roses became an independent emblem of Suso’s teachings in its own right.117 A distillation of the iconic episode from chapter 34 of the Exemplar’s “Life of the Servant,” in which Suso describes his disciple Elsbeth’s vision of Christ in a rose bower, the young Christ appears as but one of the mystic’s many attributes, such as his vision of Mary in heaven and the dog carrying his tattered doormat from its mouth (g. 2.27).118 By the time it was painted on the Heggbach panel, though, the tone and conceit of the tree-climbing Christ Child had owered into something new again. Rather than showering his devotees with owers, he faces the frame, addressing no one in particular, not even the adult Christ kneeling in prayer beneath him. The alteration in form and meaning



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figure 2.28  Infant Christ with Basket

of Roses, 1480–1500, painted woodcut. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett

can be attributed to a woodcut circulating among convents around Ulm—and hence Heggbach—of a juvenile Christ carrying a basket of roses, which is inscribed with the same rhyming couplets about “breaking o roses,” plus a couple more (g. 2.28).119 At once a synecdochic sign for Suso’s rose bower vision, text included, the Christ Child is rendered here walking on the ground of the earth with a large pruning knife, cutting the long-stem roses from the root. A decidedly more violent variant of the infant from “Rose Tree” iconography, the woodcut shifts emphasis from the showering of roses as an oblique expression of the beauty of suering to the direct iniction of it; here he

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participates in the physical, if metaphorical, violation of his older self. No longer the tender gure lavishing owers on his disciple, the knife-wielding Christ emblematizes his own suering much in the way that the panoply of arms set betwixt the branches of the giant Gethsemane tree from Heggbach do. Unlike the “Rose Tree” series or Saint Henry Suso woodcut, Christ neither stands on the tree’s branches nor does he engage with the kneeling supplicant beneath him. On the contrary, much like the busts of Judas and the “crucixere eum” tormentor, he looks leftward blankly, exchanging gazes with no one. Holding a cut rose in his

left hand, he clutches between his eshy baby legs the holy lance, an unmistakable variant (and biblical referent) of the Christ Child in the woodcut shearing a rose with a long gardening knife. Moreover, notwithstanding the red petals sprouting from its twigs, the tree itself hardly resembles any of those from Suso’s illustrated devotional codices, including the forked arboreal variants from the fteenth century.120 By contrast, the chain of branches divaricating upward rather resembles the conventional oak tree with hanging Arma Christi that concludes the printed treatise from Ulm containing the Spiritual Maypole (see g. 2.20), if not also the celebratory trees from Bock’s and Breuil’s prints (see gs. 2.2, 2.4). Moreover, the blood that Christ sweats in the Garden of Gethsemane, as mentioned in Luke, proleptically signals the blood of the Flagellation and the Crucixion. The Heggbach picture, enmeshed in late medieval May devotion, thus also hearkens to the sculpted Christs adjoining columnar and arboreal displays of Passion weaponry. Arrayed discretely to maximize their legibility and to inspire compassion for Christ’s impending execution on the Ur-wood, the arma emblazoning columns and slung from treetops evoke, if not imitate, the secular tree- and pole-centered rituals at the heart of Maytime celebrations taking place across medieval Germany. The Heggbach’s Spiritual May-Wood gives us insight into how woodcut technology facilitated the growth of a devotional topos and its artistic expression; it also demonstrates the hold of may devotion on the populace long after Suso’s death. Even as printed copies of Suso’s Exemplar remained more or less static in their illustrations, the Heggbach composite picture, though painted, exemplies the iconographic ripple eects not so much of remediations from vellum to paper to panel as it does bound illustrations to loose-leaf prints—individuated, autonomous impressions multiplying out of woodblock trunks and ittering freely like leaves shed from vegetating trees. Scholars have already highlighted the salient one-to-one correspondence between other Heggbach panels and contemporary woodcuts circulating the region; a trompe l’oeil long sheet is even shown pinned to a stone parapet to simulate the prayer texts printed on the footer of devotional woodcuts that resemble the painted diagram of the Arma Christi above it.121 But the idiosyncrasies of the Heggbach picture, in particular, are the product not of linear but rather of something approximating rhizomatic inuence—what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

have described as a decentered, detachable networking of points that meet through multiple canals. “The rhizome operates by variation, conquest, capture, oshoots.”122 In charting its trajectory, Suso’s rose-plucking Christ ensconced in branches can be seen as a slightly mutated seed that falls from the bound pages of the codex and is whisked away and buried. Having sprouted, it grows into its own variation of tree, whose leaves in turn blow o and are tangled into a new recombination of forms in the may devotional genre, which had also evolved from Suso’s original program and had taken root on an altar for nuns, not far from his native Ulm, so resonant did he remain in the area. The rose-plucking Christ’s persistence despite alterations shows that, like Fridolin and others, religious authors and artists through the early sixteenth century continued to rely on Suso’s precedent of legitimating the spiritualization of popular ritual, even as they embellished his writings and pictures. It is unfortunate, though of course true to their nature, recycled to usher in every year’s promise for the return of light, warmth, and vigor, that none of the countless maypoles punctuating Germany’s medieval landscapes, or their adornments, have been handed down to us. Still, the Heggbach retable’s assimilation of the Spiritual Maypole with Christ in the Garden would have seemed perfectly natural for Bavarians celebrating May Day in Ellbach bei Tölz in the nineteenth century. The only two-sided ornament on their maypole, the depiction of Gethsemane includes a kneeling Christ praying to the angel who faces him and delivers the holy cup. It is strikingly reminiscent of the Heggbach composition, down to the unusual inclusion of a large tree behind Christ. The maypole standing in for the cross and carrying the Arma Christi throughout the nineteenth century conrms the persistence of Suso and Fridolin’s mystical allegories, which were reinforced by the German liturgical calendar’s extraordinary seasonal emphasis on the instruments of Christ’s execution. Either holdovers of medieval tradition or by-products of it, the modern examples project the maypole as a site where the sacred and profane, and human and natural, continue to confront one another. The maypole’s persistence over generations testies to its legacy as an eective mediator between all aforementioned parties and interests, chief among them the power that spring held over people, animated, as Suso and others would say, by God’s benevolent design.



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3 Grünewald’s Greenery in Spring and Summer

In the preceding chapters we have seen the layered ritual associations between the wood of the German landscape, the Wood of the Cross, and the liturgical use of objects that depict and/or are made from wood within the devotional practices of the church as they intersected with folk belief. Next, we will explore how artworks, in their meditation on the liveliness of the Wood of the Cross, assimilated the body of Christ with it. Where in the rst chapter we examined the anthropomorphizing of the cross in its canonized and local legends, in this chapter I show how artists in turn stressed the dendrology and botanicization of Christ as his body became ever more entangled with the saintly tree on which he was crucied. Indeed, on further scrutiny, the sculpted branchy crucixes from chapter 1 liken the red juices seeping from the Wood of the Cross with the salvic euvia dripping from Christ’s tortured body. Independent of the corpus hanging from them, the branchy crosses from Santa Maria im Kapitol and Lage, as green as plants, exhibit bloody signs of violence in their own right (see gs. 1.1–1.3). Adjacent to their shorn stubs, which were sheathed in gold to identify the wood’s sacred origins and to signal the resurrection, streams or patches of red paint indicate seepage resulting Crucixion, Isenheim Altarpiece, detail of gure 3.5

from trauma to the wood itself. Not to be confused with private devotional images that illustrate a cross coated in streams of blood gushing from Christ’s wounds, the sculpted crosses in Lage and Cologne possess traces of blood too distant from Christ’s body to be considered incidental splatter. Following a similar principle several generations later, the artists who sculpted the Chemnitz whipping post deliberately incorporated a piece of raw sapwood to emphasize the eshy materiality of the sacred arboreal symbol (see g. 2.23). The part of the tree containing its saps and resins, the sapwood is one of few foreign fragments appended onto what is otherwise a singular, freestanding carved tree trunk. While any red blood depicted in the monumental composition from Chemnitz is conned to Christ’s body, the salient display of the bare sapwood is a more botanically accurate signier for the kinds of arboreal scarring that promotes the ow of a tree’s lifeblood, or resin, whose medicinal attributes, as we will see, were compared to the uids coursing through Christ’s veins. Extrapolating from the rich, sacred metaphorics of Christ on the living Tree of the Cross, artists also attributed the therapeutic eects of the rest of earth’s greenery to the saints who performed good works in his

figure 3.1  Matthias Grünewald, Crucixion, Tauberbischofsheim

figure 3.2  Matthias Grünewald, Christ Carrying the Cross, Tauberbisch-

Retable (obverse), 1523–24, tempera and oil on panel. Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle

ofsheim Retable (reverse), 1523–24, tempera and oil on panel. Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle

image. They exploited wood’s semantic ability to oscillate between subject and medium in order to interweave the salvic properties of the bodies of Christ and saints with the healing properties of trees and plants. The painter Matthias Grünewald (c. 1470–1528), the artist under primary consideration in this chapter, employed this form of meta-representation on altars, where his artworks staged the liturgical enlivenment of Christ’s body and medicinal herbs. Two of his major altarpieces—only one of which pictures the cross—will take center stage. In exploring their incorporation of plant matter, we will witness how the church, through the performance of the liturgy, which centered around but branched outward from the altar table, exerted its power over the literal, real-world healing properties of plants, including wood. We will also move across the calendar, from the spring season of the cross to the late summer feasts of the Virgin, again enveloping the seasonality and use of herbs into the liturgical calendar. The paintings of Mathias Grünewald have long been

understood to be profoundly engaged with trees and plants, as even a cursory glance at his surviving corpus would indicate. His relishing in the iconic and indexical modes of representing natural matter most often manifests itself in his preoccupation with capturing the woodiness of wood, which for him (and for spiritual writers) is where its salvic properties inhere. Witness the haphazardly built crossbars in his Crucixion for the Holy Cross Church of Tauberbischofsheim, with their crudely chopped ends and partially planed surfaces left at to leave bare the wood’s bark; he also captured the pulpy, pliable texture of lumber in the roughly hacked foot block, or suppedaneum (g. 3.1).1 But his display of expertise with natural materials is not limited to the timber of the cross, for it extends to his heightened attention to the living wood of other botanical Arma Christi, such as the crown of thorns and the birches, which can be found on the reverse side of the bilateral panel that once adorned the church’s cross altar (g. 3.2). The same is true for his

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Grünewald’s Greenery in Spring and Summer

now-lost Crucixion that Christoph Krat copied around 1648 (g. 3.3). Grünewald painted it as a tree trunk shorn of its branches but still rmly rooted in the ground. The crossbar and wooden ladder appear as unrened logs. As Christ is portrayed from the back to highlight the lamentation of Mary Magdalene, his face is not seen. Barely suspended from the ground, his body in its streaky coloration parallels the surface of the adjoining tree-cross. Indeed, the extreme precision with which Grünewald represents plant materials, from the amboyant to the mundane, betrays his desire to capture not only nature’s appearance but also, as we will see, its life-giving quality, the stu of which it was made. Part of his background as a trained hydraulics engineer would have included an intimate knowledge of plants, since the fountains and wells he constructed would have been used to irrigate gardens.2 His painted works alone, several of which contain specic vegetal forms alongside their saintly prototypes, testify to his expertise. In fact, a gouache drawing attributed to him—and reminiscent of Dürer’s Large Turf watercolor— captures a homely bed of owers and herbs held together by wooden pegs, boards, and a craggy stone plinth, out of whose crevices a sturdy hollyhock has managed to nd a rm footing (g. 3.4).3 Together with the white lilies, pink lavender, and horseradish leaves, to name just a few, the crowded scene may very well represent, as Renate Kroll has proposed, a small medicinal garden laid out before a monastery wall.4 We know little of Grünewald’s life or motivations. But in the case of two important paintings, the combination of the patron’s interest with some sense of the material context of the altarpieces and their ritual use allows us to see Grünewald’s paintings against the backdrop of a larger spirituality of wood at and on the altar. This chapter returns to the language and metaphorics of the Spiritual May mystical genre to demonstrate that the devotional trope of the cross’s exuding wood served as the theological basis for the well-known Antonite altarpiece at Isenheim

above figure 3.3  Christoph Krafft, after Matthias Grünewald, The

Lamentation of the Magdalene, ca. 1648, oil on canvas. Kunzeslau, Sammlung Würth right figure 3.4  Bed of Flowers, attributed to Matthias Grünewald, gouache

on paper, 1515–20. Potsdam, Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten

Grünewald’s Greenery in Spring and Summer

91

figure 3.5  Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece, closed, 1512–16,

tempera and oil on wood. Colmar, Musée Unterlinden

sculpted by Nikolaus Haguenauer by 1493 and painted by Grünewald in 1512–15 (gs. 3.5–3.7). In the century following the profusion of carved doleful crucixes, religious writers in Germany began to conceive of the cross itself, like Christ’s body, as a living organism whose essential tissues and saps could be exploited for medicinal and other salutary purposes. In eliding the redemptive power of Christ and the divine tree, the Spiritual May topos opened itself to the possibility for additional degrees of anatomical similitude between the God-man bleeding from his veins and the scarred wood exuding resins onto its bark. Overowing and fertilizing the earth’s crust with this admixture of sacro-biological euvia, the redemptive materiality streamed outward from the tree-cross planted at the center of Paradise across earth to proer sacred potential to all of God’s verdant creative bounty. A late medieval coda to a long tradition tracing Christ’s Cross to

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Grünewald’s Greenery in Spring and Summer

the Edenic Tree, the exuding wood enriched vegetal metaphors from scripture with references to everyday interaction with trees and herbs, including the extraction of their saps for medicinal and artistic purposes. From the holiest spot on the high altar of their church, the Antonite canons at Isenheim expressed in their multimedia retable a trenchant awareness of the symbolic and material relevance

opposite top figure 3.6  Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece, rst opening,

reconstructed, 1512–16, tempera and oil on wood. Colmar, Musée Unterlinden opposite below figure 3.7  Matthias Grünewald and Nikolaus Hagenauer, Isenheim

Altarpiece, nal opening, reconstructed, 1512–16 and before 1490, tempera and oil on wood, polychrome limewood. Colmar, Musée Unterlinden

of trees and vegetation, whose viscous essences they prescribed for patients at their adjacent inrmary. Precisely how the Isenheim Altarpiece transformed according to the liturgical calendar is unknown. Its Crucixion would have been exposed in the closed position for most of the year, with its inner layers revealed for feasts—though precisely which cannot be said for certain. Regardless, its closed appearance—and its resonances with the altarpiece’s other opened states—can be considered against the broad ritual function with the inrmary and its products from the convent garden, all serving the hospital that tended the sick year-round. In Grünewald’s altarpiece for Jakob Heller in Frankfurt’s Dominican Church, however, a patron equally motivated by care for the sick and the medicinal qualities of plants commissioned an altarpiece with a ritual function, like the maypoles and processional crosses of the preceding chapters, particular to a specic time of year: the so-called Virgin Thirty, when plants came to be laid at the altar to be blessed and thus rendered sanctied. Drawing on similar intersections of a sanctioned religious tradition and folk practice, this chapter demonstrates a layer of meaning to the altarpiece that has thus far been missed and a sensitivity on the part of patron, artist, and viewers to the seasonal relationship of plants to the ritual calendar both within and beyond the walls of the church. The Exuding Wood of the Cross at Isenheim The famous outer shutters painted by Grünewald shelter a carved wooden inner shrine that predates them, by how many years remains open to interpretation. The updating of the visual ensemble in the hospital church’s choir, which spanned two abbacies, would undoubtedly have taken into account the events of the high liturgy, including the elevation of the Host as well as the exhibition of the holiest objects in the monastery’s possession: a T-cross reliquary housing the fragments of wood from the cross and of Saint Anthony’s skull.5 Inseparable and in fact emanating directly out of rituals taking place at the high altar, though, was the Antonite canons’ paraliturgical call to care for those aicted with Saint Anthony’s re in the monastery’s adjacent inrmary. Although there was a litany of therapies for the crippling illness, so named because it was their order’s expertise to treat, the primary one associated with the Antonite liturgy is the Saint Vinage, a proprietary wine-vinegar potion likely infused with herbs that was either ingested or “sprinkled” on aected areas

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Grünewald’s Greenery in Spring and Summer

of the body. According to Aymar Falco, an historian of the order writing in 1530, its ceremonial manufacture dates to the earliest days of the order’s founding. To enhance its ecacy, the relics of Saint Anthony were historically steeped in the Saint Vinage and, in the case of the chapter at Isenheim, probably also the Wood of the Cross, since, at least as of 1628, the two were ensconced in the same T-shaped cross reliquary vessel.6 What also would have invigorated the medicine with “its divine power” was the order’s timing of the concoction, according to Falco, “on the day of the Lord’s Ascension when a great multitude of pilgrims congregates, when [the holy body] is thereupon cleaned and carried in solemn procession.”7 One of the most important occasions for the Antonites, Ascension Day, as described in this book’s rst chapter, formed the heart of May’s Cross Week and was woven together with the wider Maytime panoply of cross-centered, outdoor rituals oriented around the Feast of the Cross’s Invention on May 3 that instrumentalized the Wood of the Cross to bless the natural world. As will become clear, the canons’ altarpiece at Isenheim potently drew on the metaphorics of healing wood and plants in both a literal and a representational sense, betting a hospital order of healers with a long-standing devotion to the relics of Saint Anthony and the Wood of the Cross. The Isenheim Antonites were motivated to commission a giant painting of the Crucixion; it formed the crux of their founding and ensuing mission. A miraculously vegetating cross gures prominently in the story of the founding of the Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony.8 According to tradition, the eleventh-century Lord Gaston of the Dauphiné received a vision after his son Guérin was cured of the debilitating aiction known as Saint Anthony’s re, which we now know as ergot poisoning. A long-deceased Egyptian hermit saint, Anthony appeared to Gaston and instructed him to plant a tau cross, which subsequently bore fruit that contained healing powers. The saint’s principal attribute, the Greek letter tau (τ), was thought to possess magical properties, and the Antonites, who specialized in nursing the physical and mental symptoms of Saint Anthony’s re, ascribed it with “power” (potentia) in a bull of 1297 and emblazoned their black habits with large tau crosses.9 Its obscure origins, tied both to the Hebrew “sign” (tav) that marked those spared the plague in the Old Testament (Ezek. 9:6) and its resemblance to the miraculous crutch that supported Saint Anthony in the Egyptian desert, the magic tau

figure 3.8  Christ on the Tau Cross, ca. 1500, colored woodcut. Berlin,

Kupferstichkabinett

derived its eectiveness from the holiest of all crosses, the one on which Christ was crucied.10 Gaston’s fructuating tau compelled his son and him to establish the order’s rst hospice in 1095. Much like the crosses examined in chapter 1, this cross itself spun o an imitator with miraculous properties of its own. Centuries after the order’s founding, inscribed prints beseeched their readers to meditate on an image of Christ crucied on a tau cross sprouting golden leaets to help ward o pestilence (g. 3.8). Scholars interested in linking the altarpiece to the adjacent inrmary have formally cross-listed Grünewald’s paintings with illustrations in medieval pharmacopoeia and have identied the species of plants sprouting below Anthony in the panel of his meeting with Paul the Hermit as those used to treat Saint Anthony’s re.11 What has gone unexplored in these analyses is the multiple semantic registers associated with wood and vegetation within a spiritual and devotional context—beyond the symbolic, at the intersection of a broader thematic constellation and the seasonal rituals of the church. In fact, the conception

of medicinal plant matter as variegated reinstantiations of the Wood of the Cross is the driving force of the entire altarpiece, which becomes apparent only when we look beyond individual species to spiritual attitudes toward the vegetal world, as a whole, and paraliturgical customs around trees and plants. With its entwined and recursive registers of salvic meaning between plants and the body of Christ nailed to the wooden cross, the altarpiece can be understood as illustrating, if not staging, the entire engine of healing inherent to the Antonite order—one that revolved around Anthony and the cross. Marched from the choir on Ascension Day, in keeping with the practices of the order, when the canons produced their healing Saint Vinage elixir in conjunction with the May cross feasts, Isenheim’s cross-shaped reliquary containing Saint Anthony’s body and a splinter of the cross would have been processed out into the lived environment, imbuing with their sacred healing power the earthly landscape that sprouted the very herbs the canons prescribed their patients in the inrmary. Grünewald was a natural choice for the canons at Isenheim. A prolic master painter working mainly on religious subjects, he was unmatched in his preoccupation with the Crucixion and his attentiveness to the minutiae of the cross as an apparatus. For one, his eclectic depictions of Christ’s chief torture device exemplify his knowledge, as a hydraulics engineer and trained carpenter, of numerous methods of joining pieces of timber (g. 3.9).12 In addition to his artistic commissions, Grünewald was solicited throughout Germany and Alsace for his expertise in plumbing and engineering, operating in or around such cities as Mainz and Strasbourg, where the rst herbal incunabula were printed. His familiarity with carpentry and horticulture creeps into all of his artworks, from his display of construction methods to his fastidious representation of plant species. A historical appreciation of this fact might manifest in how we have named him. It is in Joachim von Sandrart’s exhaustive art dictionary Teutsche Academie, published in 1675, where we for the rst time encounter the word “Grünewald” as a surname for the painter who in his lifetime went by Master Mathis Neidhart, also called Gothart, or “strong faith.” A sign of the artist’s posthumous reception through the contemporary, the moniker “green forest,” whether or not Sandrart himself coined it, might well have been an imaginative projection of the master’s unrivaled penchant for plants and trees.13

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figure 3.9  Matthias Grünewald, Christ on the Cross,

ca. 1520, charcoal, brush in white heightening, and ink on paper. Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle

Grünewald’s altarpiece for the Isenheim canons portrays the largest painted Crucixion in northern Europe to survive from this period and the apotheosis of a subject that appears more than any other iconography in his surviving corpus.14 In this painting, he called even greater attention to the arboreal Corpus Christi than elsewhere in his work. This fact has also been noted by scholars—beyond Christ’s tawny-green complexion, the perforations of his excoriated esh, as Andrée Hayum has noted, intimate the patterns of tree bark.15 At the same time, previous art historical explanations of Grünewald’s altarpiece have tied its gruesome innovations to other wooden objects—of violent sculpted crucixes emerging

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out of the Rhineland about 1300 (see g. 1.1). Some even suggest that the wooden sculptures themselves, at the time more than two centuries old, were points of inuence for Grünewald.16 In his volume on German sculpture, Wilhelm Pinder placed the painter at the culmination of a continuum initiated by the depiction of Christ on the branchy cross from Santa Maria im Kapitol. Its “novel realization of an interior process . . . is horrible, like a preincarnation of Grünewald, pulled apart, hunched, tattered, torn, bent, and contorted.”17 Grünewald’s entwining of the body of Christ and the Wood of the Cross, which was particularly charged in his Isenheim commission for invoking healing properties,

continues a set of wood metaphors that appear elsewhere in his work. The reverse side of his Tauberbischofsheim Altar, which he painted with a large-scale representation of Christ Carrying the Cross to Golgotha, adumbrates some of the Isenheim Crucixion’s formal eccentricities (see g. 3.2). A torturer at the top right, whose face is hidden by the cross’s lateral beam, brandishes the birches with a tightly clenched st. The sprigs splintered o into Christ’s corpse on the obverse side of the Tauberbischofsheim Retable—and to a more extreme degree at Isenheim—are therefore lingering indices of the branches having lashed his body; they are also visual reminders of the earthly stock of the instruments wielded to inict pain and make him bleed. As we will see, many spiritualized herbal texts, including those belonging to the movement of may devotion that viewed natural greenery as a mirror of Christ’s sacrice on the Cross (see chapter 2), attributed the medicinal power of plants and trees in part through their formal and performative likeness to weapons like the birches, which penetrated and inicted suering on Christ’s body. The same broad tradition, steeped in a long-established horticultural exegesis of the Song of Songs, extended the vegetal metaphors around the Wood of the Cross to Christ’s body as the life-giving fruit hanging from it. At Isenheim, the punctuated abrasions on Christ’s excoriated esh intimate the pattern of the bark that runs vertically in line with his lips and along the right edge of his tree-cross (g. 3.10). A striated, twisting, earth-toned trunk, Christ’s body culminates in a head woven in thorns and ngers at the ends of his limbs branching toward God above. Indeed, Grünewald’s exceptional choice to relentlessly accentuate Christ’s suering under the scourge by littering his entire crucied corpus with its branchy remnants also had the distinct visual eect of conating him with it, for the sharp twigs pierce into but also protrude out of him.18 Grünewald was building on an older tradition, where meditations on the arboreal qualities of the cross—and some of the Arma Christi—spilled over and were applied to the body of Christ, too. In their concentrated analogizing of the Crucixion and springtime ceremonial trees, the author and woodcut artist for the frontispiece of The Spiritual Maypole (Geistlicher Maibaum), printed in Ulm around 1482, dissolve the human into the vegetal.19 The author describes Christ’s arms as wrenched widely apart, his two holy legs woven together, and his two hands as green leaves. He takes the physical shape of a nest, in

which the reader’s soul is planted and to which many weak birds seek refuge, ying up the tree-cross to feed from its—and thus Christ’s—rose-colored redemptive fruit.20 Much of the verbal description manifests itself on the woodcut frontispiece (see g. 2.17). His outstretched arms parallel the thin branches, out of which leaves sprout where his hands are nailed. Above his crown of thorns are twigs arranged to form a nest in which a dove is perched, spreading its wings in the image of Christ. Enfolded on the trunk, Christ is where all the picture’s birds seek refuge, ensconced on the curlicued branches like nests springing from his appendages. A similar dynamic is at play in Friedrich Herlin’s Eucharistic Man of Sorrows epitaph painting from Nördlingen (g. 3.11).21 Joined with a wheat cha and vine stalk, the bleeding Christ with outstretched arms proclaims his real presence in the two species of the Eucharist, wine and host, pictured in the left foreground. The raw ingredients of the Eucharist, though, intersect in front of Christ, and while standing in for his body and blood, they also pierce through his wounds, not so subtly referencing also the cross and nails; indeed, the Arma Christi often accompany the Man of Sorrows. While Christ serves as the ground from which the eucharistic plants shoot upward, the long, attenuated limbs of his body take on their likeness, too. Oscillations between saintly and Eucharistic vegetal and Christological bodies are a commonplace of may devotion. What may devotion brings to bear on Grünewald’s paintings thus transcends simple evocations of the Wood of the Cross or even simply of wood as a material; rather, a recursive and mutually reinforcing metaphorics of the body of man and tree emerges, one that establishes that the corollary to Christ’s formal semblance to the metaphoric tree is his containment of its salvic resins and turpentines, which, like the blood of a human body, are extracted through injury to a tree’s bark. Just as the cross might exude blood, Christ might bleed resin—itself a medicinal substance. Exploited guratively as a parallel for the sacramental blood Christ shed on the cross, tree exudates such as resin and turpentine formed the basis of medieval medicine and, most important, were prescribed by the Isenheim canons to treat skin pustules and boils and soothe the burning sensations associated with Saint Anthony’s re.22 Stretching across two panels, then, Christ’s body suering on the Ur-tree at Isenheim opens up and emanates the botanical reimaginings of Christ and

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figure 3.10  Crucixion, Isenheim Altarpiece, detail of gure 3.5 showing

Christ’s face, splintered twigs, and the tree-cross

figure 3.11  Friedrich Herlin, Man of Sorrows, Epitaph for

Paul Strauß, 1469, mixed technique on panel. Nördlingen, Stadtmuseum

the cross in the subsequent unfurlings of the altarpiece’s wings, which culminate in the gilded wooden sculpture of the enthroned Anthony sitting beneath a leafy canopy (see g. 3.7).23 The theological context for Grünewald’s graphic Crucixions, beyond the Antonite Order, is generally credited to the visions of the mystic Saint Bridget of Sweden (d. 1373), editions of which were being printed out of Nuremberg as early as 1502.24 The similarities are indeed unmistakable: The crown of thorns was impressed on his head; it was pushed down rmly covering half of his forehead, and the blood, gushing forth from the prickling of thorns, ran down in many rills over his face, hair, and beard

so that it seemed like a river of blood . . . The color of death spread through his esh, and after he breathed his last human breath, his mouth gaped open so that one could see his tongue, his teeth, and the blood in his mouth. The dead body sagged. His knees then contracted bending to the side. His feet were cramped and twisted about the nails of the cross as if they were on hinges . . . The cramped ngers and arms were stretched out painfully.25

Bridget was herself indebted to older imaginings of Christ’s martyrdom such as those found in the writing of Henry Suso, whose popular vegetal imagery for Christ, as we saw have seen, paved the way for the fteenth-century wave of may devotion out of which Stephan Fridolin and

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writers working in female monastic circles emerged.26 Rather than illustrating any single text, then, Grünewald at the turn of the sixteenth century entered into a robust intertextual devotional tradition around a shared set of metaphors—in this case, those pertaining to the healing properties of plants. For instance, in his version of the Spiritual May, Fridolin imbued his allegorical language with the kind of encyclopedic pharmacological knowledge that was being compiled and printed in Mainz at the very same moment in the fteenth century.27 Though exemplary of proto-empirical scientic inquiry, herbal incunabula were largely an admixture of ancient authorities and local folklore, much of which, as we will see in the discussion of Grünewald’s Heller Altarpiece, linked plants and faith.28 For devotional and scientic writers, there was no dividing line between the medicinal and religious; there was no healing that was not the will of God, and so to the degree that plants were medicinal, it was a reection of God’s choice, his gift to man, like his son’s body. Fridolin’s treatise, and others from the same family, thus testify to a popular spirituality that took the burgeoning interest in codifying medicinal plants and mapped it onto the architecture of the Crucixion, extending its plant-based salvic metaphors to the body of the supplicant, and not just the spirit. To take a couple of examples, the commonplace of Christ’s heart as a house in which nuns peacefully cohabitated with him was reconceived as a pharmacy, reached through his side wound, lled with medicaments for a litany of ailments to the soul and esh.29 Elsewhere, building and elaborating on an ancient tradition, Fridolin casts Christ as a doctor (Arzt) who prescribes his restorative blood, plumbed through his veins, as part of a medicinal bath infused with herbs.30 The texts form a spectacularly late medieval, empathy-driven and Passion-centric application of the “doctrine of signatures” that undergirded medieval herbalism, whereby God in his design of their appearance disclosed to man the proper use of plants.31 The same texts that allegorized such springtime May rituals as the maypole oered up the descriptions of the medicinal properties of wood—derived from the cross— and expanded outward to a broader range of herbs and owers. As part of Fridolin’s week of prayers dedicated to healing plants, for which he certainly consulted a medical text, he assigned herbs metaphoric roles in Christ’s Passion based on their formal resemblance to narrative gures and the parts of the body that herbal books prescribed them to

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treat. The crown of thorns thus suited Fridolin’s chapter on migraines, which he interpreted as the physical manifestation of the sin of pride, or bullheadedness.32 With his crowning, Fridolin commented, “Christ shows with his works the medicinal herbs that you need when your sickness of leprous pride is so great and incurable.”33 He then launched into extended comparisons between the thorns used to draw the blood from Christ’s head and the specic plant species, like the “prickly” thistle and Prunella, whose saps herbal books such as the Gart der Gesundheit had prescribed to alleviate headache.34 Fridolin also sanctied numerous plants’ therapies against a host of maladies, including gout, dropsy, and consumption, for their resemblance to Christ’s tormented body. To take just one example, in his prayer dedicated to Christ’s agellation on the column, he wrote, “In the variegated wrinkles of the sage leaf, consider the multiplicity of Christ’s wounds, on which his holy blood has hardened and toughened, what with his wounds having been torn up too often anew.”35 Later in the same prayer, Fridolin scripturally vouchsafes his juxtaposition of Christological and vegetal-arboreal bodies and leans into the botanical valence of Isaiah 53 on the Man of Sorrows, in which the prophet compared the forsaken Lord to an unassuming “rod” (virga) sprouting from the dry ground—the same Isaiah chapter from which Grünewald inscribed his Tauberbischofsheim painting of Christ struck by the birches.36 For these authors, who liken the uids and even the circulatory system of Christ to his vegetal stand-ins, the resemblance between Christ and the earthly symbols is indeed physical and material. But among the plant medicinal metaphors none was more potent than that of Christ on the cross, where his very blood is twinned with the vital liquids that are exuded by the Tree of the Cross. The cross, and all its botanical instantiations, are a double for Christ’s body; now, however, we see that the doubling extends to the process of bleeding and secreting, a more structurally and anatomically sophisticated extension of the doctrine of signatures. Drawn from the ruptured circulatory system of trees, the blood of Christ ows out into the world as the healing agent of earthly matter, by analogy, in the form of oleoresins and saps—both of which constituted the two classes of drugs, gums and oils, prescribed at Isenheim and for which the expert physician Hans von Gersdor, author of Fieldbook of Wound Medicine (Feldtbuch der Wundartzney), published in Strasbourg in 1517, most often referred his readers to visit apothecaries.37 Like

figure 3.12  Tapping Turpentine, Livre des simple

médecines, French, 15th century, painting on vellum. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS fr. 12319, fol. 312r

the blood pumped though the veins of a human body, the nutrient-lled sap is channeled from the tree’s roots to its branches and leaves via the tree’s primary circulatory system, along the outermost rings of its trunk.38 When trees’ surfaces are injured, deposits of fats and resins in their veins rupture, and their extracellular contents exude onto the bark, hardening into a vitreous mass on evaporation.39 Although the word “turpentine” originates with the proper Mediterranean terebinth tree, it was used in the Middle Ages more broadly to refer to the resins of European conifers. Its extraction from trees was commonplace in Europe; the procedure is particularly well illustrated throughout the Middle Ages within a rich tradition of northern European medical treatises that date back to the twelfth century and were inspired by the ancient Materia medica of Dioscorides.40 A standard reference book, the Book of Simple Medicines (Livre des simples médecines),

survives in a great number of extant copies.41 Under the entry for turpentine, they all include a miniature of entire trees, from root to leaf, accompanied by standing farmers who ladle the tree’s exuding resins into barrels that they either carry or rest on the ground (g. 3.12).42 Just as these herbal books illustrate extrusion and the Spiritual May texts describe it in words, so Grünewald depicted Christ’s body on the cross at Isenheim as drained and wrung out of its resinous blood. Like the resin of an exuding tree, the blood never spurts into the air but rather trickles down Christ’s skin. Red secretions dribble from the cuts in his forehead across his chin, while a wide cinnabar stream percolates out of his side wound and over the folds of his contorted torso. The focal point of Christ’s oozing blood, however, is the foot of the cross (g. 3.13). The author of the Spiritual Maypole meditated at length over the nail boring through Christ’s feet; likewise, the inscription above the giant

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figure 3.13  Crucixion, Isenheim Altarpiece, detail of gure 3.5

showing Christ’s feet and fresh versus resinous blood

nail formed on the devotional woodcut of the vegetating tau cross pointedly mentions its “length and shape” (see g. 3.8).43 By placing Christ’s feet at a remove from the suppedaneum meant to support them, Grünewald cleverly illustrates the nail’s simultaneous injury to Christ and the Tree of the Cross. Gathered into droplets under his soles and at the ends of his toes, the blood also collects around the nail’s thread and appears to ow independently from the puncture in the wood.44 Separating into two streams, the blood that hangs in suspended animation becomes an index of temporality. Pooled from streams down his entire body, it now exists in two tones: fresh vermilion and congealed lake.45

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Grünewald’s Greenery in Spring and Summer

In addition to two tones of color, Grünewald dier­ entiated the coagulated blood with an impasto application of the darker pigment, which appears as bas-relief globules on the otherwise smooth panel. To build up such a thick, pasty glaze, he increased the ratio of medium to pigment—likely with unusually high proportions of undistilled tree resin in his paint mixture—which would have rendered the original texture and appearance of the congealed blood as more vitreous and translucent than is visible today.46 We know that artists purchased many of their supplies from apothecaries, where resins were readily available for craftsmen and physicians alike.47 With his paintbrush, then, Grünewald blended metaphor and

practice, for the blood and resin fuse substantially and representationally at the point of contact between the body of Christ and the Wood of the Cross.48 Antonite canons took an oath to treat patients exhibiting the markers of Saint Anthony’s re, so they would have known how to handle resin. Since antiquity, turpentine had been used as an analgesic and adhesive plaster for skin abrasions.49 Surgical texts from the spectrum of Latin-based medical centers across Europe, including those from the Italian- and Frenchtrained Henri de Mondeville and Guy de Chauliac of the fourteenth century, are in total agreement about the role of tree exudates in the treatment of wounds.50 Produced nearby and at the time of the Isenheim Altarpiece’s commission, the German vernacular writings of Hieronymus Brunschwig (ca. 1450–ca. 1512) from Strasbourg are representative of the handwritten texts of preceding generations. Known mostly for his research on the art of distillation, Brunschwig published his Book on Surgery in Strasbourg in 1497 with the subtitle Handiwork of Wound Pharmacopoeia (Das ist das Buch der Cirurgia: Hantwirckung der Wund Artzny), which encapsulates his interventional approach to repairing injuries to the human body.51 In his seventh volume on medicinal simples, Brunschwig instructed his readers on the making of topical emollients and salves. As the chapter’s woodcut frontispiece illustrates, pharmacists simmered and stirred the ingredients over a hearthstone (g. 3.14); a shelf carries asks for their elixirs, which are reminiscent of the Magdalene’s jar in the Crucixion panel at Isenheim. Known also by the Latin term diachylon (or “through extraction”), Brunschwig’s wound plasters comprised several dierent plant juices and, in most cases, exudates of local trees, such as r and spruce.52 Indeed, resin’s value in the eld of medicine was commonplace knowledge across Europe throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period.53 The physician Hans von Gersdor, who conducted hundreds of successful amputations at the Antonite hospital in Strasbourg, also prescribed a mixture of wax and turpentine in his Fieldbook.54 At Isenheim, a surviving employment contract for a wound surgeon hired in 1708 stipulates that he manufacture the Saint Anthony salve by collecting local herbs and adding them to it.55 This knowledge of the medicinal uses of resin was overlaid with Christian symbolism that paired the bleeding tree with the bleeding Christ. Collapsing the gap

figure 3.14  “On the Manufacturing of Plasters,” title page

to chapter 3, volume 7, in Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Dis ist das Buch der Cirurgia, 1498, woodcut, printed in Augsburg

between sacred history and metaphor, both the anonymous author of the Spiritual Maypole and Fridolin attribute the fecundity of nature to the generative force of Christ’s and the Spiritual May’s vital liquids and inner saps, which soak into and fertilize the earth. Fridolin details the “eusion” and “wringing out” of Christ’s blood-sweat “ooding out onto and thus dampening the ground.” 56 To a more pictorial degree, the Spiritual Maypole extrapolates an arboreal register of redemptive physical trauma from that born of Christ’s body, whose eyes are cried of all its tears, legs drained of their marrow, head of its brain, veins of their blood, and heart of its zest (wurcze).57 This May-wood had its owers, leaves, and moisture torn and owed with such large rivers and streams of its rose-colored blood, that it became completely dried out, drained, and withered; and the more defunctive, deathly, and ghastly it became, the more graceful, loveable, and more miraculous it was to the soil of the earth, in which it is steady and rooted, as it departed, in all of its fruit and his moisture, strength, and perfection. The earth’s ground is the beautiful heart, which is ever mourned and amazed at for the great, unspeakable sweetness of the overowing love and mercy that has undeservedly owed into it; [the heart] melts and

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reows through the yearning and great compassion of its soul, through which it then inspires blossoming and brings forth fruit on the delicate daintiness of the May-wood, the strength of [the heart and the soul] it then absorbed into itself in its sap [saft], and thus are born and grow the most delicious, strongest fruits out of this earth.58

To the same eect, in Grünewald’s Tauberbischof­sheim Crucixion the blood dribbling down the Wood of the Cross amasses in a large red pool in the painting’s foreground.59 Emanating from the red primordial sludge, a green layer of grass carpets the hills receding into the dark horizon. Grünewald’s use of color also reects the elaborate arboreal metaphors for Christ that were circulating at this time. Propped up over the composition’s center, the Isenheim Christ, saliently painted in earth tones, stands apart from the brightly draped gures anking him (see g. 3.5). A sign of his premature decay on the cross, his tawny-green complexion also harmonizes with the mossy escarpment and the muddy riverbed of the landscape behind him. From a distance, yellows dominate, but on closer scrutiny at Isenheim, blues appear as the bruising around the numerous raw abrasions to his skin, as well as in his eye sockets and especially the famously livid mouth. A sign of his loss of circulation, the dark blue lips and eyes recall those aicted with Anthony’s re, whose ravaged, gangrenous limbs “blackened like charcoal.”60 The lips and eyes also hearken back to what spiritual writers described as the black conglutination of blood, sweat, and tears concentrated on the face of Christ at his Passion. Fridolin, in his Spiritual May, argued for the medicinal value of pitch, a form of dark resin (hence the phrase “pitch black”) seeping from coniferous trees or crevices in the ground, as in asphalt tar. Fridolin wove arboreal pitch into his horticultural portrayal of the Crucixion; pitch heals the most incurable of diseases because of its comparability to Christ’s precious blood, but it is also by its very nature an earthly material that derives from trees.61 Likewise, the Spiritual Maypole revels in the blood’s dark color and textural properties, which come to resemble pitch resin. Its semiliquidity mirrors the sweat, tears, bone marrow, and coagulated blood “pitchied” (gepachen) with the Jewish spittle and dust owing around Christ’s mouth.62 “To pitchify” (pichen, verpichen, or pechen), according to the Grimm brothers’ dictionary, can be

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used transitively to designate the smearing of something with mineral or pine resin or intransitively to describe something that hardens with time, as pitch does. The author of the Spiritual Maypole employs the intransitive (hence the irregular past participle form) to evoke via the mixture of earthly and divine viscosities on Christ’s battered face the ossication of resin having oozed out onto tree bark. Moreover, associated with Jews ( Judenpech) because the best variety was thought to have come from the Dead Sea, mineral pitch—which in the Middle Ages was thought to have ultimately derived from tree resin— was also collected locally throughout northern Europe.63 In fact, pitch was a strong symbol of Alsatian identity in the Middle Ages. The Abbey of Lampertsloch, located in the same region as Isenheim’s hospital, bestowed on its pilgrims samples of this liquid earth.64 In addition to its common application to skin blisters and boils, pitch was prescribed in the Gart der Gesundheit to alleviate dental discomfort, which calls to mind Christ’s blackened mouth. But Christ’s saliently dark lips at Isenheim speak to the altarpiece’s local premise of the medicinal redemption from Saint Anthony’s re that was assured in Christ’s death on the Wood of the Cross. While the oldest surviving recipe for the Isenheim chapter’s Anthoniensalbe dates from May 1662 (perhaps manufactured on Ascension Day in May, the same day as the Saint Vinage), its primary ingredients are consistent with numerous topical balsams predating Grünewald’s painted panels: “2 pounds of pitch resin and a quarter of turpentine.”65 Moreover, in this lower register, in the beholder’s direct view, Grünewald most audaciously asserted the sacrality of the tree-Christ’s exudations in his compositional equation of three holy humors: blood, wine, and balsam (see g. 3.5). Parallel to the blood dripping from the Cross’s chunky suppedaneum, the blood that pours into the wine chalice originates curiously from the chest of John the Baptist’s lamb as well as the long stem of the stick-cross it carries. The unusual, ahistorical insertion of John the Baptist into the Crucixion is also indicative of Grünewald’s, and Isenheim’s, attentiveness to the temporal seasonality of rituals, to the correspondence of the earthly and liturgical calendars. John dramatically points to the crucied Christ, uttering his words from scripture, “He must increase, but I must decrease / illum oportet crescere me autem minui” (John 3:30). With his unmistakable deictic gesture, John indexes Christ and himself not as gures in a narrative but as pivot points in

figure 3.15  Lamentation, Isenheim

Altarpiece, detail of gure 3.5 showing Christ’s feet and coagulated blood

the spectators’ lived experiences, the markers of waxing and waning light between the shortest and longest days of the year, the winter and summer solstices, the birthdays of Christ and John, the Messiah and the nal prophet to announce his coming, on whose midsummer feast day (June 25) his numerous eponymous plants (such as Saint John’s wort and currants) bloomed and were plucked and honored.66 Closing the formal triangle with the wine chalice on the other side of Christ’s feet, Mary Magdalene’s balsam jar, which she brought to anoint Christ’s dead body (Mark 16:1), would have been assumed to contain the same kind of aromatic tree resins that were allegorized as his divine blood. Derived from the story of a nameless prostitute who came to Jesus with an alabaster jar of perfume in the house of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:37), the Magdalene’s painted ceramic pot in the Isenheim Crucixion resembles the medical asks found in contemporary depictions of working pharmacists (see g. 3.14). Indeed, her association with curative balms persisted beyond the Gospel accounts of Christ’s death. Legend maintains that after her ight to France and missionary work in Marseille, she retired to the massif of Provence in a hilltop grotto, which, by the twelfth century, came to be known as SainteBaume (Holy Balm).67 Widely circulated medical recipes like the “Balsam of Marseille” were printed in southern Germany at the time and dedicated to Mary Magdalene; it lists the essential volatile oil of a lavender bush as its active ingredient.68 True balsam, like Mecca myrrh or balm of Gilead, which are mentioned throughout scripture, came from the Commiphora opobalsamum shrubs of the Middle East and would have been rare in medieval

Europe.69 Instead, the words “balm” or “balsam” would have been used to describe the viscous secretions from a variety of local plants, most notably turpentine from conifer trees.70 The unusual placement of the balsam, usually carried by the Magdalene or Nicodemus, at the foot of the Crucixion at Isenheim, endows it with Christological signicance. For the Antonite canons at Isenheim, who were tasked with nursing those aicted with Saint Anthony’s re and other ailments, the order’s eponymous balsam of pitch resin and turpentine manifested spiritual treatment in physical form. The symbolic and practical pertinence of resins in their hardened state is also the subtext for Grünewald’s Lamentation in the predella of the altarpiece, in which Christ’s loyal retinue mourns over his lifeless body after it has been deposed from the cross (see g. 3.4).71 Betting a section of the altarpiece that Germans call its con (Sarg), Grünewald’s painting of the recumbent Christ continues the Passion narrative and, situated below the gummy blood of the Crucixion trickling downward, exemplies another principal use of tree exudates: to retard and mask the odor of putrefaction.72 In fact, turpentine had been recommended for generations by surgeons like Mondeville as an important means of hampering decomposition.73 Purged of any foreign bodies that had ravaged his skin, which has greened further since the Crucixion, Christ displays in his open gashes the dark cerise blood in sculpted paint, whose coagulation the various versions of the Spiritual May compared with the specic thickening tendency of resin, pitch, and wax (g. 3.15). The brittling tendency that Brunschwig describes as resin’s ideal property to generate a second skin, or incarnative,

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is here manifested in the scabbing of the dark red paint on Christ’s lesions.74 The smearing of plant saps was the ultimate assurance that one’s mortal remains were properly tended to before burial, at once a practical solution to bodily decay and anointment with the botanical blood symbolically owing from Christ’s wounds.75 Bathing in the Medicinal Marian Garden We do not know for which specic feasts the canons opened the altarpiece’s rst set of shutters, though it was on those occasions that the oozing body of Christ gave way to its opposite—the resurrected body, fully rehabilitated. While the Crucixion leaves our view, the associations of wood and plants with healing do not. Following his Incarnation at the Annunciation and infancy, Christ’s Resurrection vividly reestablishes the integrity of his form subsequent to its fragmentation and mutilation at the Crucixion (g. 3.16). Although his gure is physically circumscribed, the ethereal Christ has transcended his battered skin, which, as the predella’s still-visible Lamentation reminds us, had been smeared with resins and wrapped in a fragrant cerecloth. Here, the cloth dramatically falls away, no longer of use, since his resurrected body was properly tended to in death. Christ’s unblemished skin in the afterlife oered a poignant postmortem inspiration to those at Isenheim treating and aicted with dermatological disorders. A freshly sawed tree trunk pointing toward the resurrected Christ from the bottom of the composition also reminds the viewer of the symbolic and physical source enabling his extraterrestrial transformation. To the left of the Resurrection, a dierent fragmentary tree peeks from behind a curtain hanging in the middle of the central image of Mary and the Infant Christ serenaded by a choir of angels (g. 3.17 and see g. 3.6). Its trunk bulged toward the holy pair, the g ttingly occupies the privileged position of the now obscured tree-cross that it typologically pregures.76 The healthy, leafy tree extends its branches across a cruciform gate, further accentuating the charged nature of the altarpiece’s central axis but also reverberating beyond and outward to the enclosed garden (Hortus conclusus) that stands for Mary’s virginity.77 According to Fridolin, the “noble wood of Christ” could come to fruition only insofar as he was planted in the fertile eld of Mary’s womb.78 Mary was the garden, “the ower of the eld,” to the Christological tree. She was considered a healing mediatrix owing to her associations

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with the healing powers of herbs.79 To license his horticultural exegesis—and underscore Mary’s virginity—he cites Song of Songs 2:1–2: “I am the ower of the eld, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.” As the allegory’s terra rma (Erdreich), the Virgin’s fertile body participates in and facilitates the sprouting of the divine tree from which all created greenery radiates.80 Witnessed by his angels, God’s cosmogonic plan comes into full bloom with Christ’s Crucixion on the living wood implanted with sacred roots. More than just its roots, Mary came to be overlaid with the cross itself. Addressed in chapter 1 of this book, a family of pictures of the Tree of the Virgin (Arbor virginis) concretize the arboreal metaphors of her immaculate stock and scion, but they also incorporate Mary structurally into the history and materiality of the Tree of the Cross (see gs. 1.23–25, 1.28, and 1.29). Among countless examples, a wooden Marian image and the oak tree where it miraculously appeared in 1454 formed the center of a thriving pilgrimage to the Antonine Order’s Church of Our Lady in the Saxon town of Eicha. There, for the Antonine canons and pilgrims, Mary’s body as the trunk from which Christ bloomed was seen to govern the tempo of the seasons and to restore their natural ow when they were disrupted. As early as 1483, priests from all the surrounding villages—some traveling “up to six or seven miles”—led processions on the Feast of John the Baptist (midsummer) to pay homage to Our Lady of the Oak [Eicha] to avert a bad harvest that was expected due to draught.81 There was thus precedent within the Antonine Order to enfold Mary’s body into real trees that evoked the cross and to involve arboreal ritual objects into processions that were coordinated with the calendar—the longest day of the year, in fact, and one referenced in Isenheim’s Crucixion. In Grünewald’s Marian picture for Isenheim, the multiple recursive references to the Wood of the Cross and healing plants and woods are not only allusive but material and qualitative. In this idyllic garden scene, the tattered rags swaddling the baby are another reminder of Christ’s impending fate on the cross. They also proleptically link his infancy with the Resurrection to the right.82 Not quite a Nativity scene, the central composition, marked by the golden crown being carried down to earth by an army of angels sent from God the Father in heaven, foreshadows Mary’s Coronation—one that evokes the mystical marriage

figure 3.16  Resurrection of Christ, Isenheim

Altarpiece, detail of gure 3.6

between Christ and his mother, the Sponsa Christi.83 Following a long tradition of expressing love of God with the erotic language of the Song of Songs, Grünewald engaged with the same horticultural variety of Solomonic bridal mysticism that functioned as the subtext for all of the Spiritual May exegeses (see g. 0.14).84 For here, as in the cases of the g tree and the gate, the wooden cradle next to which the Virgin sits is drawn from the owering nuptial bed of the Song of Songs 1:16. The cradle’s posts, with their curlicue ends, are reminiscent of those found

in cycles of Saint Elizabeth healing the inrm.85 The Dominican preacher Johannes Kreutzer (d. 1468), who left behind an ambitious but unnished exposition on the Song of Songs, cites the same verse in his edition of the Spiritual May from the mid-fteenth century.86 In his treatise, which he wrote in Alsace, he bids his Observant nuns to sleep on “the soft and tender bed bedecked in owers” to achieve mystical union with their bridegroom.87 Fridolin, by contrast, more explicitly compares the “hard sickbed” to Christ’s cross.88

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figure 3.17  Madonna and Child and Angels’ Concert, Isenheim

Altarpiece, detail of gure 3.6

The Isenheim panel is joined together with a concert of angels performing under an ornate baldachin. Embellished with the kinds of organic motifs that were becoming fashionable in south German church architecture around 1500 and that, together with sculpted prophets in its spandrels, typographically invoked the Old Testament, the structure draws on a broadly shared constellation of devotional metaphors related to the Old Testament’s Song of Songs and the healing rituals that treated body and soul at once.89 A salient example of metaphorical, Solomonic healing architecture can be found in the built environment laid out in Kreutzer’s Spiritual May.90 Carved not in inert stone but in bright and lively earthen matter, it resembles the “beautiful and resplendent palace” of cedar and cypress—an allusion to Song of Songs 1:17 and two of the four arboreal species comprising Christ’s cross—built for Kreutzer’s nuns in their spiritual garden.91 Extrapolated from the Solomonic bedchamber, wine cellar, banquet house, and storeroom, Kreutzer’s mystical wooden edice shelters

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the soul and functions quite like a medieval monastery.92 It housed “a pantry, herb garden, and pharmacy,” which contained more than fty specic “spices, potions, ointments, aromatics, oils, and confections” for the use of nuns in their medical practices.93 In a subsequent chapter, Kreutzer’s nuns are also aurally nourished by the sweet, reverberating sounds of string music (Saitenspiel), whose therapeutic eects he attributes to the instrument’s functional likeness to Christ’s body strung about the wooden cross. “The harp signies Jesus the sponsus, who was nailed and stretched on the Wood of the Cross. The wood [of the harp] represents the cross, the pegs [Nagel] the weapons, with which he was crucied. The strings are his holy appendages and veins pulled apart and made taut over the cross. The music and the harp player [are] the devout soul.”94 Drawing their golden bows in the open air and beneath the leafy Solomonic canopy, the Isenheim angels thus serenade the holy pair with the sweet melodies of the Wood

of the Cross. In a pen-and-ink drawing from a manuscript copy of Fridolin’s Spiritual May, which belonged to a nun of the Franciscan convent in Pütrich, we are re­minded that the healing capacity of string instrumentation is rooted in spiritualized nature (g. 3.18). Resounding from the earth, the music generated by the Infant Christ ngering a harp from a depression in the ground stimulates the sprouting of nature and its attendant medicinal fruits. The image’s caption reads, “I, Jesus, want to play the harp well and sweetly for you, that you might fend o fever.”95 Moreover, the wooden bathtub in the foreground of Isenheim’s Marian picture also belongs to the standard repertoire of springtime rituals that Fridolin and Kreutzer allegorized (see g. 3.17). Together with the cradle and chamber pot, it alludes to the notion that Christ was born, and remained during his life on earth, entirely human. Stretching across the two central panels, the tub also formally and programmatically participates in the devotional trope of spiritualized medicinal bathing, which while originating in the monastic sphere found readership among the literate public because bathing itself was a beloved pastime throughout the Middle Ages.96 Though outdoor, heated herbal baths were popular year-round, the public was particularly enthusiastic about indulging in them in May and spring not only because of the herbs’ and water’s freshness following the frigid winter but also because, as one exemplary historical account in the Basel area makes clear, “superstitions” compelled them to bathe on May Day, Ascension Day, and Saint John’s Day, as alluded to above.97 Documentary proof is lacking, but the bathtub’s pride of place on Isenheim’s altarpiece suggests that bathing indeed formed part of the patients’ therapeutic regiment and that its eects, too, were woven into the springtime, cross-centered liturgical calendar, so fundamental was it to the Antonite Order and the devotional genre of spiritual bathing.98 Grown in the fecund ground of the Virgin’s womb and fortied by the uids from Christ’s body drained on the tree-cross, the copious herbs, which Fridolin and Kreutzer beseech their readers to steep in their heated may-baths, will help heal their readers’ physical ailments as they “entirely sweat out from themselves their wicked desires, corporeal lusts, and evil yearnings.”99 Introducing Fridolin’s week of prayers on the subject in the Pütrich manuscript, a drawing shows Christ outdoors in the mystical wooden tub, which, with its two protruding handles, appears strikingly similar to that found in the Isenheim composition (g. 3.19).100

figure 3.18  Christ Playing the Cross-Harp, Stephan Fridolin’s

Der geistliche Mai, pen drawing on parchment, 1529. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 4473, fol. 217r

figure 3.19  The Infant Christ Bathing, Stephan Fridolin’s Der

geistliche Mai, pen drawing on paper, 1529. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 4473, fol. 206r

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figure 3.20  Michael

Wolgemut, detail of May Bath and Dance, May Calendar Page, Conrad Celtis’s Quatuor libri amorum, woodcut, 1502, printed in Nuremburg

Accompanied by an angel, the Infant Christ eats from a lateral plank, carries a ladle, and drinks from a Krautstrunk goblet with its distinctive decorative prunts—all conforming to contemporary accounts of may-bathing like that found in a woodcut attributed to Michael Wolgemut from Conrad Celtis’s Quatuor libri amorum, printed in Nuremberg in 1502 (g. 3.20). Situating his bathers—a romantic scene of a man beguiling a woman with a harp—beside circle dancers donning oral chaplets, Wolgemut pictures the same profane Maytime customs which Fridolin, the Pütrich nun-artist, and Grünewald spiritually allegorize to channel the healing power of plants and vegetation into the spheres of the cross liturgy and Solomonic bridal mysticism. During the years Grünewald painted his panels for Isenheim, the Franciscan Thomas Murner published in the nearby Alsatian city of Strasbourg A Devout, Spiritual Bathing Tour (1514), an illustrated poem of rhyming vernacular couplets intended for general audiences.101 Spurred on by the author’s own healing experience May-bathing after a harrowing winter u, the text stages an expansive array of bathing and sauna therapies—positioning Christ as the bathing master and Murner as the patient—as an allegory for repentance and redemption.102 He dedicates a chapter to the popular outdoor medicinal baths that Fridolin and Kreutzer recount, the kind that the canons at Isenheim reference on their altarpiece. In its frontispiece, Murner sits half submerged in his tub amid a lush garden, from which the herbs stued in a basket in the picture’s foreground presumably have been plucked (g. 3.21). With a pair of tongs, the plants and owers are tossed into a

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Grünewald’s Greenery in Spring and Summer

cauldron suspended from a canopy and elevated on a platform, stewing over a re to condense the “power” of the “herbs’ saps” mentioned in the caption above. The medicinal concoction is then introduced to the bather, soothing their skin and pores but also penetrating their circulatory systems through the inhalation of their vapors. Not unlike Isenheim’s central Marian image, the picture is split into a semienclosed and an open-air space, with the plants and water of Murner’s spiritual bath juxtaposed with the trees and fountain of Paradise behind him (see chapter 1 for Grünewald’s painting of Mary in the cistern of a fountain for his Aschaenburg variant of the Isenheim composition). According to the chapter’s text, of the four biblical Trees of Paradise, which typologically infuse all herbs with their medicinal “power,” Murner waxes most lyrically about the Tree of Life, whose “wood was taken with Adam to his grave,” the one that crosses into the inhabited world to become the wood of Christ’s cross.103 The same year Murner published his devotional bathing lyric, the Benedictine monks of the Swabian town of Blaubeuren brought nature indoors, covering the walls of their bathhouse with dense thickets to reenact spiritualized wild bathing all year round (g. 3.22).104 Between the branches and leaves, a veritable menagerie of wild animals sustains the illusion of the forest scene just as they perform Christological allegories ascribed to them. In one of the vignettes, the stag, which appears throughout Kreutzer’s chapter on spiritual bathing, becomes the prey of a pack of hunting dogs.105 Symbolizing one’s vanquishment over sin, the stag, a very common metaphor for Christ taken up by

right figure 3.21  The May Bath, Thomas Murner’s Devout, Spiritual Bathing

Tour, woodcut, 1514, printed in Strasbourg below figure 3.22  Blaubeuren, Benedictine Monastery Bathhouse, wall

paintings of the forest hunt, ca. 1510–20

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Johannes Tauler, liberates itself by smashing its canine predator against a tree—a thinly veiled reference to the triumphant power of the Tree of the Cross (“bǒm des crútzes”).106 Apart from guring as subjects of the devotional prayers, though, daily activities such as tending the herb garden, stocking the apothecary, composing music, and bathing constituted typical monastic obligations. While the pastiche of healing imagery from the Spiritual May would have appealed to sick patients receiving variations of these treatments, the privileged placement of related motifs on the Isenheim Chapter’s high altar—and its visibility restricted to special feast days when the rst set of wings opened—indicates that the Antonite canons considered these medical duties an integral part of the spiritual exercises that elevated them closer to God. The bathing tub, placed in the foreground spanning both central panels, can thus be seen, like the plants in the altarpiece’s various scenes and the Crucixion, as at the intersection between the canons’ daily practice of healing (itself a salvic act) and the cluster of devotional metaphors that brought plant materials into the realm of the divine. Saint Anthony and the Carved Wooden Shrine Attributed to the Strasbourg artist Nikolaus Haguenauer before 1493, the shrine is one of the earliest instances of the vegetative kind of sculpted wooden cabinets that were beginning to furnish countless altar mensas across southern Germany (see g. 3.7).107 Tiny buds and acorns alongside pronounced grape bunches not only signify the Eucharistic wine but also stood for Christ on the Cross and the Saint Vinage healing potion (g. 3.23).108 The nely wrought branches and tendrils of Haguenauer’s canopy, swarming with sopping, writhing leaves, also call attention to the very wooden medium in which they were carved. They therefore possess more than an iconic kinship with their referent. They were and are trees—the materiae medicae that were integral to therapeutic practice at Isenheim precisely for their tangible and elemental composition: their sap, balsam, and juices, which Antonites emulsied and fermented for various therapies, including the Saint Vinage wine-vinegar medicament, which, in following their order’s customs, the Isenheim canons would have infused with the relics of Saint Anthony and processed on Ascension Day amid the other cross feasts in May.109 Anthony’s ability to cure, though, is oset by his control over who falls ill in the rst place—hence, his

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figure 3.23  Nikolaus Hagenauer, carved shrine from the Isenheim

Altarpiece, detail of gure 3.7 showing buds, acorns, and grape bunches. Colmar, Musée Unterlinden

ubiquitous representation as an enthroned judge.110 Following a juridical iconography commonly found on seals, the Isenheim variation underscores the order’s heritage in herbal healing. Just as Grünewald paints Anthony’s modest throne as branches tethered together over a stone seat, beneath which the holy plants grow, the carved throne of the frontal Anthony in the altarpiece’s shrine is arboreal in constitution, springing o foliated spirals on its four corners. In this most sublime view, the altarpiece dedicates itself to the Antonite Order’s patron saint as well as two of the chapter’s preceptors, Jean d’Orliac and Guido Guersi, who commissioned the sculpted shrine by 1490 and its painted shutters by 1512.111 Demons incinerate a timber structure in the background while hybrid monsters beat Anthony with branchlike clubs. The anthropomorphic demon in the foreground of Anthony’s Temptation, with its gangrened skin covered in boils and its limbs partially deformed, exhibits symptoms of Saint Anthony’s re. Fastened to a cracked and fungus-covered version of the

figure 3.24  Isenheim Altarpiece, detail of gure 3.7,

the wellspring in Saint Anthony’s Meeting with Saint Paul

sawed-down tree trunk (which corresponds to that in the Resurrection panel), a piece of paper recounts Anthony’s struggle according to the Golden Legend, which echo Christ’s own words at the Crucixion. “Where were you good Jesus, where were you? Why were you not there to heal my wounds?”112 In its overlapping resonance with hospital patients and Christ on the cross, the statement, which is closest to eye level for the viewer here, is a highly unusual acknowledgment of the psychological suering felt at Isenheim and a tragically poignant reminder that Grünewald’s altarpiece, oriented around the monumental image of Christ’s Passion on the Cross, aimed to heal regular people plagued by pain and suering. Its compositional mirror on the lower left side of the left panel alludes to the ways Christ and the canons indeed

healed the aicted. Grünewald portrays Anthony and Paul the Hermit seated amid teeming ora and fauna in a Theban oasis. A date palm fans its fronds above Paul, and a gnarly tree covered in stringy moss and lichen is rooted behind Anthony. Beneath the rock on which he sits sprouts a tuft of plants, not unlike the way they slip into the world from the cracks in so many of Grünewald’s pictures; in this case, there grows a number of specic species recommended in contemporary herbals to treat Saint Anthony’s re.113 But those and the other herbs in the painting’s foreground sustain life only by means of the wellspring beneath Paul that inundates the soil with water (g. 3.24). A crudely chopped tree branch with decayed heartwood directs the ow into a makeshift basin made up of haphazardly raised stone slabs. Its humble

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construction mirroring that of Grünewald’s reections on the Wood of the Cross, the wooden plumbing, in fact, constitutes yet another representation of the exuding Wood of the Cross—this time channeling its creative potential and nourishing waters to the mystical herb garden (for more on aquatic themes and the Wood of the Cross, see chapter 1). In his passage on the ve lovely owing fountains, Kreutzer calls the fourth “the little Jesus fountain, named after our savior and redeemer, the holiest of mankind. And the fountain . . . springs forth from the trunk of the cross; and it possesses ve large pipes, which carry out the red juice” mixed with the water and sweat of Christ.114 The two saints, Paul and Anthony, thus gure as the spiritual surrogates for the medicinal plants, more obviously painted here than on any other panel, that sprout forth from the soaked earth fertilized by Christ on the cross. Through this culminating picture, in conjunction with the carved wooden shrine and all the shutters opening up to it, the relics in the canons’ possession, and the multiple representational registers proered by the imbrication of Christ’s body and blood with those of plants, we reencounter the Isenheim Altarpiece for its staging of the Eucharist and an endlessly recursive metaphorics of salvic healing. The Verdure of Frankfurt’s Heller Altar Like his three counterparts on the exterior, stationary wings of the Heller Altarpiece, which Matthias Grünewald painted for the Dominican Church in Frankfurt around 1510, Saint Lawrence appears to us in a monochrome palette betting the somber Lenten duty of obscuring the dazzling interior shrine that lay behind (g. 3.25).115 In contrast to his forlorn gaze, which avoids the viewer, Lawrence’s dalmatic billows energetically toward its audience and catches the rungs of the saint’s gridiron attribute. A light breeze wafts through the pages in his right hand and rustles the wall of tangled leaves and branches behind him. Rather than the sterile architectural niches of most grisaille compositions, Grünewald stages his standing saints in verdant outdoors brimming with plant life (see g. 3.27). As in the Isenheim Altarpiece, he has here oered a particular taxonomy of healing plants corresponding to each saint, some of whom are shown in the act of charity. Proering food and drink to someone outside the picture frame, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, famed for her commitment to the poor and inrm, is pictured as Jacques de Voragine recounts her “helping [the sick] with medicines

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figure 3.25 Matthias Grünewald, Saint Lawrence for the Heller

Altarpiece, ca. 1509–10, mixed technique on wood. Frankfurt, Städel Museum

figure 3.26  Saint Anthony, Hans Von Gersdorff’s eldbook

of Wound Medicine, woodcut, 1517, printed in Strasbourg

and drying them with the cloth of her head.”116 Following a compositional commonplace for depicting healers with their patients, such as that in an illustration of Saint Anthony for Hans von Gersdor’s Fieldbook of Wound Medicine (1517), Grünewald paints Saint Cyriac treating the possessed Artemia, who kneels diminutively before him from the bottom corner of the panel (g. 3.26). Also dressed as a deacon, Lawrence, like his other saintly counterparts, should be considered a gural analogue to the medicinal herbs—the orets of hops, with their individuated sepal petals, and the medlar shrub—that envelop him.117 Voragine tells us in the Golden Legend that Lawrence derived his strength of conviction from his arboreal namesake, the laurel tree, an ancient symbol of victory and healing that subversively emblematized the martyr’s ultimate triumph over the pagan emperor Valerian.118 “The laurel is always of pleasant viridity [viriditas], agreeable odor, and virtuous of strength,” wrote Voragine.119 Like the tree, Lawrence possessed “viridity in cleanness of heart and purity . . . and gave to poor people and thus remained in his righteousness perdurably.”120 Medicinal herbs whose healing qualities, or viridities,

were associated with Lawrence, such as the laurel from the Golden Legend or the hops into which Grünewald ensconced him, shared in their humoral constitution the character of his incineration on the grill. Hot and dry, they were prescribed for sweat baths and to compensate for an overabundance of their temperamental opposites, such as instances of depression or fever-induced shivers.121 The Golden Legend makes no mention of viridity apart from Lawrence’s biography. The term itself was one that Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) employed in her Causes and Cures to connote the greenness or verdure of earth as a metaphor for spiritual fecundity.122 As inrmarian of her cloister, though, Hildegard was also a vanguard practitioner of material medicine (materia medica) and natural healing methods, assimilating and reinterpreting ancient pharmacology into both the Christian belief system and local traditions.123 Not solely metaphorical, Hildegard’s greenness was also tangible, an euvial sap pumping through plants’ veins like a person’s own bodily humors. According to Victoria Sweet, “Viriditas seems to be some kind of . . . physical substance that moves from root to leaves and is therefore probably a liquid . . . it was some thing.”124 It was a liquid carrier of physical and spiritual life. In the valediction of her letter consoling her dear friend Adelheid, abbess of Gandersheim, whom she advises to stroll over hills under the sun in prayerful devotion to God, Hildegard juxtaposes the restorative potential of unctions and viridity in the same breath. “May He anoint you with the ointment of His mercy . . . May He anoint you with the viridity of the Holy Spirit, and may He work good and holy works in you.”125 This anointing has an abstract and tangible sense, as if in her path to absolution Adelheid, under the light of God and the sun, is to be besmeared with the vegetal balm of his mercy. Lawrence’s verdure is striking against the convention that the panels are intended as grisaille, an imitation of

overleaf top figure 3.27  Reconstruction of the Heller Altarpiece (closed, with obverse

and reverse of stationary wings), after Decker (1996). Dürer Workshop (central panels), ca. 1507–9. Frankfurt, Historisches Museum. Matthias Grünewald (outer panels), ca. 1509–10. Lawrence and Cyriacus in Städel Museum, Frankfurt, and Elizabeth and unknown female saint in Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe overleaf bottom figure 3.28  Heller Altarpiece (open). Jobst Harrich (central panel), after

Albrecht Dürer, ca. 1614–17, and Dürer Workshop (wings), 1507–9, mixed technique on wood. Frankfurt, Historisches Museum

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right figure 3.29  Floorplan of Frankfurt’s

Dominican Church, after Weizsäcker (1923) below figure 3.30  Reconstruction of the

Heller Altarpiece, after Decker (1996)

stone. Indeed, a surviving letter from the patron of the altarpiece to Albrecht Dürer, who, along with Grünewald, made the exterior panels and was entirely responsible for the interior, asked that these outer panels be in Steinfarbe, or “stone color” (gs. 3.27, 3.28).126 Set before barren, even lunar landscapes, the boxy gures in heavy drapery painted by Dürer’s workshop indeed evoke the hardness of stone, especially when compared with the brown, clayish tones with which Grünewald portrayed his ethereal saints in delicate, owing garments enveloped in leafy niches. But as at Isenheim, Grünewald appealed to a patron knowledgeable about and identied with healing plants and the ritual function of the altar on which his paintings would be installed. The altarpiece showcases the recursive relationship between the liturgy and pharmacology at the very site where their healing power was ennobled by the church, at the moment to which they were thematically linked in the liturgical calendar—this time in summer. Moreover, once understood as a driving programmatic force of the altar, the patron’s interest in this theme can

also be seen within the Dürer workshop’s stony eorts. In 1507, the Frankfurt merchant and mayor Jakob Heller commissioned Dürer to paint an epitaph for himself and his wife, Katharina von Melem.127 Installed by 1509, the winged altarpiece adorned a side altar dedicated to the Dominican saint Thomas Aquinas at the southwest pillar in the nave of the city’s Dominican Church, before which the pair was meant to be interred (g. 3.29).128 According to Bernhard Decker’s reconstruction from 1996, on whose primary concept scholars tend to agree, Grünewald’s panels were conceived as stationary bilateral wings; their reverse sides show stone columns that would have extended beyond and anked either side of the actual nave pillar against which the altarpiece was installed (g. 3.30).129 One of many Frankfurt burghers who sought coveted posthumous real estate within church walls, Heller was continuing a family tradition—his father and grandfather were buried in the same church—that would, however, end with him. Without children to pray for his soul, Heller wielded his political weight and record

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figure 3.31  Detail of the Rosary Panel for the Marian Altar of Frank­

furt’s Dominican Church, 1486/1500, painting on panel. Heidelberg, Kürpfälzisches Museum

of local benecence to secure his salvation in the afterlife. He established an endowment to remunerate the convent in perpetuity for its divine intercession, which included among a litany of rituals daily requiem masses dedicated to himself, his wife, and his parents.130 Picturing Thomas Aquinas, the Magi, and four healer saints (the last by Grünewald) in a muted palette on the wings’ exterior sides, the altarpiece opened to reveal in vivid color the two donor gures humbly kneeling below their eponymous patron saints, Saints James and Catherine, all of whom orient themselves toward the central culminating scene of Mary’s Assumption to the Trinity (see gs. 3.27, 3.28). Heller’s chosen iconography was in keeping with the church’s specic dedication to the “most blessed Virgin Mary assumed to heaven” and the Dominicans’ special devotion to her.131 The Rosary Panel now in Heidelberg’s Kurpfälzisches Museum once belonged to the retable fashioned to the rood screen’s altar of the Virgin (g. 3.31); it can only be assumed that the now lost sculpted shrine accompanying Hans Holbein the Elder’s paintings for the high altar also depicted the Madonna.132 But the Hellers, like many of their fellow townsmen, paid particular tribute to the Virgin as founding members of Frankfurt’s rather active chapter of the Brotherhood of the Rosary. It

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is no wonder, then, that Jakob Heller spared no expense to ensure that Dürer’s own hands manufactured the climactic image that would have stood prominently by the church’s main entrance, through which church attendees swarmed on any of the four primary Marian feast days: the Presentation in the Temple (November 24), Annunciation (March 25), Death and Assumption (August 15), and her Nativity (September 8).133 As Dürer’s correspondence with Heller attests, “I have painted it with great care, as you will see, using none but the best colors I could get.”134 The central Assumption panel fell victim to re in the eighteenth century, and the copy made around 1614–17 still receives more attention than the outer panels that Heller commissioned of Dürer, which survive intact but were almost certainly painted by his assistants.135 The historiography has traditionally pitted Grünewald and Dürer, the two towering artistic personalities, against each other.136 That they converged on a single project without compromising their own styles perpetuates the notion that Heller’s altarpiece served as a battleeld on which each master stood his proverbial ground. But this myth, coupled with the fact that the altarpiece’s panels are scattered across separate collections, has led scholars to underappreciate a programmatic continuity between the two masters’ contributions.137 Dürer’s representation of the Assumption is related to Grünewald’s depiction of healing saints through Heller’s enduring commitment as almoner to Frankfurt’s sick and inrm. Heller aspired to the city’s oce of almoner and, in the very year Grünewald is assumed to have delivered the grisaille panels, established in his will the preparation of “housing across from the monastery gates in which poor folk may be warm in winter.”138 Symptomatic of a burgeoning trend of lay ocials, chiey municipal governments, actively assuming greater responsibility over the welfare of their most disadvantaged denizens, Frankfurt’s almsmen oce had since its founding in the late 1420s under Johann Wiesebeder, “teacher of medicine,” privileged pharmaceuticals among its remedies for the poor and sick.139 As one of the almsmen oce’s four members appointed by the town council, Heller would have overseen the collection and distribution of public support in the form of rewood, meals, tokens for bread from designated bakeries, shoes and clothing, and medication from Frankfurt’s pharmacies.140 Like Guido Guersi, who commissioned Grünewald to paint in full expression the

divine inspiration for caregiving by Isenheim’s Antonite canons, Heller contracted the same artist to depict on the outer wings of his altarpiece—the sides visible most days of the year—four saints in the very acts of civil bene­ cence, feeding and healing, the same acts with which he was tasked as city almoner. Grünewald’s medicinal plants surrounding the four saints proleptically point to the primary occasion for their giving way to the altarpiece’s colorful interior of Mary’s Assumption painted by Dürer. As will become clear, Mary’s Assumption was an event and holiday that inaugurated an auspicious period in the calendar year for Frankfurt’s citizens sustained by herbal therapies, particularly the sickest among them. The Virgin’s Sacred Summer Greenery Vergers’ books and other records, which instructed ocial caretakers in the function of a church’s altars through the year, seldom survive.141 Without them, we are left with what altars themselves and their retables tell us about their ritual use. While Heller’s altarpiece would have remained closed for most of the year, as was standard practice, the iconography of its colorful interior points to the feast days on which it was ceremonially opened. In addition to the Feasts of Saint James the Greater (July 25) and Saint Catherine (November 25), the donors’ patron saints depicted above them on the side wings, the altarpiece’s ritual opening would have coincided with the subject of its primary scene, Mary’s Assumption, a holiday that initiates a liturgical season known as the Virgin Thirty. Comprising the approximately thirty days between her Assumption (August 15) and Birth (September 8), the Virgin Thirty commemorated the period during which herbs and owers blossomed and matured into their most potent medicinal form—and were therefore ripe for plucking. For example, herbal books from the fourteenth century prescribed collecting various plants, including juniper berries and periwinkle, “between the two days of Our Lady, the Assumption and Nativity, that is on our Lady’s herb consecration and her birth.”142 As the day that inaugurated the period of fertility, Mary’s Assumption most often appears in conjunction with the careful handling or extraction of certain plants, such as verbena, whose unearthing “on the evening of Our Lady” involved lengthy incantations to Mary, Christ, the four archangels and the Evangelists; a fourteenth-century manuscript with no fewer than four benedictions for gratiola lays out in detail how the herb should be plucked “on the day of Mary’s Assumption.”143

Thanks to a copy from around 1300 of the Saxon Mirror (Sachsenspiegel), a record of medieval customary law in the Holy Roman Empire, we know that, at least since the early thirteenth century, these outdoor blessings extended from an ocial church Mass for the consecration of herbs (“wuerz messe”) on Assumption Day.144 On the page dedicated to the payment of dues, we see visualized in the crowded margins the tight coordination between folkloric, agricultural, and liturgical calendars argued for throughout this book—and here, in particular, how the church (and state) stood to benet nancially from them (g. 3.32). Introducing the tax calendar, a peasant in stripes scythes wheat and then pays his lord, a seated dandy with coied hair in a roofed pavilion, a ground tithe, a share of which would have been allotted to church coers.145 Though shown in the picture as coins, tithes most often took the form of goods, vegetal and animal, and were collected according to farming and thus also church cycles. The remainder of the calendar’s illustrations show for each due date a depiction of the saint with whose feast day it is aligned, the good that was taxed, and/or, most interestingly, the ethnographic ritual material or object that peasants invoked to celebrate that moment of the year.146 The three lambs that are tithed on May 1, the Feast of Saint Walpurgis, are paired with three large leafy trees that connote the greenery-centered customs observed that day (see chapter 2); staked grapevines signify the wine tithe due on the Feast of Saint Urban, May 25 (see chapter 4); appearing next to the meat tithed on Saint John’s Day, June 24, a crown refers to the vegetal headgear worn by revelers that night for midsummer; Saint Margaret binds a demon to the same eect as the piles of gathered grain tithed on her feast, July 13; on Assumption Day, when “every tenth goose was brought to the lord,” we see the kinds of bundled bouquets churchgoers would have brought to church for the blessing of herbs in the Virgin’s name; nally, a bleeding Saint Bartholomew carries his ayed skin beside a peasant paying taxes in pence on eggs and grains on August 24. More than a codied record of these rituals’ deep histories, the inventory, especially in the case of Assumption Day, makes plain the transactional system of reciprocity on which the church—and believers who sought its spiritual protection—relied. People paid their tithe on geese but, after bringing their greenery and owers into the church, left with a blessing in return. Indeed, this mechanism of exchange is replicated in the

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figure 3.32  The Payment of Dues, Sachsenspiegel,

ca. 1300, painting on vellum. Heidelberg, Universi­täts­ bibliothek, Cod. Pal. Germ. 164, fol. 9r

very donation of an altar or altarpiece, which in Heller’s example churned out a salvic benet for him and all who similarly presented donations to it (the church) and left with more than with what they came.147 Numerous surviving textual sources bear witness to the popularity of the herb blessing ritual, still practiced today and known in German as the Kräuterweihe. The periwinkle, according to the Gart der Gesundheit, “is much better when it is consecrated with other herbs” on our Virgin’s day.148 Hieronymus Brunschwig elaborates further on the temporality of periwinkle’s Mariological signicance. “The devil has no eect over whomever carries this herb on his person. Also on whichever house door it hangs, in this house can come no sorcery, and if it does it will be exposed and disappeared. But make no mistake, no angry specter may possess power in a house in which

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this herb is present. And much better is it when it is consecrated between the Two Days of Our Lady.”149 Likewise, snapdragon or Antirrhinum that is “blessed on Our Lady’s Assumption Day” possesses amuletic powers and will protect its owner from “sorcery.”150 Already embellished with greenery for feast days, church interiors on Assumption Day, in particular, are a delight for one’s eyes and nose. Every year, residents of Angers in Berchtesgaden (Upper Bavaria) gather the widest possible variety of local ora and swathe the sanctuary in blankets of it (g. 3.33). The holiday’s plants hearken to those discovered by the apostles around Mary’s empty sepulcher and the marvelous, sweet-smelling odor the Virgin left behind as the clouds parted and she entered heaven.151 In the Middle Ages, the scene was often acted out inside the church

figure 3.33  Assumption Day Herb Consecration (Kräuterweihe), August 15,

2018, Parish Church of Saint Mary’s Assumption in Angers, Berchtesgaden (Upper Bavaria)

using a sculpted Madonna that was pulled upward with a rope and pulley through an aperture to heaven (Himmelsloch) in the vault.152 As the radical reformer Sebastian Franck (1499–1543) tells us, townspeople of all ages marched into church, eager to receive benedictions for their bundles of sundry herbs, owers, and fruits. As oerings to the Virgin, the plants were uprooted, arranged, and brought to the Mass to be blessed in her name.153 With Mary’s intercession amplifying their known healing properties, they were regarded as possessing much magic (“seer vil zauberei”) and were brought home or to hospitals, where they were especially valued as palliatives for the sick and diseased. The ritual celebration of local ora on Assumption Day was a spectacle in Frankfurt’s Dominican Church. Adding to the order’s Virgin-centered piety, the city’s chapter of the Brotherhood of the Rosary, with their hundreds of corporate members regularly congregating around the Virgin Altar on the south side of the choir screen, must have drawn extra attention to the four main Marian feast days.154 Although we do not know exactly which words were uttered in Frankfurt, a Dominican ritual for Saint Mary’s convent in Mödingen-Augsburg enumerates their blessing of herbs on the Assumption holiday in 1487:

Lord hear my prayers. As supplicants and with fervent prayers we pray for your omnipotence, you who miraculously created everything from nothing and who bade dierent seeds coming out from the earth to spring forth, and you bade that each seed should remain in itself. You walked on the earth and you established dierent kinds of medicines to heal the bodies of humankind. You have deemed it worthy to bless and sanctify these creations of herbs of dierent kind so that whoever should partake of them during this celebration shall receive healing of both soul and body insofar as in the odor of your perfumes they shall be worthy to enter the doors of heaven. For our Lord Christ Amen. And may the blessing of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit descend on these creations of herbs and there remain forever. Amen.155

A similar benediction would have been recited before Heller’s altar to consecrate some of the very species of herbs that Grünewald represented in paint on his retable. Growing up to the spout of Saint Elizabeth’s jug of wine, galium or “Our Lady’s bedstraw” has long-standing Marian roots and is one of the herbs that was common to the wide regional variety of the holiday’s plant arrangements (g. 3.34).156 Conceived as the straw on which Mary gave

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figure 3.34 Galium plant growing below Saint Elizabeth, Heller

Altarpiece, detail of gure 3.26

birth to Christ in the manger, galium was appropriately prescribed, among a myriad of reasons, to quell labor and menstrual pains.157 Once blessed, it is one of the many herbs that would have been conceivably distributed to heal Frankfurt’s own community of the inrm, to whom Heller had dedicated much political and charitable service. A man seemingly in fear of his salvation, Heller commissioned Grünewald at the moment he was advocating for his own civic role as almoner. His worldly provisions, though, were moot without divine intervention. For this reason, the altarpiece envelops the four saints dressed as healer deacons in proliferating vegetation, donning dalmatics and tunicles, and in whose names the plants’ ecaciousness was predicated. Even the columns

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Grünewald’s Greenery in Spring and Summer

donning greenery on the reverse sides of the stationary wings carried sacred signicance. Heinrich Weizsäcker identied them as Jachin and Boas, the cult columns of the Canaanites that King Solomon appropriated as spolia for the entrance of his temple (1 Kings 7:13–22).158 Almost certainly aware of the two Romanesque columns inscribed as such in Würzburg Cathedral, Grünewald incorporated them for stylistic consistency with the altar’s surrounding structures and for the sacral quality they lent plants as architectural reinstantiations of the Trees of Paradise, and thus the Wood of the Cross.159 He therefore painted the individual plant species not to mobilize them as symbols but rather to convey the essential heritage of their saintly healing powers, which the priest vouchsafed in his

blessings made on the holy gures’ behalf. I will demonstrate shortly that, in being restricted to a limited color palette to suit the Lenten character of the closed altarpiece, Grünewald imitated wood sculpture because its organic substrate simulated the inner substance of material medicine, which was made more potent during the octave of the Virgin’s Assumption and Birth. But there is more to this seemingly jovial scene than might meet the eye. Just as with the crucixes in this book’s rst two chapters, the church’s sanctication of plant matter signals its desire to absorb potentially problematic folk practices within its ritual and calendrical orbit. Although the objects previously discussed were associated with earlier points in the year, in all cases, the church wielded the harvest season, when people ritually celebrated the reaping of plants, into an asset whose power only the church could sanctify, channeled through not only the priest’s hands but also the altar—the focal point of ritual. Certainly common at the time of the herbal incunabula and printed codices, the ocial Latin blessing of herbs (Benedictio Herbarum) on Assumption Day dates to the twelfth or perhaps even the tenth century.160 Its appearance in missals and ritual books from Germany attests to its persistent relevance through the early modern period. More or less following the standard formula for benedictions, an example from Speyer’s Rituale of 1512 commences with the priest, dressed in his proper liturgical accoutrements, calling out numerous orations or prayers in the name of God and, given her relevance to the ritual at hand, Mary on the festival of her Assumption: God, [you] who furnished remedies to human needs with every kind of herbs, bless with your right hand this collection of herbs of your compassion, so that whoever, brought before your holy church, is weighed down with weakness should taste something from them, shall receive the gift of hoped-for healing from you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives with you. Amen . . . With this the herbs are sprinkled with holy water and smoked with incense.161

As is the case for mystics and other spiritual writers who allegorize Christological topoi in earthly terms, the prayers invoke God’s footprint in the natural, visible world he created to justify man’s exploitation of its herbs, trees, and all ora and fauna for subsistence and, more im­por­ tant, medicinal remedy for the bodies of the ailing. A leitmotif throughout the blessing, the distinction between

figure 3.35  Hans Baldung Grien, Consecration of Water from Geiler’s

Emeis, 1516, woodcut, printed in Strasbourg

alimentary and therapeutic consumption of plants underscores the dominion of the church over the vegetal world. The ecacy of “this collection of herbs” to heal the sick and meek, evidently presented to the priest by his congregation, is derived not from their innate essence as such but from the ecclesiastical sanctication—the performance of the vested priest—as an instrument or representative of Christ. The fear that outsiders could channel the supernatural power associated with paraliturgical sacramentals, most nefariously by females engaged in witchcraft, serves as the subtext for a sermon Johannes Geiler von Kaysersberg administered during Lent of 1508, in which he makes cautious allowances for the widespread observance of the Kräuterweihe to the people of Strasbourg.162 That “the church required magic,” according to Geiler, was presupposed by its professed intercession in the blessing of such “things” as candles, salt, herbs, or holy water, the last of which was sprinkled on inanimate objects such as house doors or gravestones at pivotal moments of seasonal change.163 “Flowers and plants that are consecrated on the Day of our Lady’s Assumption . . . and mixed into cattle feed or given to the weak and inrm . . . these are not unjust things to need . . . they are not beseeched in vain,” for they were consecrated by a priest, an agent of the Holy Church governed directly, unmediated (“ohne mitel”) through God, the Holy Spirit.164 A woodcut illustration accompanying this entry in the printed collection of Geiler’s Lenten sermons reinforces his formulation for the church-mediated dispensation of blessings: a central compositional cleft separates a tonsured male cleric on the right, who icks holy water with an aspergillum on the main threshold of a house, and a group of laypeople on the left standing idly by (g. 3.35).165

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In the same sermon, Geiler admonishes against the blurring line between sacrament and sacramental exacerbated by a world inundated with extraliturgical rituals and accusations of nonclerical abuses thereof. The Heller Altarpiece can be seen as a device for precisely the kinds of attempts to co-opt and contain what might otherwise have been construed as extrasacramental chicanery or even witchcraft. It also powered the engine of ecclesiastical giving and taking that took place during the Marian holidays. Although Grünewald’s grisaille greenery calls up the importance of these rituals when they are actually not happening, they stand in for and anticipate the season when representation gives way to real greenery. In that, the grisaille paintings allow for a representational, sacred, and church-authorized context for plants across the entirety of the year. In stepping aside for the real plants to arrive at the altar, with their colors complemented by the nest pigments Dürer could procure for his interior shrine, the grisaille panels would have lent those real plants yet more sacred authority. For this reason, the unique way Grünewald and Dürer handled the medium of grisaille for the altarpiece’s outer wings becomes meaningful. Painting the Plasticity of Wood Far fewer grisailles by German painters of the period of the Heller Altarpiece are known to have existed than those by their Netherlandish counterparts. The same pattern held for grisaille paintings commissioned for Frankfurt establishments. Though primarily active in Antwerp, the so-called Frankfurt Master produced at least two altarpieces for the city’s Dominican Church, one of which was installed by 1506 in the church not ten meters from Heller’s altarpiece (g. 3.36).166 Though it was common for the Lenten or workday outer sides of closed altarpiece cabinets, stylistic cohesion with surrounding retables in the church may have also driven Heller’s preference for “stone colors.” However, the Frankfurt Master did not work in true grisaille of the sort Dürer pursued for his gures. Rather, he painted in a mode of half-grisaille reminiscent of Hans Holbein’s Gray Passion, so named for its likewise subdued but not entirely monochromatic pigmentation (see g. 2.21). Grisaille painting, certainly as it relates to the Flemish masters who popularized it, is often regarded as meta-representation, chiey ersatz stone sculpture. In his review of comparanda for Grünewald’s Heller saints, the art historian Dietmar Lüdke conceded that the panels, which

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are extraordinary and without precedent, are not the kind of artful trompe l’oeil imitations of stone, alabaster, or ivory gures, such as those we know from Robert Campin, Rogier van der Weyden, Jan van Eyck, or Hans Memling.167 Lüdke is correct, for Grünewald’s panels indeed do not resemble stone, alabaster, or ivory. Although Grünewald was limited to stone colors, heeding Heller’s stipulations, he applied them over an unusually prominent ocher ground to suuse his gures with the sculptural quality of carved wood, unpolychromed examples of which were ourishing at the time.168 Carrying only shades of blue-gray, Grünewald’s brushstrokes are so fugitively deployed that, while rendering his forms with a sweet evanescence, they let coruscate

figure 3.36  Frankfurt Master, detail of Saint Anne’s Altarpiece, 1503–6,

painting on panel. Frankfurt, Historisches Museum

figure 3.37 Ocher ground on the panel margin, Heller Altarpiece, detail

of gure 3.26

through their translucence an ocher ground laid beneath, one that is readily apparent in the margins to his panels when they lack picture frames (g. 3.37).169 That ground, covered only in gossamer layers of painted form, permeates the compositions with a warm, clayish pliancy that, as Christian Altgraf Salm notes, is saliently absent in the Dürer grisailles. Sandrart may have also sensed their yellowish tonality, if not the thin application of their gured pigment, when he wrote that Grünewald’s panels were painted “with light in gray and black.”170 After Sandrart’s observation, the altarpiece was dismantled, Grünewald’s panels were sawn apart, and they were distributed to dierent museums, each pursuing its own means of conservation. A noticeable dierence in yellowishness between the male and female saints is the result of a varnish still present in the set now hanging in Frankfurt.171 As we know they were originally arranged, though, the way the saints rise from masonry niches to the leafy outdoors also enacts Grünewald’s transition from stone to wood.172 In his evocation of wood sculpture on a wood altarpiece surrounded by magical vegetation, Grünewald reframes the terms of grisaille painting as a mode of trompe l’oeil sculpture, or, in other words, as a playing

eld for the so-called paragone. Rudolf Preimesberger has shown that Jan van Eyck, in his Madrid Annunciation, exploited the grisaille mode to assert not only that painting was superior to sculpture but that painters could do sculpture better than sculptors could (g. 3.38).173 Contriving two sorts of stone with paint, he positioned ctive white marble statuettes of Mary and Gabriel in front of a wall of polished black stone, proudly deploying his hallmark of the reection to boast that the painter, unlike the sculptor, can at one fell swoop convey two sides of a single body simultaneously; he can show the viewer, in one instant, that his painted Mary and Gabriel are, indeed, sculpted in the round. Grünewald, for his part, was less concerned with the competition between painting and sculpture and the artist’s ability to transform one into another. In his works for Heller, the wood panel becomes its true self, rather than being transformed through paint into stone or anything else. Structurally speaking, the lithe body of Lawrence, the billowy texture of his robe, the wispy hair and light pages of the book, imitate the idiosyncratic pliancy of limewood, which was amenable to vigorous, painterly form-making. Lending itself to wood carving as it does to painting, the

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figure 3.38  Jan van Eyck, Annunciation Diptych, ca. 1435–40, oil on

panel. Madrid, Thyssen-Bornemisza

passage of the mantle’s corner exuberantly swooping over the grill—its feathery fringes grazing the harsh rungs of Lawrence’s instrument of martyrdom—is an aberration from the saint’s standard iconography and appears in another notable instance: a high relief carved in unpainted limewood, presumably for an altarpiece, by an acolyte of Tilman Riemenschneider (g. 3.39).174 Whereas van Eyck expressed the potentiality of paint to remediate his panels to stone, extending his marbleizing to their reverse sides, Grünewald engages the brush to rearm the corporeality of wood and vegetal media (g. 3.40).175 As opposed to van Eyck, he borrows monochrome’s simulation of plasticity to tout his objects’ material substrate, a panel of pine sheathed in yellow clay, which shines through and imbues his designs with an earthiness and woodiness. Rather than

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casting reections o their polished surfaces, Grünewald’s healing saints and pulsating herbs bend forward to absorb the light, phototropic to the divine, asserting their essential and heavenly presence to the municent Jakob Heller buried before them. The verdant grisaille panels would have thus conversed in their form and purported substance with the now-lost wooden cabinet that originally sutured together the moving parts of Heller’s retable. Though that cabinet is lost, it might have resembled the kind of organic embellishment and muted color scheme Dürer employed in the frame he designed in 1508 for the Nuremburg merchant Matthäus Landauer, whose central Holy Trinity painting (now in Vienna, framed by a copy of the Nuremburg original) is trimmed with gilded and subtly polychromed carvings of

above figure 3.39  Saint Lawrence, School of Tilman Riemenschneider,

limewood, 1510–15. Nuremburg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum above right figure 3.40  Jan van Eyck, Annunciation Diptych, detail of gure 3.38

showing marbling on reverse of Gabriel panel

the Last Judgment and ramifying grapevines (g. 3.41).176 The grisailles would have thus interacted with carved wood, from which they drew motifs and resonance, in anticipation of the part of the year they gave way to living plants, which replaced illusion and lled the church with the colorful, aromatic, rustling nature of their real presence. The contrast must have been astonishing. Falling out of view on Assumption Day, it was what the grisailles promised and foreshadowed that vividly came to life with the altarpiece as backdrop. The actual verdant herbs and owers would have fullled the premise asserted by the Golden Legend; placed below the reproduction of the Assumption, on the altar (a stand-in for Mary’s tomb), they emitted a holy fragrance to the Apostles as the clouds parted and she entered heaven.177 Understanding, through Grünewald’s panels, the entire altarpiece’s participation in the ritual use of plants

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figure 3.41  Frame for the Landauer Altarpiece,

designed by Albrecht Dürer in 1508, carved before 1516, painted and gilded limewood. Nuremberg, Germanishes Nationalmuseum

in the season of the Virgin allows us to reconsider Dürer’s grisaille contributions as well. That Dürer knew of the patron’s interest in plants, and of their relevance to the altarpiece, is evident from the arboreal borders he placed along the edges of his grisailles, which have eluded all but the closest viewers (g. 3.42). Running along the same horizontal axis as the vine trellises above the female saints, a barky tree branch once served to separate Dürer’s program visually into two stacked registers (before it was physically sawn into four independent quadrants in the nineteenth century).178 Painted brown and burnished with gold leaf to highlight the branch’s barkiness, the arboreal divider is a salient formal distinction from the drab, arid stage-setting of Dürer’s pictures, but it subtly ties them together with the teeming wildlife of Grünewald’s sepiated grisailles that once anked them on either side.

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Grünewald’s Greenery in Spring and Summer

Though one of them is missing, part of Dürer’s central Lenten panels clearly formed an Adoration of the Magi. A pendant to the interior’s Assumption, as it represents another major liturgical holiday associated with the Virgin, the scene also ties the theme of gift-giving from the barren landscapes of the altar’s exterior, such as they would have appeared in real life on the winter Feast of the Epiphany (January 6), to the earthly bounty and bringing of plants in summer. Presenting their best bundles of herbs and owers to the church, and by metaphorical extension the Virgin, the people of Frankfurt restaged the act of donation the moment its painted representation was concealed, for their faith and devotion to ritual observance was rewarded with the promise of healing and salvation. In Dürer’s admonition to Heller that his Assumption painting “be kept clean, that no one should

figure 3.42  Dürer Workshop and Matthias Grünewald, Heller Altarpiece,

detail of horizontal arboreal divider motif, after Decker (1996)

touch it or throw holy water on it,” we witness a concern about the extreme vulnerability of this precious picture, given its iconography and role in the liturgical calendar, to heightened activity occurring at the altar, which would have included vigorous deployment of the aspergillum on the plants and owers laid atop it (see g. 3.32).179 Dürer’s letter only conrms that he and artists like Grünewald were fully aware of the liveliness of liturgical spectacle and that their paintings were not merely inert backdrops to it. In their artistic engagement with the materiality and vitality of wood, the altarpieces in Isenheim and Frankfurt participated as mediators in the altars’ rituals, which activated worldly greenery so that it could perform and heal in the model of Christ crucied to the sainted tree. Besides medicinal plants and trees, though, the cross would also shape-shift into

the ingredients for—and the carpentered technologies to transform them into—the most salutary vegetal by-products of all: the Eucharist. In the next chapter, a series of altarpieces highlight the persistent presence of the Wood of the Cross in the production of the bread and wine that was transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ on the altars before them. Once again, as the cross’s wood is enfolded into the extended metaphors comparing Christ to plants—this time wheat and grapes—the body of Christ, in turn, begins to assume ever more botanical qualities.

Grünewald’s Greenery in Spring and Summer

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4 The Spiritual Vintage

Around the year 1500, woodcarvers in Rothenburg ob der Tauber employed their medium to reanimate the vegetation, and restage the carpentered technology, that together yielded the town’s treasured wine relic (g. 4.1). More than emblematizing “Christ as vine” or generalized concepts such as fecundity, the viticultural motifs that the local cabinetmaker Erhard Harschner carved to ensconce the miraculous Holy Blood in its eponymous altarpiece in the west chapel of the Church of Saint James faithfully represent, to an unusual degree, the early stages of the vintage in practice. With his carving knife, Harschner bound the vines that framed a tabernacle in the predella to trellises, or shaven-down posts tted together with elbow and crossbar joints (g. 4.2).1 Tucking the titular relic in the superstructure between a pair of braided vines, he also rendered the upper frame’s buttresses as two large, staked vines that curl out and ramify upward toward the chapel’s vaults (g. 4.3). The wood at times appears as if it is hewn back to life. The severed stalks in the predella expose an inner pulp; the striated bark is dotted with buds and gives way to canes that shoot freely into arabesques above the trellises. Not yet bearing fruit, Harschner’s Reliquary of the Holy Blood within twisting and standing vines in the crest of the Holy Blood Altarpiece, detail, g. 4.3.

vines appear in their springtime form and complement the woven arrangement of owers blooming above the central gures of Christ and the Apostles, which Tilman Riemenschneider famously carved. For the local pilgrims who ocked to the west chapel of the Church of Saint James for a glimpse or perhaps a miracle from the Holy Blood, the viticultural woods would have resonated with the retable’s unusual focus on the Last Supper, with its drinking Apostles, and the principal relic it housed. Rather than blood trickling from the Host or collected from Christ’s body in Jerusalem, the miracle-performing Holy Blood consisted of consecrated wine spilled from a chalice during Mass held in Rothenburg. To be sure, vines and grapes also populate the architectural elements of the massive, ziggurat-shaped altarpiece still in situ at the parish church of Saint Martin in Lorch am Rhein (1483); it is the single surviving extant monochrome altarpiece made before that in Rothenburg (g. 4.4). Similarly, grapes adorn the rounded arch framing the Virgin and Child and the two Johns in the central corpus of the altarpiece in the pilgrimage church of the Coronation of the Virgin in Lautenbach (1488; g. 4.5).2

above figure 4.1  Erhard Harschner and Tilman Riemenschneider, Holy

opposite figure 4.2  Tamed and pruned vines in the predella of the Holy Blood

Blood Altarpiece, 1499–1505, pine and limewood, Church of Saint James, Rothenburg ob der Tauber

Altarpiece

top figure 4.3  Reliquary of the Holy Blood within twisting and standing

above left figure 4.4  Vine tracery on the High Altar, Parish Church of Saint

vines in the crest of the Holy Blood Altarpiece

Martin, Lorch am Rhein, ca. 1450 above right figure 4.5  Vine tracery on the High Altar, Pilgrimage Church of the

Coronation of the Virgin, Lautenbach, 1488

In these cases, grapes grow from vines that conform to the structural lines of the cabinet. Sprouting from Gothic curves and pecked on by pelicans, they function as static symbols for the Eucharistic wine atop the altar. For Rothenburg’s altarpiece, however, Harschner separates architecture from vine to accentuate instead the means by which that wine is made—namely, with the intervention of his own craft. Left unpainted, the wooden vines dance between art and nature, or what man has formed and what continues to form itself. Highlighting the texture of the branches’ skin and even the brous innards where they are cut, Harschner sought to heighten the liveliness of the earthly plant that produces the sacramental juices. He introduces microcarpentry in the form of alder poles and trellises to thematize the role of wooden contraptions in the domestication of wild, preconsecrated grapes. Living in a region famed for its winemaking, Harschner and his fellow Rothenburgers were keenly aware that without a stable architecture, vines cannot come to fruition. In the same vein as contemporary devotional writers, who in their long meditations on the process of making wine sought to convey Christ and the cross’s presence in it, Harschner makes plain for us how the seasons-long span of wine production, especially for southern Germany in this period, was so profoundly imbricated with the substance of wood. In preceding pages, we rst encountered the spiritualization of the grapevine in the context of may devotion, coinciding with its ritual observance in the liturgical calendar through Saint Urban (May 25). The subject of previous chapters, may devotion assimilated secular celebrations of spring woods (for example, maypoles and love garlands) into that season’s numerous liturgical observances of the Wood of the Cross, which radiated around the Feast of the Cross’s Invention on May 3. In his Spiritual May, one of many texts exemplifying the genre, Stephan Fridolin oriented an entire day’s prayer around the bound grapevine—a motif so poignant that a nun named Eufrosina from a convent in Pütrich includes a drawing of it in her manuscript copy of the treatise from 1529 (g. 4.6), a topic to which I will return. But, moving forward in time from the spring, like the vines that produced the popular beverage, spiritualized vintage allegories came to real fruition in their autumnal iterations. Inspired by Bonaventure’s Mystical Vine, texts falling under the genre of the Spiritual Vintage extrapolated a detailed, viticultural rendition of the Passion story from wine themes in the Song of Songs and, in particular,

figure 4.6  Infant Christ as the True Vine, Stephan

Fridolin’s Der geistliche Mai, pen and ink on paper, 1529. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 4473, fol. 261r

John 15, in which Christ compares himself to the “true vine” and his Father the husbandman: “Every branch in me, that beareth not fruit, he will take away: and every one that beareth fruit, he will purge it, that it may bring forth more fruit.”3 In addition to scripture, rooting their texts in observations of the myriad manifestations of wood integral to wine’s manufacture in fall, Fridolin, Johannes Kreutzer, and others wrote a series of lengthy devotional treatises that were meant to be read in conjunction with the second cross holiday of the calendar year, the Feast of the Cross’s Exaltation, this one taking place on September 14. The Spiritual Vintage texts and images allegorizing autumnal winemaking in Christological terms function, together with their spring counterparts, to draw cross and, therefore, wood resonances across the two most important inection points of the agricultural calendar year. Having just observed the Marian and hagiographic potency of wood in the medical quality of summer herbs, we progress forward in this chapter to fall, where again religious writers and artists indulged in the various semantic registers proered by the materiality of wood, whose living and carpentered conditions formed the backbone



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of both the season’s liturgy of the cross and the industry of winemaking. Its recitation synchronized with “the day of the Cross’s Exaltation,” Fridolin’s devotional tract, The Spiritual Autumn (ca. 1480–94),4 progresses along a cycle of ve weeks, from tilling the earth and trimming the vines to pressing the grapes, barreling and fermenting the juice, and even selling and binging on the delicious juice.5 (Bonaventure’s treatise, in contrast, stops after the training of the vines to wooden posts.) The allegory is at times so prescriptive that its target audience of Clarissan nuns, the spiritual vintners, are compensated with gurative wages for their intellectual labors. As is also the case for Kreutzer’s short “Autumn Must” prayers (ca. 1450), much of the nuns’ devotional work involves an engagement with wood, which in its sacred materiality doubles as a lifegiving, blooming plant in the image of Christ and the timber technologies that bear and break him.6 The season has changed, but the same metaphorics Kreutzer and Fridolin used to allegorize springtime they pulled through the year into the season of the grape harvest. Following the precedent set by Bonaventure’s Mystical Vine and Tree of Life, Fridolin and Kreutzer each composed devotional companion pieces to celebrate the Holy Cross in its arboreal and viticultural incarnations in the spring and autumn. In their texts, and in a series of artworks, as this chapter will make clear, the grapevine comes to be laid over the Wood of the Cross such that they become recursive; the result is an extended resonance of the cross’s sacred wooden materiality across all of the wood deployed throughout the winemaking process, spanning the entire agricultural season and both seasons of the cross, from the planting and pruning of vines and the Feast of Saint Urban in May to the harvesting of grapes and barreling of their juices in the fall. The unprecedented degree of vivid ethnographic detail in religious pictures and texts from this period, since they were often framed as valuable elevating signs of divinity, in turn evoke just how imbricated people were with their surrounding environments—and how central a role wood and greenery played in their experience and shaping of them. The church’s denition of nature therefore had grave consequences for everyday life. How then were people supposed to envision themselves in relation to it?7 At once a hostile environment, a place of temporary exile after humankind’s banishment from Paradise, nature also functioned as a code, bearing the blueprint of its divine

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designer, that people could crack and exploit for nourishment, medicine, and amusement. Previous chapters have demonstrated how the woods of the cross manifested themselves as paradigmatic forms of nature from which to muster nourishment and therapy. This chapter will rather explore the role of wood both in the work of cultivation and as that which is cultivated. It will expand the scope on late medieval attitudes toward nature and to show how the cross’s wood played a central role in enabling humanity’s intervention with it. In establishing itself as the rightful mediator between the two, the church instrumentalized wood as the key for humanity to unlock the mysteries of faith and the natural world. The relationship between wood as instrument of the Passion and the realities of contemporary manual labor are spelled out in The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, a sumptuously painted manuscript of the fteenth century, which contains an unusually long visual dedication to the Legend of the Wood of the Cross (g. 4.7). From the upper corner of one its unusual illuminations, as if from a Creation scene, God dispatches his Son through the Holy Spirit not to the Virgin’s womb but to the rolling green hills of earth, which are shown unsullied by humanity. Below in the bottom margin of the page, along the same diagonal axis on which the Christ Child hurtles toward the ground carrying the cross with which he will redeem human sin, a man in contemporary Netherlandish attire kneels toward a pond and casts a net to catch his underwater prey. Unlike the pristine terrain above, that of the here and now is littered with a veritable inventory of the primarily wooden tools available at the time—ropes, hemp baskets, and bell-shaped traps—to extricate sh from their natural habitat. It is an unmistakable allusion to the ecological triumphalism of Genesis 1:28, wherein God commanded Adam to “take command of the shes of the sea” and all the world’s resources as he pleased. But in the fallen land of the manuscript’s marginal illustration—and its reader—humanity cannot merely take; it is cursed to “labor and toil” with the ornery, sometimes uncooperative environment that follows its own set of rules (Gen. 3:17).8 The juxtaposition lays bare for Catherine of Cleves that material and spiritual subsistence were not mutually exclusive; indeed, one was a function of the other. To wield the proverbial shnet, she must rst carry the cross—a mental exercise set in motion by the illustrations and prayers to the Holy Cross contained in the devotional instrument she clasped in her own two hands.

figure 4.7  Homunculus on the Cross and Man shing, The Hours of

figure 4.8  Melancholic Christ with the Cross and Christ in the

Catherine of Cleves, ca. 1440. New York, The Morgan Library, MS M.917, fol. 85r

Winepress, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, ca. 1440. New York, The Morgan Library, MS M.917, fol. 121r

A similar dynamic is at play in the manuscript’s illustration of the Melancholic Christ standing on his lowered cross (g. 4.8). Behind him, a single upright tree points to the arboreal origins of the cross’s carpentered timber, which breaks the frame and traverses into the realm of the oral marginal decorations. The wood shifts shape yet again at the bottom of the page, assuming the form of a corkscrew-style winepress that crushes Christ, who dons the crown of thorns and squeezes the birches and whip under his arms. As the vise grips tighter, the blood squirting out of his battered, crouching body pools into a lone liturgical chalice presented to the viewer against the blank vellum surface. Ultimately leading to the nished by-product in the Eucharistic substance of wine, the sacramental potential of wood spans the entire process of conversion, from its living rootedness in the ground as a plant (in this case a tree, but its vegetal stand-ins are endless) through all the steps of its human manufacture. The

picture thus distills how plants, trees, and the stu arising from the dirt of creation were embraced in religious art and literature of this period and region not only for the typological associations with their physical form or material output but also for how integral wood was to the process by which the latter was converted from the former. Consistent with the Spiritual Vintage texts in this late medieval mystical mode, Erhard Harschner envelops Rothenburg’s sacred varietal in the altarpiece with visual traces of the harvesting process to call attention to the relic’s (and wine’s) preconsecrated, material substance as a concrete liquid, a beverage that is cultivated from the earth while also being a sign of the Passion or the Incarnation. But it was also the substance of wood, in its living and carpentered guises, that was loaded with a sacred signicance that undergirded the devotional viticultural allegories as well as Rothenburg’s relic and altarpiece—a point that, as will become clear, social art



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history seems to have overlooked. The town council of Rothenburg’s decision to leave the Holy Blood Altarpiece without pigmentation and gilding was therefore no act of aesthetic restraint but a bombastic artistic maneuver to allow the spiritual resonances around wood and wine to unfold for the viewer. It could very well be the case that scholars have overlooked the numerous interpretive avenues concerning wine and viticulture because the altarpiece’s vegetal motifs, though visually salient and plentiful, were not carved by the comparatively far more renowned artist Tilman Riemenschneider, who, in keeping with strictly regulated guild divisions of labor, would have likely produced the gural and relief sculptures alone. In fact, Harschner had been hard at work on the cabinet for the Holy Blood Altarpiece for nearly two years before Riemenschneider entered the picture in 1501, at which point Harschner, Riemenschneider, the town council, and others all agreed on the overall design, spelled out in words and drawn up as a cartoon (now lost).9 We will never know to what extent and at what point the Würzburg-based Riemenschneider may have consulted on the altarpiece before the contract date, but precedent for the high altar at Ulm, carved in monochrome in 1474, tells us that cabinetmakers were known to have advised on the ideological conceptions of these monumental pieces of liturgical furniture.10 At least from what we can tell from the surviving evidence in the inventories, Harschner’s contributions were accorded similar nancial value as those of Riemenschneider: fty orins plus bonus.11 It is only when we start with Harschner’s cabinetry and frame, which is where the story rst unfolds in contemporary sources, that we can fully appreciate how the whole unpainted wooden construction, the organic and the narrative, relates to the wine that is the relic on the altarpiece, the blood of Christ on the altar, and the product of the land surrounding the church—all of which, in the contemporary devotional sphere, is mediated through the sacred materiality of the Wood of the Cross. Indeed, the prolonged delivery process of the altarpiece’s parts means that the imagery of Harschner’s cabinet stood for a while without Riemenschneider’s gures, contextualizing the wine relic on its own. Just as wood gured in the springtime imagination of the Holy Cross in celebrations of trees and greenery, wood was exalted as the key instrument to convert vines’ material yield—grapes and their juices—into a liturgical

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figure 4.9  Binding and Elevating the Vine, from book 4

of Peter Drach’s Petrus de Crescentijs zu teutsch, woodcut, 1495, printed in Speyer

mirror of Christ’s body and blood. Wine was of paramount political, religious, and economic importance in medieval Germany, and wood formed the backbone of its production for popular consumption as an everyday beverage for the masses and as a symbol for Christ’s sacrice on the cross. Wood thus carried substantial spiritual associations throughout the church calendar, from spring leaves and summer herbs to autumnal grapes and grains. Staking the Vine for the Season of Saint Urban In his frame for Rothenburg’s altarpiece, Harschner depicts multiple horticultural practices taking place at dierent points along the winemaking process, including the early phases of caring for the plants. Indeed, vineyard farmers necessarily tended to the wood of the vine in late winter and spring at least as much as its fall fruit, if not more so. Critical to ensure their ability to carry the weight of their bounteous fruits come autumn was the binding and guiding of vines to wooden supports, the simplest among them being crude vertical wooden stakes called alder poles. Flanking the relic of the Holy Blood and the Annunciation group, Harschner carved two large singular vines whose loose, serpentine ends double back and deect themselves from their architectural guides in a way that parallels how the earliest vernacular books

figure 4.10  Urban’s Day Procession in Nuremburg,

gouache, ca. 1550. Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmusum

on farming, particularly on vine growing, represented this foundational step of training vines in and around the springtime Feast of Saint Urban (see g. 4.3). Peter Drach of Speyer translated and printed to great popularity two editions, in 1493 and 1495, of Petrus de Crescentiis’s Ruralia commoda (1305–9), a highly specialized agronomical text written almost two centuries earlier in Bologna.12 Commensurate with de Crescentiis’s fastidious attention to each step in the production of wine, from tending the vines to barreling and fermentation, Drach dedicated eleven woodcut illustrations, the greatest share of the whole book, to the chapter on viticulture. Accompanying the section on elevating grapevines, a picture contains a farmer in early spring crouching to restake vines and loosen soil with his hoe in the foreground (g. 4.9). “The vineyards must be lifted and the vines bound before the fruits [Auge] swell too much.”13 Court law (ca. 1150) from Cloister Muri in the Swiss canton of Aargau, which owned vineyards by Lake Zurich, conrms the importance of the preliminary training phase, which area farmers must perform by Easter under threat of punishment.14 As part of his daily work every year . . . each farmer must cut the vines and bind them; he must work the dirt twice with a hoe, in whose holes he plants the

vines to increase their number; they are secured by a fence and a night watch; later one needs to fetch wood, which one needs for alder poles and then, when the grapes are attached and the shoots erupt the eld crew is compensated. If he has not cut the vines by Easter and worked the earth, he is punished and likewise on the Feast of Saint John the Baptist (June 24) if the ground has not been hoed and the vines bound a second time.

The liturgical calendar commemorated the end of springtime vine dressing with great fanfare on May 25, the Feast of Urban I, Germany’s patron saint of vintners. From that day forward, vines were left more or less to their own devices, and the whims of the weather, if not those of Saint Urban himself.15 A colorful drawing from Nuremberg around the year 1550 oers us a glimpse of the way countless towns and cities across the Holy Roman Empire likely rang in his feast day (g. 4.10). A man on horseback in the guise of Pope Urban processes through the streets of Nuremberg and is accompanied by a retinue of music makers who help rouse the local townspeople. Dressed in a mantle embroidered with grapevines, he raises the beaker he holds in his right hand to bless the two traces of nature harvested from the ground that



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bookend him: on one side a vessel of grape juice slung over a man’s shoulder, on the other a felled tree with hanging reective decorations that allude to May Day customs. Indeed, crowds on the Feast of Urban coursed through the cathedral city of Strasbourg and the far-ung village of Thann alike, if not following the lead of a man in costume then likely parading behind a greenery-laced version of any of the innumerable carved images of Pope Urban holding grapes that were displayed in exterior niches of church walls, wayside shrines, and, as in the case of the Clarissan convent in Nuremberg associated with Fridolin, winged altarpieces (g. 4.11 and see g. 0.13). By then, Urban’s cult had been in full swing for centuries; pilgrims ocked in droves to his relics in the heart of the Alsatian wine country at the Benedictine monastery of Erstein since 849. A cheerful occasion to mark the end of the planting season, widespread observance of his feast speaks also to the need to channel divine protection since vines, though they may have taken root and begun to show their rst signs of budding fruits and blossoms, were still vulnerable to the vicissitudes of late spring weather. A stray occurrence of frost, for instance, would have sounded the death knell for a year’s vintage. In medieval botanical terms, there was no semantic dierence between the “wood” (or lignum in Latin) that constituted the living tissue of trees versus that of vines. In her Physica, Hildegard von Bingen describes the grapevine as “a wood [that is] projected out from the earth, rather resembling trees.”16 Indeed, in their ruminations of the cross’s sacro-biological heritage, theologians since Bernard of Clairvaux and Bonaventure had allegorized the living Wood of the Cross both arboreally and viticulturally. In artistic practice, when the living wood was depicted as such—that is, in contradistinction to carpentered planks— it most often took the form of a tree. That said, enough instances of vine-crosses survive, like the one held by a Beautiful Madonna sculpted in the Rhineland around the year 1405, to make clear that the wood of the vine and that of the tree were interchangeably employed to signify the living quality of the cross (g. 4.12).17 Betting the proleptic nature of the pictorial genre, the sculpted Mary, which was originally installed on the facade of a building on a small alley in Mainz, balances the weight of her infant in one hand and a branched, forked cross bearing grapes and the Corpus Christi on the other.18 The wavy hair on his slumped-over head and his overly inated lungs rhyme with the fruits dangling beside him.

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figure 4.11  Winged Altarpiece (with Pope Urban), ca. 1500,

polychromed wood, Convent of the Poor Clares, Nuremberg

figure 4.12  Virgin and Child with Vine Crucix, ca. 1405. Mainz,

Landesmuseum

figure 4.13  Vine Crucix, painted vellum. Hildesheim, Dombibliothek

MS 682b

Closer in conceit to the kinds of diagrammatic cruci­xions accompanying copies of Bonaventure’s Tree of Life is a full-page illumination of Christ nailed to a vine sprouting grape bunches now in the collection of Hildesheim Cathedral (g. 4.13).19 Painted in the four­ teenth century, the vegetal mirror of Christ’s Passion, like those that come after it, takes its liberties based on Christological ciphers from the medieval bestiary and pregurations in scripture. The pelican feeding its chicks, symbolizing the Resurrection, is nested in the crown of the Spiritual Vine much in the way a bird perches itself in the tangle of vines crowning the Last Supper shrine of the Holy Blood Altarpiece (g. 4.14). Moreover, just as the Spiritual Vintage allegories—and the Holy Blood Altarpiece—analogize the Wood of the Cross and the wood deployed in wine’s manufacture, the missal miniature embeds the mystical wine trotter from Isaiah, crushing the grapes of wrath in the wooden barrel with his branchy stomping stick, inside the tendrils of the cross’s oshoots.

As these works demonstrate, not only was the vine of winemaking understood to be recursive with the Wood of the Cross, the many uses of wood in the winemaking process, well understood in its technicalities in this region, come also to be folded into the symbolism of wood and wine. Wine, central to the ritual of the Mass, was by the later Middle Ages in Germany assuming a new degree of cultural and economic relevance in the profane world. Thriving viticulture was highly lucrative both for the counts and lords who collected toll revenues and for urban centers such as Cologne, for instance, whose wine excise constituted more than half of the city’s annual tax revenue.20 “Wine landscape is urban landscape” is how Tom Scott, historian of medieval viticulture, described the urban thrust of the industry. The production of wine also stimulated the economies of south German cities, whose swelling populations in turn became ever thirstier for their potable harvest.21 By 1400, wine was the daily drink at least among the main viticultural centers in Germany, of which Fridolin’s Franconia had only recently become a major player.22 The Tauber valley, in particular, was ideal for vine growing. Its south-facing, rolling hills (on average about three hundred meters in altitude) were conducive to sprawling terracing, which increased the potential surface area of plantings, prolonged sun exposure, and improved access for the dressers.23 Sunny days were plentiful in the summer, and the river and its numerous tributaries moistened the valley’s loamy, mineral-rich soil.24

figure 4.14  Holy Blood Altarpiece, detail of gure 4.1 showing bird perched in shrine canopy greenery



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One of the earliest sources for farming vines along the Tauber dates to January 25, 1338. In it, Brother Eberhart von Hertenstein of the Marian and Teutonic Orders, on behalf of the town of Rothenburg, leases a nearby vineyard between Archshofen and Craintal to a Luz Orholen.25 To ensure the parcel’s productivity, Brother Eberhart not only reviews the nancial terms of the charter but also belabors the fundamentals of the vintage for the tenant, who seems to have been a novice vine grower. “You must dung with two cartloads of manure or with four of fresh soil . . . trim and prune the vines . . . and at the right time, bind them to posts.”26 By the fteenth century, the Tauber valley had matured into a broad and variegated network of vineyards, with vines tied to alder poles punctuating its vast landscape in large scale for the rst time. Pruning and Primping the Vine In addition to staking the plants in spring, vines must be pruned, their overgrowth pared back, to ensure their development later in the year. Whereas the spiraling vines framing the Holy Blood relic in the superstructure bear freshly pockmarked traces of the curved pruning blade, we see in the branches growing upward from the predella tiny spurs or buds, each of which the result of prior winter pruning, and each of which containing its own compressed shoot that will grow and ultimately produce a crop in the forthcoming season (see gs. 4.2, 4.3). As opposed to the primary vine, it is the errant limbs pruned o from it that are invoked to lavishly decorate the carved cabinetry of Riemenschneider’s equally large carved retable now in the Church of Our Lady in Creglingen, not twenty kilometers from Rothenburg (g. 4.15).27 Because of its Marian iconography, art historians have long entertained the possibility that it adorned the lay altar dedicated to Mary in Rothenburg’s Church of Saint James (in German, Sankt Jakob), a retable for which was delivered by “a carver from Würzburg” in 1496.28 More recent technical analysis of the grati on its surfaces and adjustments made to the Creglingen church’s vaultings have reinforced the theory that it was relocated there shortly before 1600.29 Its cabinet’s ourishes also speak to Rothenburg’s site specicity—and seem to anticipate the more elaborated viticultural details lavished on the Holy Blood Altarpiece’s cabinet installed on the opposite end of Saint James’s Church by May 1502.30 Indeed, for their striking relationship to each other, Eike Oellermann has attributed the Creglingen shrine work to Erhard Harschner.31

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figure 4.15  Tilman Riemenschneider and Erhard Harschner, Altarpiece

of Mary’s Assumption, pine and limewood, ca. 1505–10, Church of Our Lady, Creglingen

It, too, spared a layer of polychromy, the Marian retable also makes bold references to the pruning of vines; its superstructure is embellished with large barky, textured grape stalks pruned at the root.32 In places they expose their pulp, their eshy biological innards, blurring the distinction of woodiness in sculpted form versus medial tissue (g. 4.16). Bound to the stakes or latticework, the dormant, fruitless vines of spring, according to Drach’s treatise, must be snipped o to maintain the annual production of fruit. “It is said to be better to frequently renew the stem of the vine. The lush, crooked and weak branches and those developing in the wrong places must be removed; a second which grows between two others must be cut away. Anything growing at the foot . . . should never remain.”33 His back toward

figure 4.16  Vine tracery in the superstructure of Creglingen’s

figure 4.18  February Calendar Page, Da Costa Hours, ca. 1515. New

Marian Altarpiece

York, The Morgan Library, MS M.399, fol. 3v

figure 4.17  Pruning the Vine, from book 4 of Peter Drach’s

Petrus de Crescentijs zu teutsch, woodcut, 1495, printed in Speyer

us, hard at work, the vintner in Drach’s visual aid grooms the tethered stalks with a curved blade; the orphaned, compromising twigs litter the ground beside him (g. 4.17). Frequently visualized in the Labors of the Months, vine growers can be seen digging, binding, and trimming their edgling shoots in a painted picture for the February page in the Da Costa Hours (Bruges, ca. 1515). In the expan­sive eld, farmers tether individual grapevines to a vast array of xed dowels receding far into the distance (g. 4.18). A sign of forthcoming prosperity, two men appear in the window of a watchtower to oversee the premises. In the foreground, three laborers engage in the threefold preparatory process: one prunes, another bites his knife to bind a vine with both hands, while the third pickaxes a hole into which he will plant a branch. Thus, the Christological echoes of winemaking’s rst steps—to dig and plant the loose vine into the earth, to bind it to a sturdy wooden post, and to prune it to ensure fruition—were not lost on writers and artists. In addition to Bonaventure, both Fridolin and the anonymous author



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figure 4.19  Prole of the Holy Blood Altarpiece

of the “Berlin Vineyard Sermon,” written in fteenthcentury Swabia, portray Christ as the plant stretched and bound upright to the “stake of the holy cross.”34 Just as Christ admonishes that his Father, the husbandman, will only prune the promising but dispose of the barren branches in righteous judgment (John 15:2), so too must the readers of these devotional texts excise from the tamed vine of their hearts all the hindrances to its fruitfulness.35 Ever intent to heighten the immediacy of his botanical exegesis, Fridolin, in particular, equips his Clarissan readers for their prayerful pruning with the proper curved blade (“das Heplein”)—a rhetorical device that imbricates Christ’s viticultural metaphor into the real-life fteenth-century experience of the reader, who, as in the case of Sister Eufrosina in Pütrich, may have been a gardener with experience in dressing vines.36 Living Under the Living Wood Throughout Harschner’s cabinet for the Holy Blood, we see a sophisticated relationship between natural and

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figure 4.20  Espaliered pear tree, The Met Cloisters, 2019

manmade architecture. Unlike purely decorative appliqué, the grapevines actively engage with the structural elements of the altarpiece’s crown, puncturing through the nials’ buttresses, which temper but support the altarpiece’s proliferating vegetation. The Holy Blood’s uniquely perforated predella, whose architectonic reinforcements are partially concealed by contorted vines tamed to trellises, amplies the work’s appearance of overall weightlessness. It is also a remarkably shallow altarpiece, measuring only 41 centimeters, almost half the depth of Michael Pacher’s shrine of 1481 in Saint Wolfgang, Austria (g. 4.19).37 As in the predella, the atness of the airy crest, buttressed on either side by long, leafy and curling vines, intimates the custom of espaliering branches, or binding and stretching them across twodimensional wooden armatures over time to practical and/ or aesthetic ends (g. 4.20). Hollow and interstitial, these armatures in their three-dimensional forms, like the case of arched arbors, become fully realized architecture with the progression of the growing season, as the branches

figure 4.21  The Winemaking Profession, Tacuinum santitas, ca. 1400–

figure 4.22  Lucas Cranach, Virgin of the Grapes, ca. 1520, oil on

1425. Paris, BNF Latin 9333, fol. 83r

panel, Melk Abbey

woven through their wooden matrices come into ever fuller bloom, producing verdant enclosures and sheltered respite from the blistering sun or torrential rain.38 Suused with owers or fruit-bearing plants, the shady retreats were the perfect place to ensconce oneself while working outdoors, as a vintage scene from a German vernacular edition of the Tacuinum santitas attests (g. 4.21).39 Although the predella’s vines are only beginning to sprout leaves, the stalks in the shrine are shown burgeoning to life, and they form a oral canopy over Christ and his disciples. Though seemingly free-oating, the owers crown the solemn scene of the Last Supper and are thus assimilated into the ecclesiastical sphere, conforming to the partially visible geometric Gothic patterns surmounting them, sometimes even sprouting upright nials instead of owers. Based on its symbolic associations with the Virgin as an enclosed garden (hortus conclusus), Karl Oettinger famously extended the relevance of the arbor—of the likes pictured in both Stefan Lochner’s and Martin

Schongauer’s Madonna of the Rose Bower (ca. 1450 and 1473, respectively) as well as Lucas Cranach’s Virgin of the Grapes (ca. 1520; g. 4.22)—to numerous examples of vegetating architectural forms in southern Germany around 1500, arguing for the Paradise Garden as the late Gothic conceptual pendant to the rational, geometrydriven Heavenly Jerusalem envisaged by cathedrals of the preceding High Gothic period.40 For Oettinger, the arbor epitomized horticultural architecture; coming out of the garden, a space inextricably woven with the Virgin, it also functioned metonymically to imbue the sanctuary with “a new feminine character.”41 Though a simplistic descriptor for the botanical vaults hanging over and “tree-like” carved altarpieces outtting German sanctuaries, the arbor itself is consistent with many horticultural tools and devices, whose interventionary function to tame and shape growth religious writers allegorized as the weapons wielded against Christ in his Passion.42 Martin Schwarz, guardian of the town’s Franciscan monastery at the time of the town council’s contract



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with Riemenschneider in 1501, for which he is named the primary attester, may have consulted on the iconography of cabinet and contents; from his own artworks, we know that he was familiar with the arbor motif with regard to grapes. Though listed among other witnesses to the transaction, the “prudent and wise” Schwarz is the only man given descriptors. He is also the only artist besides Riemenschneider mentioned in the contract. He endearingly incorporated the natural world into all of his compositions, delicately reproducing, for instance, several identiable species of owers in his Our Lady Altarpiece (ca. 1480–85) for Rothenburg’s Dominican convent (g. 4.23).43 Schwarz’s twelve-panel account of the Passion (1494), as Hartmut Krohm rst remarked, shows a strong formal kinship with the woodcuts illustrating Anton Koberger’s printed edition of Stephan Fridolin’s Schatzbehalter from 1491.44 Schwarz’s appearance in the contract with Harschner and Riemenschneider opens up the possibility that he advised on the altarpiece’s iconographic program; Schwarz also links the altarpiece to a local iconographic tradition involving grapes and wood. According to the nancial records, two years after Harschner commenced work on and had been receiving payments for the retable’s cabinetry in 1499, Riemenschneider ocially appears and contractually agrees, along with Harschner, among others, on a Visierung or cartoon, the author of which remains contested.45 Schwarz, a learned Franciscan, may very well have served as a spiritual consultant to the integrative design of the altarpiece, if he was not himself the one who drew the cartoon, having already consulted with Harschner—and maybe Riemenschneider, too—about the carved vegetal motifs before the gural sculptures were delivered in the subsequent months thereafter. By 1499, Schwarz had already collaborated with Riemenschneider on a painted winged retable for his Franciscan brothers (1490–95).46 In fact, two full-length portraits of Mary Magdalene and Bridget of Sweden he probably painted for the cloister of the town’s Third Order of Saint Francis (g. 4.24), of which he was an aliate, feature manicured brown branchwork frames; their shorn stalks and bulbous leaves strike a familiar chord with those crowning Riemenschneider’s Last Supper scene. Tucked in the corners, small grape bunches spell out the plants’ particular species. As in the Holy Blood Altarpiece years later, the viticultural canopies reinforce the compositions’ promise of localizing the miraculous powers of the depicted saintly

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personages. While the Magdalene holds her jar of balsam, whose herbal properties I have discussed in chapter 3, Saint Bridget clasps over her heart what must be a painted representation of the brand-new reliquary fashioned in 1491 to house Rothenburg’s storied relic: a metal cross encrusted with a rock crystal, which contained the holy stain of spilled wine. Indeed, the grape arbor was a broadly visualized metaphor in the region. The colorful pen illustration from Sister Eufrosina’s copy of Fridolin’s Spiritual May evokes Harschner’s viticultural ourishes for the predella and superstructure of the Holy Blood Altarpiece (see g. 4.6). As in the Rothenburg ensemble’s monstrance and blood reliquary, the Infant Christ is anked by traces of agricultural process: wooden posts hoist the twining vines upward, whose ends in turn coil around one another for mutual support. But the relationship of subject to frame is more than referential. Steadying his weight on a fork-shaped sta, itself consistent with the forked alder poles mentioned in Peter Drach’s text (if not also the fork-shaped arboreal crucixes discussed throughout this book), the Christ Child is literally the vine, his tufts of hair also intimating the fructuated grape bunches that envelop him.47 Further blurring the lines between human and fruit bodies in his Spiritual Autumn, Fridolin contemplates the ripening of succulent berries as Christ’s eyeballs swelling up with tears. The visual metaphor is made all the more vivid since, as Fridolin knew and as we saw in the excerpt from Drach’s text, the German word for eye (Auge) also signies baby grapes (Träublein). Their fruition indexing the welling up of Christ’s eyes throughout his life, including while he suered “on the high stake of the Holy Cross,” grapes also thematize the visual organs of the text’s reader, who “beholds” the Passion of Christ in this botanical-allegorical mode through “the eye of her mind.”48 It was not just the fruit but also the vine that was thought to weep. Before the juice-engorged bunches materialized in fall, farmers harvested a dierent precious uid directly from the branches themselves in spring, between March and June. Another example of the law of signatures (see chapter 3) that so often undergirded medieval medicine, the clear viscous droplets that trickled from incised vines were aptly called “vine tears” and so resembled those of their human counterparts that they were throughout the Middle Ages prescribed to treat oph­tha­lmological disorders (g. 4.25). Konrad von Megen­burg in ca. 1350 described the vines’ sap as “tears

above figure 4.23  Martin Schwarz, Annunciation,

Our Lady Altarpiece, ca. 1480–85. Nuremburg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum above right figure 4.24  Martin Schwarz, detail of Bridget of

Sweden, ca. 1490–1500, Saint James Church, Rothenburg right figure 4.25  Vine tears or vine water, March 2022,

Mautern, Austria

that drip out when one cuts them”; in her Physica, Hildegard of Bingen counseled that “when the vine shoot is cut in spring, collect the outowing vine drops from this incision . . . Then let some of it on your eye without wetting your eyes. When done often, the eyes will see clearly again.”49 The particular trimming method Harschner accentuates around the central pillars in the base, positioning the freshly clipped ends of vines separated from the main stalk directly before the spectator’s gaze at the predella level, alludes to, in addition to wine and thus the Eucharist, the other specic healing power yielded from grapevines and attributed to Rothenburg’s Holy Blood relic. More than any other ailment suered by its pilgrim visitors, as reported by the Teutonic Order priest Johann von Ellringen in 1442, Rothenburg’s sacramental wine relic was known to miraculously cure blindness.50 The Tree Press The examples above indicate how the Holy Blood Altarpiece is imbued with a rich language of wine technology—one that opens onto, and would have been seen in relationship to, a yet more expansive devotional tradition that interwove the wood of Christ’s Passion with the wood featured throughout the production of wine. Perhaps the most familiar wooden machine employed in the process, the winepress was a treasured device, particularly for smaller towns in possession of only one or two of them. Whereas in the early Middle Ages they were most often the property of manorial lords, winepresses in the later Middle Ages, including at least one we know of belonging to Rothenburg’s inrmary, were often installed within urban environments, just outside city walls, with their sta directed by city councils or local religious organizations.51 Their core crushing function spurring a gigantic family of Eucharistic images too numerous to exhaustively cover here, winepresses formed one piece of an extended devotional allegory that embroidered the entire autumnal season of the vintage with arboreal and carpentered stand-ins for the Wood of the Cross.52 In his Spiritual Autumn, for instance, it is not enough for Fridolin to draw functional comparisons between the press and the cross; he dwells also on the press’s mechanical model, which is by no coincidence named after a tree. The “Preßbaum,” as Fridolin calls it, is so named for the single vertical corkscrew cylinder, which, when turned, provides the hydraulic pressure for the

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press’s crossbar to crush the grapes.53 Most presses in late medieval Germany consisted of the tree form.54 Tree presses were illustrated as part of the winemaking metaphor for salvation history as early as the twelfth century. The spindle-driven planks can be seen in a copy of a now lost miniature of the mystical vintage from Abbess Herrad von Landsberg’s Hortus deliciarum, made in Alsace between 1167 and 1185 (g. 4.26).55 Trisecting the circular composition with its timber beams, the obtrusive wooden machinery contrasts with the vine stalk out of which it grows and which more gracefully snakes its way through the crowd of saints dumping grapes into a central vat. Here, the cross’s presence is typologically and materially implicit; like the winepress, it is an outgrowth of spiritual vegetation. As part of its unusual illustrated rumination on the Legend of the Wood of the Cross, the aforementioned page from The Hours of Catherine of Cleves juxtaposes the two woods: that comprising the press crushing a Melancholic Christ in the margins, with that of the standing cross above, leaning on a hilly landscape—a reference to its, and thus also the press’s, organic origins (see g. 4.8). In the same book as the Swabian Spiritual Maypole, which envisions the cross as the festive springtime tree, its publisher included a print of Christ bound and helpless, lodged in the autumn-based apparatus, this one’s gadgetry intimating a perpendicular cruciform as well as, with its four-pegged crank, the jamming down of the crown of thorns (g. 4.27). With ever greater literary and artistic indulgence on the winemaking trope, the cross sometimes outright supplants the lateral “tree” cantilever that compresses Christ’s body and squeezes out its blood, as in the Load Bearers’ Altarpiece in Munich (g. 4.28).56 What Fridolin’s writings, in particular, help to illuminate is that both technologies, the cross and the winepress, which crushed to extract salvic and economic value, were necessarily carpentered from special trees. On the ancestry of the cross, the Golden Legend reports that, once King Solomon noticed the “beauty of the tree” Seth had planted upon Adam’s grave, he felled and lumbered it for his forest house (before it was ultimately recycled for Christ’s cross generations thereafter).57 Medieval winemakers in northern Europe, like those of the Alsatian town of Weißenburg in 1275, required special privileges to chop down local trees mighty enough to press grapes.58 Combining the cross’s scriptural pregurations and hagiography, Fridolin stresses for his readers—as artists did

figure 4.27  Christ in the Winepress, 1482, woodcut,

from Geistliche Auslegung des Lebens Jesu Christi, printed in Ulm

figure 4.26  The Mystical Winepress, Herrad von Landsberg’s Hortus

deliciarum, made between 1167 and 1185, Alsace, fol. 241r

figure 4.28  The Load Bearers’ Altarpiece, ca. 1500, painting on panel.

Munich, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum

for viewers of devotional images, for that matter—in their mystical reimagination of Christ’s suering under the winepress the parallel importance of reconstituting prized trees for spiritual and material benet. It was not only Fridolin’s Clarissan nuns but also the laity who would have recognized the arboreal origins of the timber that composed both the winemaking contraption and Christ’s Holy Cross. “The Spiritual Vineyard,” a fteenth-century folk song found in numerous dioceses’ hymnals across Germany, also compares Christ’s cross to the tree press.59 Perhaps sung in coordination with the autumn feasts of the cross, the hymn reimagines Calvary as a mystical vineyard. Christ is the grape seed implanted in Mary, who carries him for nine months and nurtures him to full maturity at thirtythree years, at which point “the Jews came with weapons / and wanted to smash the noble grape. / The tree press was ready / as Scripture says [Psalm 93:1]. / The Lord God himself wanted to carry the tree press.”60 Images of the mystical winepress visualize Christ’s deference to his divine fate, as scripture foretold, by showing either farmhands or even God and saintly attendants manning the machinery (see gs. 4.27, 4.28). In instances underlining Christ’s own intentional complicity, the act of pressing is self-inicted, as in the Stör family epitaph from Nuremberg (g. 4.29).61 Squeezed from the fruits of the vine and the body of Christ, the juice and blood pool into the press’s trough as substantial equals. Either from the blood streaming down the tree press or out of the vat’s spigot, angels often appear in winepress pictures collecting the holy admixture with liturgical chalices (see g. 4.28). Though scholars generally regard the mystical winepress as the standalone winemaking emblem par excellence for Real Presence in the drinkable species of the Eucharist, there are in fact numerous other mechanical devices that stand in for Christ’s cross in the Spiritual Vintage allegories, which in their recounting of the entire production process stress wood’s indispensability in the transformation of grape juice to wine. Christ as Cask The living Wood of the Cross shape-shifting into the various carpentered technologies—some crude, others sophisticated—necessary to transform the harvested grapes into a salable fermented beverage is a leitmotif in the late medieval genre of the Spiritual Vintage. From

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the farm to altar table, the manufacture of wine was extremely labor intensive; it has been estimated that the work required for vine dressing exceeded that for cereal agriculture by a factor of eight.62 At rst, only monasteries and wealthy lords possessed the equipment and technical know-how for the industry.63 But as urban centers grew more populous by the late Middle Ages, increased demand for the drink subsequently stimulated numerous trades along the chain of production. Sophisticated carpenters were needed to build and operate winepresses, cartwrights for horse-drawn carriages, and barrelers for the cooperage. It is therefore no wonder that, concurrent with south Germany’s wine boom, religious texts and artworks began to incorporate these traces of wine’s newfound omnipresence in everyday life into an expanded repertoire of viticultural metaphors for the redemption in Christ’s suering. Particularizing long-standing exegetical traditions that underscored Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist or rearmed typological relationships between the Old and New Testaments, late medieval manifestations of vintage allegories hinge on the timely coincidence of the tending and harvests of grapes and the Feasts of Urban and the Cross for innovative environmental meditations, always undergirded by scriptural precedent, on the materiality of the spiritual wood. An altarpiece now in Munich and a votive painting from Nuremberg exemplify timber’s centrality to wine’s manufacture and the allegories that employed it as a spiritual foil for the autumnal worship of the Holy Cross.64 Likely commissioned by a family or corporation in the business of cask making and transport, the Load Bearers’ Altarpiece from around 1500 integrates the Euchar­istic motif of Christ as the Man of Sorrows in the winepress into a larger, multi-episodic story of farmhands hard at work in the wood-centered industry (see g. 4.28). In the Stör family’s votive panel, which was produced about the same time and hangs in Nuremberg’s Lorenzkirche, biblical characters assume the positions of all the divisions in the viticultural labor, lling, carting, and storing the wooden wine barrels (see g. 4.29).65 In addition to the chalice-bearing angel ying in the heavenly upper register of the Load Bearers’ Altarpiece, occupying the same space as Christ, God the Father, and three praying souls in the clouds, a group of farmhands in the foreground, on earth, gather and pour the pressed juice into large wooden barrels. In the Stör votive, Pope

figure 4.29 Mystical Vintage, Stör Family Votive Panel, after 1479, Saint Lawrence Church, Nuremberg

Gregory the Great and Saint Augustine carry out the same duties, their barrel presumably having been hammered together by the Church Fathers Ambrose and Jerome, who wield cooperage tools in the top left corner. While the workers oer viewers of both pictures a charming glimpse of late medieval labor practices, they in their myriad deployments of wood also perform the remaining steps of a newly expanded, unabridged viticultural allegory. Whether or not they had personal stakes in the wine market, the patrons of these pictures show us that scenes

from everyday life, outside church walls, functioned as popular signs that elevated one’s devotion to Christ, the Eucharist, and the Holy Cross. In other words, where Bonaventure and others left implicit the steps between the pressing of grapes and consumption of their juices, writers and artists in the later Middle Ages expanded the autumnal allegoresis of Holy Cross adoration to include wooden barrels and carts. The Mystical Barrel, for instance, is prominently featured in a woodcut illustration for the sumptuous psalter Beatae

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figure 4.30  The Mystical Barrel, Psalter

BMV from Zinna Monastery, woodcut, 1493

Mariae Virginis, printed out of the Cistercian monastery at Zinna (Brandenburg) in 1493 (g. 4.30).66 Decorating prayers to the rosary and accompanying double portraits of Emperor Frederick and his son Maximilian, in whose honor the psalter was executed, the over-life-size barrel sprays its contents onto the mouths of the gures praying with rosaries anking it and functions as a base to a miniaturized T-shaped crucix.67 The Holy Wood that constitutes both the cross and barrel is equipped to bear the physical but virtuous heft of Christ’s body and fermented wine. Expressing the same principle in his fourth week of fall prayer on the loading of the Mystical Barrel, Fridolin invites his readers to draw spiritual vigor from the tensile strength inherent to both wooden instruments. “The more you focus on the gure of Christ’s stretched out, pulled apart crucied body . . . the more you will ll your precious little barrel of will with the potent wine that will fortify you.”68 The virtue of will (Fridolin uses both “Wille” in German and “voluntas” in Latin), which refers to Christ’s willingness to sacrice himself for humankind’s salvation, is also borne out in the woodcut of the Mystical Barrel. Whereas the laborers in the Munich altarpiece and the Nuremberg votive panel are shown transferring the juice, the crucied Christ sheds blood directly into the bunghole of the barrel, in which the liquid sacrament for the Mass must rst undergo fermentation. Once it is tapped on both heads, the drum bleeds, like Christ’s nailed hands and side wound, at the sites of its injury. A means for delivering and containing the liturgical blood, the wood of the Mystical Barrel, like that of the springtime Spiritual Maypole we encountered in chapters 2 and 3, represents both the body of Christ and the weapon that brutalizes it. Outside monastic and imperial circles, everyday Germans understood and perpetuated the notion of the Mystical Barrel as a mirror for the Corpus Christi and the

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Holy Rood refashioned for winemaking. Making light of the apparent uidity between these subjects, the author of the popular Strasbourg Riddle Book (1505 or 1510)—putatively Thomas Murner, the author of the spiritualized bathing tracts discussed in the previous chapter—baits his readers to believe that Christ and the cross form the solution to the rst of his printed compilation of sixty-ve puzzles.69 The rst puzzle reads in part: “It came from on high / and suered much by heat, cold, and circumcision . . . / Thirty coins was its worth. / Sold, caught, bound, it was hammered hard . . . / Its side wounded, and its other parts / nowhere spared, high or low / out of it owed a healing fountain.”70

Following the same structure as the book’s other riddles, the solution—a wine barrel—is designed to refute all of the reader’s initial, more predictable assumptions that the puzzle actually referred to the Crucixion. As opposed to the Son of God coming from heaven above, the wine barrel originates from a tree’s wood, which in the course of preparation must be soaked in hot and cold water. It is not the Infant Christ’s genitals that are ceremonially clipped by a Jewish cleric but the wooden staves that are chopped by common cask makers (“bender”). Christ is not what is pawned for pennies, and it is not his nailed body that bleeds on the cross but the wine barrel that is hammered and kept together with metal rings (“rey”) and whose wine pours out through its bunghole and spigots (“pont vnd die zapfenlöcher”). The riddle is hence a playful, popular distillation of what the Zinna psalter woodcut expresses in ink: a tapped wine barrel mirrors Christ’s broken body on the cross. Having extended the Passion metaphors to gloss on the making and lling of casks, the secular and devotional sources also analogize the Holy Cross that delivers Christ’s redemption for humankind with the

wooden vehicles used to transport barrels of wine to their cellars. Indeed, the giant Mystical Wagon hauling the Christological barrel, which dominates the center of the Stör votive panel, structurally corresponds to the cruciform winepress enfolding the Man of Sorrows positioned directly behind it.71 In the same vein, Fridolin juxtaposes the weight of Christ’s heart to a wagonload (“füdrig”) of wine, just as the Strasbourg riddle compares the soldiers who tortured and nailed Christ to the cross to the cartwrights hoisting the heavy barrels on horse-drawn carriages.72 Likewise, Johannes Kreutzer’s “Autumn Must” prayer and the riddle highlight the formal and material kinship between the wooden beams of the cross and “two hoisting planks”—the conventional attributes of medieval freighters.73 Requiring their own set of specialized, mostly wooden devices, those who transported barrels over shorter distances, from the cart to the cellar, come into full view in the Load Bearers’ Altarpiece. The hoisting tree (Schrotbaum) and ladder, which are employed by the laborers in the foreground to convey the large drum into the cellar, echo the tree press and the living, bushy trees—from which the ever-present lumber in this scene originates—that frame the large, bloodied Christ. It is therefore in light of this local devotional and horticultural preoccupation with wine that we must consider the unpainted wooden vines that the cabinetmaker Erhard Harschner carved to enframe Rothenburg’s miraculous wine relic. Recognizable to Rothenburg’s pilgrims as emblems for the Holy Blood’s cultivated origins, the tamed vines are also indicative of the heightened presence of winemaking—and the role of wood therein—in Harschner’s métier of cabinetry. Kurt Wesoly has demonstrated that the boundaries between agriculture and handicrafts in this period were semipermeable.74 Though not at the technical caliber of rened cabinetmakers, the carpenters involved in the wine industry, such as those pictured in the Munich Load Bearers’ Altarpiece, were specialized enough to seek representation in craft guilds.75 Given that any one guild organization often encompassed a wide variety of occupations within a specic trade (for example, Strasbourg’s Guild of Cartwrights, Boxmakers, and Turners), it stands to reason that within that trade there was some mingling across the skilled orders—whether social, professional, or otherwise.76 In Frankfurt in 1492, for instance, cabinetmakers worked alongside coopers and carpenters in at least eighteen dierent breweries.77

Although sculptors did not t into the same woodworking guilds, vociferously maintaining their independence from the lower skilled orders of barrelers and cartwrights, we know that wine presided over the transactions that both Harschner and Riemenschneider conducted with Rothenburg. That the town council and Saint James’s Church christened their arrangements over wine toasts—Harschner’s quarter pitcher to Riemenschneider’s half—shows that wine was considered the privileged good at the nexus of art, craftsmanship, agriculture, and the church.78 By virtue of his trade, then, Harschner may have been a guiding force in the decision to accentuate the domesticated heritage of the Holy Blood relic iconographically with horticultural ourishes or materially with unpolychromed wood. The very harvesting and recombination of wood into myriad structures, each contrived to stimulate and sustain cycles of life, constituted sacred practice in the gurative language of the Spiritual Vintage allegories. Drinking Oneself Divine Oering a vivid glimpse into medieval industry, and perhaps emblems of the professional milieus of their patrons, the Munich and Nuremberg paintings also bear witness to diverse audiences assimilating their lived experiences into their private devotion to God. Always already reinforced by exegesis of scripture, from Isaiah, the Song of Songs, and the Gospels, the many allegorical incarnations of the Holy Wood in the Spiritual Wine’s production, however, also speak to common anxieties about the precariousness of a world in routine, but not necessarily providential, ux. Its fruits, their juices and esh, were mysterious predicates of God’s municent design that, rather than being handed out freely, needed to be cultivated and nurtured. Indeed, a primary consequence of humankind’s Fall from Paradise was its responsibility to work and contend with postlapsarian nature’s ebbs and ows in order to reap its benets. The celebration of the Exaltation of the Cross in September thus functioned as the perfect spiritual foil for the simultaneous employment of various wooden technologies that helped unleash the greatest gift of earth’s fall harvest. With the binding of vines, pressings of its grapes, and barreling and carting of their juices, medieval Germans recast Christ crucied on the Holy Wood in viticultural terms not only to deepen their adoration for the cross but also to dignify the complex carpentry



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involved in the manufacture of the wine that functioned as a cornerstone in rituals performed inside and outside the church. Part and parcel of those rituals was, of course, consuming the wine. As opposed to the liturgical sipping of Eucharistic wine from the chalice, Fridolin asks his readers to indulge in the holy drink as if they were carousing with angels, apostles, martyrs, and church ocers at a festive banquet in Heavenly Jerusalem. Hospitality was considered a Christian virtue in the Middle Ages, so the wine that the guests poured for Fridolin’s reader only helped to elevate her spiritual intoxication with God.79 Kreutzer also employs drunkenness as a metaphor for sacramental union with Christ; in the conclusion of his second “Autumn Must” prayer, he names Bernard of Clairvaux, who in his commentaries was among the rst medieval exegetes to liken the wine of the liturgy with that of the Solomonic wine cellar (Song of Songs 2:4).80 According to Solomon’s verses, once the bridegroom enters the wine cellar, the bride is oered food and beverage: “Eat, O friends, and drink, and be inebriated, my dearly beloved” (Song of Songs 5:1). Pictured in the foreground of the Load Bearers’ Altarpiece and the top right corner of the Stör votive panel, the doorways representing cellars—the one in the Stör panel surmounted by an image of King Solomon himself—harken to this nal, consumption-oriented phase of the vintage allegories. Inscribed within the Zinna woodcut and Stör votive panel, the Solomonic verses explicitly form the subtext of Fridolin’s entire fth week of prayer. For each day, his nuns dwell on a particular property of the drink—each a gift that helps liberate readers from their troubles and draw themselves closer to God.81 Together with “brashness” and “inner warmth,” for example, intoxication on the mystical wine causes a “physical numbness,” which proved particularly advantageous for the saintly martyrs who were cast to violent execution.82 If Fridolin praised the spiritual “enjoyment of the noble drink,” his fellow Nurembergers would decades later satirize its rampant abuse in the public sphere, particularly on feast days.83 At the center foreground of Sebald Beham’s expansive dedication to the subject, part of a series of kermis prints published in Nuremberg from 1528 to the mid-1530s, we see the immediate aftereects of overindulgence (g. 4.31). Almost an inversion of a Last Supper composition, a group of tipsy men and

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women sit with their cups at a table, smooching, arguing, and vomiting. As opposed to Fridolin’s portrayal of its virtuous properties in spiritual terms, the Nuremberger Erhard Schön’s illustration of “The Four Wondrous Properties of Wine and Their Eects,” a popular verse written by Hans Sachs in 1528, compares the many states of drunkenness, from friendliness to belligerence and plain madness, to the four temperaments and even the characteristics of the four beasts—lamb, bear, pig, and monkey—depicted at the foot of each table (g. 4.32). A moral commentary on the vice of uninhibited inebriation, these prints participate in the Reformational critique of Catholic festival culture, if not the topos of the mystical vine, which distracted the populace from core tenets of the faith.84 But they also attest to the popularity of wine consumption. As a Latin verse written around 1595 by a council consultant in the Franconian town of Rothenburg attests, wine was more or less the conventional drink of the day, given the town’s paucity of fresh spring water: “If the water shortage has depressed you since you can remember / still today it is said / here the water is often rarer than the wine.”85 According to surviving records, patients and sta of Rothenburg’s inrmary (Neue Spital)— an extensive foundation whose personnel included a blacksmith, a wainwright, a gravedigger, vintners, wardens, guards, dairymaids, cooks, and so on—could be expected to consume approximately three-fourths Maß of wine each day, just shy of one liter, which is about half the consumption to which patients were entitled on holidays.86 Franconia was wine country, and Fridolin and other spiritual writers exploited its ubiquity in production and consumption, as well as its rich history in the Bible, to extend his devotional exercises through the vintage season, pairing the grape harvest with Christ’s suering on the cross. Wine, of course, was also of paramount concern to the sacrament of the Mass. Indeed, there was little to no material dierence between the vintage of wine ritually consumed at the altar and that casually imbibed by the laity, certainly those of a higher social status. Although water was often added to dilute it and to accord with the bipartite emission from Christ’s pierced side wound (John 19:34), liturgical wine was ordinary wine rendered miraculous.87 With some exceptions, it was largely purchased from the same vineyards and cultivated by the same farmhands as that acquired by institutions,

top figure 4.31  Detail of gure 2.7 showing

vine trellis and festival drunkenness below figure 4.32  Erhard Schön, Four Properties

of Wine, 1528, woodcut

spiritual and secular, for nonsacramental use.88 When it came to Christ’s Eucharistic body, on the other hand, the distinction between the makeup and facture of everyday bread and unleavened hosts was starkly drawn.89 Only the nest grades of wheat our (farina triticea), as Aquinas and many others put it, could approximate the heavenly bread oered by Christ to his disciples, which, in accordance with the Jewish tradition at Passover, necessarily lacked yeast.90 As Aden Kumler’s research

has shown, the fastidious aspiration for purity extended to the production of the wafers, for every step in the process was carefully prescribed to minimize human contamination (from saliva or hair, for example) as well as any trace of human intervention (such as ngerprints or asymmetries).91 Perhaps because its owing, fugitive nature inherently resists any signs of immediate human touch, the church was less discriminating with the drinkable species.



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The uid to be substantially transformed into Christ’s blood needed to be wine, probably of high quality and almost certainly void of apparent impurities, but wine nonetheless—that is, fermented grape juice served at the Last Supper, tended from the kind of vines to which Christ compared himself in John 15. Though red wine’s formal likeness to Christ’s blood rendered it preferable, the color of wine that the celebrant chose was often considered incidental to its instrumental capacity as an agent to the Eucharistic sacrament.92 Instead of the propriety of its ingredients and manufacture, what mattered most, aside from the wine not spoiling into vinegar, was that the admixture of wine and water did not alter the former’s idiosyncratic ontology.93 In his letter De materia eucharistie, which became part of Gregory IX’s compilation of decretals (ca. 1234), Honorius III reminds his readers, likely those who helped formulate decisions in ecclesiastical law, of the “Church’s general and reasonable custom [that] more wine than water” be mixed in the Eucharistic solution.94 Robert Grosseteste also admonished against the dilution of wine, lest it lose its character—or, in other words, what dened the bottled vintage per se, with all of its quirks and quiddities as a cultivated, fermented beverage.95 Unlike the Host, which is always walled o from other bread, from the beginning of its making, wine that is the communion wine is not necessarily distinct from the wider world of wine; as the dilution of wine demonstrates, wine must remain denitively wine up to the point of its transubstantiation. Its ordinariness is, in fact, what makes its miraculous transubstantiation into the blood of Christ very particular. It was precisely such ordinary wine that comprised the famed Holy Blood relic in Rothenburg. Instead of blood from Christ’s historic body or blood appearing as ecks on the Host, Rothenburg’s Holy Blood was always insistently consecrated wine. The few sources that clarify its mundane origins never associate it with wine transubstantiated from the original Last Supper but rather that from the Mass celebrated locally in Rothenburg. For example, in his compilation of Rothenburg’s trove of relics, the Teutonic Order priest Johann von Ellringen described the Holy Blood in 1442 as “three droplets of blood spilt on a corporal cloth” that “remain visible” in the eponymous chapel’s reliquary cross, which on stylistic grounds the historian Anton Ress dates to around 1270 (see gs. 4.1, 4.3).96 At some point in the thirteenth century, then, the wine relic presumably rst appeared. Having been consecrated

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before spilling onto the corporal, the blood of Christ “must have produced a second-order miracle,” as Katherine Boivin put it, and subsequently sparked a cult following that persisted through the time Riemenschneider was commissioned to aunt it for pilgrims.97 Rothenburg was by no means the only city to claim possession of a miraculous sacramental blood relic, though in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, most instances came out of the Low Countries and France.98 In his volume on the varieties of the Holy Blood, Karl Kolb surveys a number of wine-related relics in Germany, each with a unique origin story. In twelfth-century Merseburg, leftover drops from an inadequately cleaned chalice were swabbed, stowed away, and venerated—though no cult developed.99 Forgotten for decades after its miraculous appearance in 1310, the blood-stained corporal from the Benedictine cloister of Saint Georg in Tyrol was installed in a monstrance in the late fteenth century.100 Sometimes the blood appears on corporals in absence of the wine, as was the case in Waldsassen in 1218, when the white cloth showed signs of the blood only after a priest laundered it.101 Unlike these examples, though, Rothenburg seems to have been able to compete with the cultic sites in Reichenau, Schwerin, Weingarten, and Cismar, all of which championed traces of the blood Christ shed on Calvary.102 Moreover, Rothenburg continued to invest in the marketability of its sacramental relic even in the face of a shifting excitement in Germany for blood hosts—or the Holy Blood insofar as it appeared as spots or droplets on the surface of Christ’s Eucharistic body.103 In Caroline Walker Bynum’s summation, “The primary form of blood wonder in the fourteenth and fteenth centuries was the eruption of blood from the (mishandled or desecrated) wafer. Thus we might say that, for the most part, it was bread, not wine, that turned into blood.”104 While consumption of the Host was indeed also highly regulated, consecrated wine was consumed only by the ociant. It was excluded from lay consumption precisely due to its hazardous potential as a liquid to spill from the chalice; its accidental form, in sacramental parlance, was indeed prone to accident, or unintended harm. Consequently, the practical dangers of administering this other species of the Eucharist were mitigated by the precept of concomitance, which promised the dual presence of body and blood in either the wine or Host alone—hence the miraculous wafers that bled when they were stabbed.105

figure 4.33  Frontispiece to Jodokus (Jost) Hofus’s De sacrae

waltdurensis, woodcut, 1589, printed in Würzburg

While the vast majority of Holy Blood pilgrimage churches in the immediate and general vicinity of Rothenburg were associated with host miracles, the blood relic out of Walldürnn is its closest peer in origin and eect.106 Also the result of carelessness with the chalice, the rivulets of transubstantiated wine splattering on a corporal during a Mass service there in 1330, however, subsequently pooled together to form multiple miraculous faces of Christ.107 Later framed and exhibited for pilgrims, the stained corporal came to be appreciated less for the material substance of consecrated wine than for the visual forms the wine miraculously reproduced.108 Moreover, popular interest in the relic did not develop until a century after the miracle took place, when the town, much in the spirit of Rothenburg, began to nance the enlargement of the church complex with indulgences. The legend was not recorded until 1589, when the priest Jost Hous published a leaet as part of his campaign to institute an annual pilgrimage to coincide with the Trinity festival (g. 4.33).109 A testament to the pictorial

nature of Walldürn’s blood relic, Hous’s cover, a graphic translation of the original miraculous account with its allusions to the Holy Face, inspired copies for centuries and ultimately propelled the relic into the realm of the cult image.110 On the other hand, the unremarkable material origins in the wine of the Mass were never lost with Rothenburg’s Holy Blood. On the commemoration of the west chapel renovation, the relic was embedded in a large oval rock crystal in 1491. While physically magnifying its contents, the crystal also bears an inscription from 1502 that dignies the relic’s humble origins, “a drop of Christ’s blood on a corporal,” echoing Ellringen’s description from some sixty years earlier.111 For Rothenburg, there was nothing else to commemorate, no supplementary miracle, other than that which took place at every Mass: the theological doctrine of transubstantiation, which equates consecrated wine (in substance) with Christ’s blood.112 The altarpiece itself articulates this principle, situating the relic between Gabriel and the Annunciate Virgin and under the Man of Sorrows to underscore the euvial equivalence of Christ’s lifeblood, in his Incarnation and Passion, and consecrated wine (see g. 4.3). But the sacramental is also accompanied by the terrestrial. As has been mentioned, espaliered vines buttress the predella’s and the superstructure’s Christological composition. The braided branches, shorn of their twigs, which immediately frame the aureate, blood-bearing cross also call to mind the use of trees, instead of alder poles, around which vines would twist like garlands, in the production of wine.113 In addition to narratival tropes from scripture, the altarpiece thus also turns to the mundane, material practice of the vintage—itself already imbricated with the Wood of the Cross—to point out the central miracle: the workaday substance from the elds surrounding the church, referenced by the horticultural iconography of the cabinet’s frame, miraculously transformed into the drops constituting the Holy Blood. Restaged on the altarpiece, and performed anew in the liturgy before it, the ordinary becomes the extraordinary. Riemenschneider’s “Woodiness” More than its idiosyncratic iconographic program and structural morphology, by far the question to which most of the Holy Blood Altarpiece’s technical studies have dedicated themselves is its monochrome appearance—what German scholars have called its Holzsichtigkeit, its wood



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surfaces left unpainted for the eyes to see. Neither term, however, monochrome nor Holzsichtigkeit, perfectly encapsulates the Holy Blood’s surfaces.114 The lips and pupils of many gures were tinted pink and ocher, and it is not in fact bare wood but rather a translucent glaze, applied immediately after the altarpiece’s completion, that is visible to the eye.115 Technical observations aside, scholars have been preoccupied with why the altarpiece was left unpainted, with explanations ranging from a burdensome additional cost for painting’s labor and raw materials, a new aection for a monochrome aesthetic in various sculptural media due to the advent of printmaking, and a greater participation of furniture makers in altarpiece production, to a growing need to placate an increasingly vociferous, if nebulous, iconoclastic zeitgeist. In his famous volume, Michael Baxandall asserted that the burghers of Rothenburg’s city council erred cautiously with their commission, opting for a “certain puritanism . . . and moral weight” of parsimony to “conciliate resentments below, divert enthusiasm into stable channels.”116 His attribution resonated with a more broadly held interpretation. Bernhard Decker has written that the staining of sculpture in a wood-colored monochrome was a direct “attempt to make cult images less vulnerable to idolatry” than their “coloured and gilded” counterparts.117 Contemporary sources would seem to indicate the blatant foregrounding of wood, which in this period and region replaced stone as the preferred medium of sculpture, was not prima facie a form of imagistic self-abnegation. Nor was it a ploy to outmaneuver the impending hammer of iconoclasts, who openly disdained the material’s abundant presence in church spaces. In addition to the precious metals and stonework that adorned the church, wooden retables, screens, and choir stalls alike were axed to pieces, set ablaze, or recycled for practical civic use.118 Wooden images—and the trees from which that wood was timbered—were especially susceptible to the mistaken impression of demonic possession, according to what Andreas Karlstadt wrote in his pamphlet On the Removal of Images from 1522. “I stand in fear that I might not be able to burn idols. I would fear that some devil’s block of wood would do me injury . . . Although, on the one hand, I have Scripture and know that images have no power and also no life, no blood, no spirit, yet, on the other, fear holds me and makes me stand in awe of the image of a devil, a shadow, the notice of a small falling leaf.”119 For Karlstadt, it may well have

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been the ornamental leaf tracery in addition to the gural sculpture that triggered a false sense of animacy. A leaf shed from the margins calls to mind the living thing from which the idol’s possessed material constitution—a block of wood—originated: a tree. But not just any tree. He also wrote, “You shall destroy their altars and break down their images, fell their limewood trees [linden], and burn their carved images [geschnitzte bilder] with re.”120 Putting a contemporary spin on a verse from Deuteronomy, Karlstadt pointedly bifurcates representation from medium to emphasize the destruction of both the idol and its material makeup—limewood sculpture, one of the most common forms of representation in Karlstadt’s day. The decision of Rothenburg’s town council to underscore the altarpiece’s arboreal origins would prove all the more meaningful because, as far as can be gathered from the surviving evidence, the Holy Blood Altarpiece might well represent the rst of Riemenschneider’s carved ensembles that was from the outset deliberately spared pigmentation and gilding. Admittedly, determining intention for unpolychromed altarpieces in this early period of their innovation—before they became a viable option in the marketplace, in their own right—is among Riemenschneider specialists an infamously elusive endeavor.121 While conservators suggest that the presence of a discrete, glazed coating applied to a carving’s surfaces best indicates a motivation for a “monochrome” nished product, the rule is hardly conclusive for the rst wave of Riemenschneider’s large-scale commissions.122 The translucent varnish appears on the retable he carved in 1490–92 for the high altar of the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene in Münnerstadt; but Veit Stoss ultimately painted over it in 1502.123 And while it is absent in his Marian altarpiece now in Creglingen, conservators have also concluded that despite the unnished impression of its surfaces—their pallid color and the visible discrepancy between the r cabinet and limewood carvings—there is no indication that polychromy was ever applied, either.124 Had Creglingen’s patrons run out of nancing, or does the Marian altarpiece exemplify a shift toward a toleration or acceptance of unpolychromed altarpieces? Regardless of whether Creglingen was produced either immediately before or after the Holy Blood Altarpiece, both works emerge at a critical inection point in the history of style when Riemenschneider experimented with novel possibilities for his craft amid a growing, if ambivalent, taste for the new unpolychromed aesthetic.125 In the case of the Holy Blood retable, then, to have glazed

rather than polychromed the carved wood demonstrates a conscious choice in design that departed from but established a new norm—one that was integral to its express purpose to exhibit the town’s miraculous wine relic. Furthermore, to consider the glazed wood in exclusively visual-optical terms, as scholars have historically done, is to overlook the organic nature of the larger ensemble as a whole. The varnish, while also a protective measure against worm infestation and dust particles, moistens the wood, which, after the desiccation process in preparation for carving, appears strained and astringent.126 Egg-based with ocher, gypsum, and biochar additives, the varnish reinfuses the wood with a natural vigor that not only unites in color and texture the sculpted limewood forms and the carpentered spruce cabinet but also underscores the shared medial and biological origins of the carved bodies and the busy network of simulated organic forms: vines and leaves in the predella and crest, and owers and leafy branches above the central shrine.127 Surprisingly, no previous commentator has made more than a passing remark on the altarpiece’s manicured branch and leaf tracery, much less their iconographic and material connections with the rest of the program.128 Indeed, the historical consideration of wood as medium has been limited to the conceit that good craftsmanship is a function of clever material eacement; ideally, rawness surrenders to skill.129 That the altarpiece was left unpainted, though, only calls greater attention to the deliberate oscillation between nature and artice, to the homology of the hewn branches and their material substrate. To the extent that emerging graphic arts spurred an aesthetic preference for unpainted carving, Britta Dümpelmann has suggested that the reduction of surface color ultimately revealed “materialities” of “sculptural substance.”130 My aim is to demonstrate that sculptors for the projects in Rothenburg and Creglingen embraced wood’s woodiness, both its outer appearance and its inner essence, to convey the recursive layers that bound together grapevine and wood, cross and wine. Rothenburg’s chapel was consecrated in 1266 to the body and blood of Christ—and was among the earliest known to bear this dual dedication.131 The two primary liturgies celebrated at the Holy Blood Altarpiece since its foundation in 1467, as well as the altarpiece’s commission a handful of decades thereafter, all signal a lasting devotion to both halves of the Eucharist.132 Conceived functionally and morphologically rather like a monstrance,

figure 4.34  Hans and Claus Schmid of Würzburg, Monstrance, Bad Mergentheim Treasury, ca. 1509

with its extraordinary geometric footing, xed open wings, and central glazed windows, the altarpiece was, in fact, stipulated in its design to encompass one.133 On the same vertical axis as the Holy Blood relic, a “sacrament house,” according to Riemenschneider and Harschner’s contract, would have held the body of Christ for display in the altarpiece’s predella. Now lost with the passage of time, the original sacrament house may have captivated its viewers with the same kind of shimmering silvery surface we see in the monstrance that Riemenschneider’s stepsons produced for the Franconian town of Bad Mergentheim commissioned in 1509 (g. 4.34).134 Responding to the dedication of the chapel, the liturgies performed at its Holy Blood Altarpiece, and his contract, while prioritizing the blood relic, Riemenschneider’s gural contributions took up the frame’s promise of the ordinary wine made blood



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figure 4.35  The pointing apostle, Holy Blood Altarpiece, view from the

north

from central standing point

and its resonances with wood—that is, the Wood of the Cross—and expanded it to encompass the Host, thereby completing the miracle that took place on the altar. The multiple resonances of Riemenschneider’s gural program—especially the central Last Supper, an uncommon choice for an altarpiece’s shrine—unfold as the viewer moves across the altarpiece.135 If the assumption that pilgrims entered the chapel from the north side is correct, pilgrims would have probably encountered the body of Christ rst.136 Before they even traverse the threshold into the chapel, a seated apostle, noteworthily staring outward from an oblique angle to the northern stairwell, ensnares them into the unfolding drama (g. 4.35). Disengaged from what occupies his compatriots, the seated apostle also physically breaks the frame of the cupboard, opening the right side of his body to point the viewers’ attention downward toward the sacrament house, which stood in place of a modern crucix in the predella. Moving forward to stand in front of the altar, the viewers lock gazes with Christ, who hovers from the rear and oers a piece of bread to the lone-standing and faceless apostle. From the frontal viewpoint, the infamous

160

figure 4.36  The False Communion of Judas, Holy Blood Altarpiece, view

The Spiritual Vintage

moneybag identies the only standing gure as Judas and therefore the bread given to him as both species, since, according to John 13:26, Christ rst soaked the sop in wine before handing it to his traitor (g. 4.36).137 Along the same vertical axis as Judas and the host monstrance, the Holy Blood relic comes into view above the fray in the superstructure, fullling in “real” terms the concomitance purported by Christ’s central oering carved in wood. Two small gures in the projecting corner panels of the wings, an Old Testament prophet and a monk—for his corpulence and exposition on transubstantiation, sometimes identied as Thomas Aquinas—each point to the corpus and sanguis Christi, underscoring Rothenburg’s longstanding but unique commitment to the exultation of both species, discretely (see g. 4.1). A formal and conceptual pendant to the introductory meditation on the predella’s monstrance, Riemen­ schneider concludes the cinematic unfurling of his Last Supper composition with a dedication to the Holy Blood. In a remarkable move of artistic legerdemain, Riemenschneider congured his gures such that, as pil­ grims advanced closer to the southern exit, an apostle

figure 4.37  The drinking apostle complementing Judas, Holy Blood

Altarpiece, view from the south

holding a wine goblet appears in the spatial breach opened by Judas’s forward-leaning body (g. 4.37). A precise reection to Judas clutching his sinister attribute is the adjacent apostle’s extended arm, whose hand gesture echoes that of Christ, holding a cup of wine versus the morsel of bread. Chalices and wine consumption relate not only to the physical sacramental relic itself but also to miracles known to have transpired in the Holy Blood chapel as early as the fourteenth century. Among the more colorful accounts Johann von Ellringen recites in his compilation of Holy Blood miracles are two whose thaumaturgical ecacy explicitly relates to drinking from chalices.138 A local woman from Rothenburg, for example, was cured of her speechlessness once “she drank out of the chalice before the altar.”139 Likewise, a maid, who suddenly became mute on the Feast of Saint Martin, “drank from the chalice in the same chapel” and regained her speech.140 For a space “consecrated in honor of the holy body of our Lord Jesus Christ and his holy blood,” as Ellringen reminds us with a red-inked headline to his entries, it seems only fair to assume that verbal or visual portrayals of consuming wine from a chalice within the

Holy Blood chapel would elicit mental associations with its eponymous relic.141 Like Harschner’s branch tracery, Riemenschneider’s gural sculpture keyed into popular consciousness of wine to captivate its viewers. Indeed, our understanding of what the foliate ornament frames, the unusual Last Supper iconography and its spotlighting of Judas’s false communion is incomplete without some consideration of how Harschner, by exploiting the iconic and indexical representational potential of his lively, unpainted vine carvings, sought to convey wine qua wine. In keeping with John 15, the tamed, trained vines primed for the fall vintage parallel the virtuous disciples sculpted at the Last Supper, who grow fruitfully out of the prototypical, true vine of Christ—that is, all the disciples except Judas, the deviant, withered branch that God the husbandman would toss into the re and burn.142 Harschner’s and Riemenschneider’s simulated rejuvenation of inert timber to its former vigorous woodiness possessed an additional layer of confessional signicance, particular to Holy Week celebrations. The day on which repentants were ceremoniously absolved of their sins, Maundy Thursday, the day of the Last Supper, nicknamed Green Thursday (Gründonnerstag) in Germany since the Middle Ages, a term that stems from Luke’s metaphorical passage on the dry wood, which having followed a virtuous path, ultimately blossoms into greenness (Luke 23:31).143 By the 1520s, Riemenschneider’s unusual composition would be copied but altered to cater to a reformed audience that prized the Word of God above all else.144 The Last Supper would become a far more prevalent theme for Protestant altarpieces, where emphasis in the Mass shifted to a symbolic reenactment of the historical event, as recounted in the Gospels. Viticultural and vegetal themes persisted but, as the epilogue to this book illustrates, only insofar as they stuck to the letter of scripture and operated in a safe, abstract register of signication. For Protestants who vigorously disavowed real presence and the cult of the saints, there was no allowing for the cross’s extrabiblical legendary biography, much less anything like may devotion, where the healing and magical power of plants was attributed to a saintly tree. The kinds of slippage between the bodies of Christ, the cross, and plants which the previous pages have laid bare would no longer be abided. In word and image, they would be vigilantly reeled in and controlled.



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Epilogue The Protestant Reection of Spiritual Greenery

It is partly because of the people who objected to them that we have records of the plant-centered liturgical and popular rituals that were carried out across late medieval Germany. The Middle Low German verse referenced in chapter 2 of this book, which railed against the indecency of the revelers carousing about the maypole, lay bare the practice of this custom in the rst place. Evocative of contemporary critiques of Catholic festival culture, the verse in its juxtaposition of the maypole dance and the Crucixion signals a dangerous potential slippage from mindless secular merrymaking to idolatrous apostasy. The decorated tree could provoke unjust adoration as a corruption of Christ on the cross or worse, as Sebastian Franck would have it, a “heathen” medium between wor­ shippers and false nature gods. While the identity of the maypole verse’s author is unknown, the logic of their screed comports with that of Frank’s Weltbuch of 1534, a title cited throughout this book because it is a veritable ethnographic trove of the various ways the church invoked greenery throughout the liturgical year. An avowed but solitary reformer who operated apart from the move­ ment’s inuential cliques, Franck was, like his peers, a

God’s Lament for the Fate of His Vineyard, 1532, woodcut, detail og g. 5.4

diligent humanist who obsessively observed his contem­ porary surroundings to critique them. Among what he and his fellow reformers saw was widespread distraction from the “pure gospel” of God, a fetishistic attachment to the cult of saints and their relics and images, the consecrated Eucharist, and the blessings of objects such as plants.1 It is perhaps for this reason that he dedicates so many lines enumerating the “Roman Christians’” traditions during the Cross Week, Ascension, Saint Urban’s Day, and the Virgin Thirty, among others. Above all else—and this is where he nds real company among his fellow reformers in the early sixteenth century—Franck resists the institution of the church itself as a mediating force between Christ and his followers. In the preceding century, though, before the Reforma­ tion broke out in earnest there was a short-lived but eervescent movement of “pulpit theology” whose calls for reform from within sometimes betrayed similar anxieties over a world inundated with extraliturgical rituals involv­ ing things like greenery.2 The so-called prince of the pulpit, Johannes Geiler von Keysersberg, whose sermons are also quoted throughout the preceding pages, sought to redress

what he believed to be pervasive moral decay inside and outside the church by directly reaching into people’s hearts with a ery, if racy, vernacular that they could digest. Although Geiler recognized the “magical” powers that the church invested in the herbs it consecrated, he drew a clear distinction between what is inherently holy and what is made to be. On the question of why one can feed cattle plants blessed on Assumption Day but not the shank of the Paschal lamb, Geiler answers: “Est dierencia inter sancticationem et sancticatum. There is a dierence between that which the priest blesses and what is blessed; what is taken by the priest’s hand and what is holy, [the latter of] which one should not feed to dogs or animals; but the other, which [the priest] blessed, one can surely do that.”3 Geiler’s admonition of the blurring line between sacrament and sacramental presages the herbalist and reformer Hieronymus Bock, who in his Kreutterbuch of 1539 expresses overt skepticism of the “many superstitions women possess with owers and herbs that belong among those blessed on the day of Our Lady’s Assumption.”4 The same superstition suspected around perversions of church doctrine led to a rash of Protestant rule books published in the 1550s and 1560s, which among other rituals railed against the Virgin Thirty and the consecration of herbs. The twelfth provision from a police order in Leiningen (1566), which was targeted against clerical malpractice in the south German Pfalz region of Oberbronn (modern France), levies a ten-orin ne against “godless, supersti­ tious priests or monks who have consecrated wax, palms, candles, or herbs, with which one uses magic, chanting, and witchcraft.”5 Even in Protestant areas, though, the rich, variegated network of Catholic paraliturgical sacramen­ tals continued to threaten the controlled domain of what constituted a pure sacrament, the inherent grace of which was being projected onto the ephemeral and everyday or, more hazardously, misdirected for the black arts. The reformers’ criticism and prohibition, though, presup­ pose the common credence in the added power of herbs that were consecrated in the name of Mary, Christ, and the saints. Beyond the liturgy, botanists sometimes complained that the religious superstitions surrounding plants stunted scientic progress. Otto Brunfels (1488–1534), one of the so-called fathers of modern botany, bemoaned the mul­ tiplicity of plant names adopted by Christians, which

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complicated the process of cross-referencing species with the more clinical, objective classication system employed in ancient texts. In his entry on Saint Mary’s Thistle, whose properties he enumerates just as he does for hundreds of other plants in his Kreutterbuch of 1532, Brunfels also gripes about the Christian interference in his scientic discourse, with its numerous and arbitrary appellations. “What our Hermolaus Barbarus [i.e., Pliny] is calling Cardum mariae we call Thistle of the Virgin or Morning Thistle. That is, saints’ names have invalidated [umgestossen] the ancient heritage and original names of herbs.”6 His real diatribe on the discrepancy between ancient and contemporary approaches to herbalism, though, is fully articulated in the seldom-read prologue to the same treatise: Today we still attribute numerous herbs and owers to Gods: Trinity orets, the rose of Our Lady, Holy Ghost ower and spice, Mary Magdalene owers, herb of Saint James, herb of Saint Christopher, Saint Mary’s Thistle, Saint Peter’s herb, Saint Lawrence’s herb, Saint John’s Wort, and countless others that are deemed particularly vaunted and vigorous for no other reason than the saint after which they are named supposedly having had founded, signied [anzeygt], and blessed them. On the plant Hyssop, it is said that our Lord Jesus planted it with his own Godly hand. It is entirely ridiculous to speak, much less to believe—indeed it does not give justice to plants, which our forefathers and elders, who appreciated and valued them so highly—that their signicance and powers were given to them by gods and the Allerheiligstes.7

A Reformed theologian and former Carthusian monk, Brunfels does not question God’s cosmogonical hand in nature’s design but rather argues for the innate ecacy of plants independent of popular ascriptions. His stern empiricism, though, is a hallmark of burgeoning modern medicinal methods that represents an epistemic shift from those of the preceding generation, in which, for example, I would consider an artist like Matthias Grünewald to be an active player. Like Brunfels, who commissioned the accomplished woodcut artist Hans Weiditz to accurately represent his subjects from life, Grünewald painstak­ ingly observed the visual idiosyncrasies of the numerous vegetal species he studied. For Weiditz and his artistic peers, though, the depicted plants’ instrumental powers

could not be divorced from their saintly namesakes, whom Grünewald nearly always painted as their corporeal counterparts. In his striving to simulate the matter and earthiness of the plants and trees pictured in his painted panels, Grünewald was making a conceptual leap beyond associative signication and proposing a physical pres­ ence of holiness in nature, which, while consistent with contemporary devotional traditions, would have been totally anathema to the Reformers, theologians and bota­ nists alike. Indeed, the employment of botanical and agricul­ tural metaphors took on an entirely new character for Protestants. For Catholics, spiritualized cultivation centered around imagery of Christ’s Passion. In those explored in the preceding pages, the Wood of the Cross in its various vegetal and carpentered instantiations was asserted as the agent in the reaping of earth of its spiritual and material benets. Rather than exegetical or apocry­ phal tropes, Protestants stuck to the letter of scripture and extrapolated from it only the gurative register of its hor­ ticultural imagery. For the frontispiece to his “Sermon on the New Testament, That Is the Holy Mass,” printed in Leipzig in 1520, Martin Luther chose a woodcut picture of Christ in the winepress (g. 5.1). On the surface it appears familiar to its Catholic forebears in its construction. Staged before trellised vines, the God-man is shown hunched over and treading the grapes of wrath, their juices owing into the chalice in the foreground. But ever so slight adjustments bring it into line with Luther’s new vision for the spirit of the Mass and sacramental theology—one that took a laserlike focus on the Word of God as it was handed down in scripture. At the time his sermon was printed, Luther was more or less in agreement with the doctrine of Real Presence, that God revealed himself in the worldly “exter­ nal [eusßerlich] sign” of sacraments, as to Noah the sign of the rainbow, Abraham the circumcision, and us Christ his “own true body and blood under the bread and wine.”8 What Luther feared, however, was Christendom’s idola­ trous fervor for “sacrament without testament”: Many have written of the fruits of the mass, and indeed have greatly exalted them; nor do I question the value of these fruits . . . God has here prepared for our faith a pasture, table and feast; but faith is fed with nothing except the Word of God alone. Therefore you must take

figure 5.1  Frontispiece to Martin Luther’s Eyn Sermou von dem newen

Testament. das ist von der heyligen Messe Doct. Mar. L. Aug, 1520, woodcut, printed in Leipzig

heed above all things to the words, exalt them, highly esteem them, and hold them fast; then you will have not simply the drops of blessing (tropruchtlín) from the mass, but the very head-waters of faith, from which springs and ows all that is good.9

Real Presence is assured in the bread and wine because God can manifest himself on earth and, as Luther wishes to emphasize, because Christ himself uttered the words, “This is my body . . . This is my blood.” In the same vein, we are meant to read the sermon’s frontispiece of Christ in the winepress as a straight, stable illustration of biblical verse—namely, Christ’s selfappellation as grapevine in the Gospel of John, his blood’s

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165

figure 5.2  Title page of the Elector Lutheran Bible, 1649, engraving,

printed in Nuremberg

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Epilogue

presence in the Eucharistic wine chalice from all the syn­ optic Gospels, and the viticultural allegorizations of his Crucixion as foretold by Isaiah in the Old Testament. The woodcut artist is careful to avoid dangling referents or paraliturgical innuendo. Christ dons the crown of thorns as he would have on the cross; the other Arma Christi, unlike what we saw in The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, for instance, are absent, for the Man of Sorrows we behold here is pictured faithfully to scriptural rather than apoc­ ryphal or legendary accounts. Christ bleeds only from his side wound and into the trough. There is no incidental splatter or spillage on the cross, calling improper atten­ tion to its putative saintly role in salvation history. All sacrament allusions—the tethered vines, Christ’s blood, the trampled grapes, the wine of the Mass—fall within the semantic space of the biblical text, within the connes of the picture frame. Christ’s frontal gaze and the liturgical chalice—held not by a saint or angel in liturgical vest­ ments—propped humbly on the ground under the spigot imply the spectator’s direct access to Christ and the sacra­ ment of the Mass without the intercession of saints and their relics—human or vegetal—or the institution of the church.10 Luther states this plainly in the text of his ser­ mon: “Thus it becomes clear that it is not the priest alone who oers the sacrice of the mass, but every one’s faith, which is the true priestly oce, through which Christ is oered as a sacrice to God. This oce the priest, with the outward ceremonies of the mass, simply represents.”11 Besides its reference to Christ’s presence in the drink­ able Eucharist, the motif for Protestants also called atten­ tion to the solitary nature of Christ’s sacrament. They exploited the emphasis in Isaiah 63:3–5 that it was the Messiah alone who would tread the winepress as a rally­ ing cry for hagiolatry. For instance, the preacher Johann Schuler paraphrased the same Isaiah verses in a sermon he delivered in 1609, expressing the notion of Christ honoring anyone as a saint, from Francis to even his own mother, as an “abomination.” “I treaded the wine press alone, and none of the nations was with me. I looked around, there was no helper.”12 In the so-called Elector’s Luther Bible printed in Nuremberg in 1649, the Isaiah verse inscribes a Herculean Christ squatting under the weight of a corkscrew winepress at the top of the titular engraved illustration (g. 5.2). From the wounds of Christ’s stigmata a hemispheric series of arcs link Christ to his fol­ lowers in the contemporary world and from biblical his­ tory. Whereas the monks in the Zinna psalter are shown

figure 5.3  Lucas Cranach the Younger, Luther and the Vineyard of the

Lord (Epitaph for Paul Eber), Parish Church of Wittenberg, 1569

catching the Eucharistic wine from the mystical barrel with their mouths, the Protestants printed in the Luther Bible receive Christ’s sacramental blood-wine cognitively, in the abstract, as the diagrammatic lines emanating from Christ in the winepress terminate on their heads (see g 4.30). The object of their minds’ eyes is also the referent of the Divine Word to which each and every one of them—and the reader, by extension—has unfettered access. Along the same central vertical axis at the bottom Christ reappears, this time as a preacher. With his index nger, a deictic gesture, he points to an opened vernacular Bible—the very text bearing this engraving, open for all to

see—propped atop an altar.13 As opposed to its Catholic counterpart, the Protestant altar is no site of magical sub­ stantial transformation of bread and wine, much less of the consecration of earthly greenery. One of the best examples of Protestants spiritualizing more extended agricultural allegories comes from Lucas Cranach the Younger’s epitaph of 1569 for the hymnist and Luther condant Paul Eber (g. 5.3).14 Still ensconced beneath its aedicule on the walls of Wittenberg’s parish church, the painting portrays a variation of the parable of the Vineyard of the Lord from Matthew 20 and 21 and Psalm 80 to convey something else—a deeper, albeit

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167

nonsacramental, level of signication: the uprooting of Roman Catholic weeds that have infested the Christian garden and rotted the Word of God. Borrowing from his father the hallmark “antithetical” compositional format of juxtaposing good versus bad, Cranach the Younger bifurcates the allegorical vineyard with a ditch down the middle, splitting the reformers from the clergy.15 Fullling the prophecy of Isaiah 5, the Catholics toss severed vines into the re, pour stones into the well, and engage in other acts of self-sabotage to desecrate the eld, “where briers and thorns shall come up” (Isa. 5:6). Luther commands the other half, itself a kind of group portrait of the major Protestant gures in Wittenberg at the time, among whose ranks Eber was counted. Cloaked in black at the center, Luther rakes while his supporters obediently weed, water, pluck, and bind so that the garden may thrive. Eber is shown kneeling, pruning the vine just below Luther. Besides his physical likeness, Eber inserts him­ self as the subject of his epitaph in the form of a pun—a gure of speech beloved by humanist reformers—that ris on his last name. Eber, which translates to “boar,” is the epithet Pope Leo X used to indict Luther in his CounterReformational bull of 1520, in which he compared Luther to a boar that wreaked havoc “on the administration of the Vineyard, an image of the triumphant church of Peter.”16 Flipping the pope’s bull on its head, Cranach the Younger portrays the pope with his hand outstretched to the Vineyard’s Lord, here in the guise of Christ. While the pope and his entourage appear dissatised with their compensation, Eber and his family genuect opposite them, with their hands folded or holding the Bible. Instead of from the church’s appurtenances, from the Eucharist, or from relics or arbitrary Good Works, salvation for the Protestant Ebers comes from faith alone. It stands in contrast to the object the Störr family’s devotion in their votive epitaph of the previous century from Nuremberg. The viticultural themes portrayed above their praying bodies rest entirely on the Real Presence of Christ in the liturgical wine and the saintly presence of the True Cross recurring throughout the technical process of that wine’s manufacture. In a broadsheet of 1532 that must have inuenced Cranach the Younger, the woodcut artist Erhard Schön also responded to Pope Leo’s bull while at the same time indicting Catholic festival culture that involved trees (g. 5.4).17 What splits this vineyard in question is not a ditch but the water owing from the fountain of life at

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the foot of Christ crucied on the vinestock. While it no doubt evoked associations between the cross and the Tree of Life, the arboreal crucix Schoen depicts here is not meant to underscore the cross’s literal ancestry in the loca sancta of Paradise or to reinstantiate that ances­ try over miracle-working natural phenomena in the German landscape, as we saw in the Odenwald’s fountain churches in chapter 1. The water cistern beneath the cross on the broadsheet instead hearkens to the fact that Martin Luther and the Reformers recognized baptism as one of Christianity’s true sacraments. It also elicits more conceptual ideas of origins. “Ad fontes” or “to the fonts,” a common refrain and motto among humanists of the period, including that of Luther’s collaborator Philip Melanchthon, encapsulated the idea that an original source—in this instance, the Word of scripture—con­ tained all its potential hermeneutical mysteries within itself as opposed to secondary interpretations made subsequent to it.18 While Christ on the cross was a font or source of salvation, its image was not to be adored. Staged behind a congregation of Reformed Christians, the image is what they envision in their minds’ eye, rapt in the stripped-down Word uttered by the preacher from the pulpit. The preacher points to Christ, but his image is to be interpreted as an invisible, abstract one—the gment of the speech banderole unfurled above his nger: “Blessed are those who hear the Word of God, and keep it, and act according to it.”19 Christ returns the gesture with his eyes gazing downward, protective of his ock of proper adherents. The fruit of the word and faith alone ourishes while monks and an ineectual pope scramble to rejuvenate their desiccated half of the garden, the ground beneath their feet cracking in every direction. It is past the point of no return. A menacing God and a trio of angels wielding garden­ ing tools uproot and set ablaze all the plants the Heavenly Father had not planted, per the broadsheet’s inscription citing another horticultural verse from Matthew, this one from chapter 15. As opposed to leaves and grape bunches, the dead trees have strung up from their barren limbs objects of Catholic devotion: monastic attire, liturgical vestments and instruments, books of hours, reliquaries, a monstrance bearing a consecrated Host, rosary beads, indulgences, and more. In the decorated trees’ resemblance to the Spiritual Maypole pictures in various media dis­ cussed throughout the previous pages, though, we encoun­ ter Schoen’s objection to Catholicism’s late medieval

figure 5.4  Erhard Schön, God’s Lament for the Fate of His Vineyard, 1532,

woodcut, printed in Nuremberg

figure 5.5  Daniel’s Vision of the Tree Crucix, frontispiece to the “Merits of the Tree Crucix” from Johannes Geiler von Kaysersberg’s Sermones prestantissimi, 1514, woodcut, printed in Strasbourg

devotion to a quasi-sacramental view of the natural world. Juxtaposing the vegetal crucix with the deadened Catholic festive trees, Schoen seeks to reinstate the created world as a mirror, a reection, a reservoir of symbols that approxi­ mate divine themes by means of association. Although many Catholics themselves protested it, the Roman Church continued to accommodate and absorb into Christian devotion the adornment of maypoles to commemorate spring greening. Not dissimilar to Fridolin’s brand of may devotion, the Capuchin monk Adalbertus Monacensis of Munich (1643–1704) in his treatise on feast days of the church calendar wrote an entire chapter juxtaposing “the decoration of the maypole with the Holy Cross.”20 Five years before he compared the maypole to Christ’s cross in his May Day sermon in Strasbourg in 1500, Johannes Geiler von Kaysersberg delivered a themati­ cally contiguous set of sermons during Holy Week on the subject of the “Merits of the Tree Crucix.”21 Transcribed and eventually published in a compendium with others administered early in his career, the Holy Week speeches from 1495 were endowed in their printed version of 1514 with a woodcut frontispiece of Christ on a tree-cross (g. 5.5).22 Rather than that of Paradise or Golgotha, the anonymous artist portrays Christ crucied on the imagi­ nary tree envisioned by Nebuchadnezzar, according to the book of Daniel 4:7–9: This was the vision of my head in my bed: I saw, and behold a tree in the midst of the earth, and the height thereof was exceeding great. The tree was great, and strong: and the height thereof reached unto heaven: the sight thereof was even to the ends of all the earth. Its leaves were most beautiful, and its fruit exceeding much: and in it was food for all: under it dwelt cattle, and beasts, and in the branches thereof the fowls of the air had their abode: and all esh did eat of it.

It is from these verses that Geiler derives the diagram­ matic structure of his sermons, each virtuous descriptor of Nebuchadnezzar’s tree elaborated on for its shared characteristic in the tree of the Holy Cross. Inspired more by Bonaventure’s Tree of Life than anyone in the may devotional movement, Geiler infers the tree-cross’s for­ mal properties symbolic value. Its large size is a reection of the glory of Christ’s mystery, the width of its canopy a sign of the extent of Christ’s love across the world, its beautiful leaves stand-ins for the nal words he uttered on the cross. Geiler’s sermons share little with the genre of fteenth-century horticultural allegories that were so heavily predicated on concrete details from the everyday world. There is nothing agronomical, medicinal, folkloric, or practical in their spiritualized gurative language. The tree that forms the crux of Geiler’s metaphor is not of a specic variety; it is a universal, even impossible one, bearing all fruits from one trunk—all of which is brought to bear on the sermons’ frontispiece illustration. Although the image bears a slight resemblance to the picture intro­ ducing the Swabian Spiritual Maypole, with its curling branches housing birds, the conceit of Geiler’s arboreal crucix is rather dierent. Here, peasants yank at the two branchlike crossbars of Christ’s tree-cross; an aristo­ cratic woman baring her shoulders plucks a grape as she irtatiously exchanges gazes with the viewer. Distracted by the urge to reap his fruits, the people fail even to notice the crestfallen Christ hanging at the center, who stares downward and elicits sympathy only from the angels below him. Unlike the depicted laity, the reader of Geiler’s reforming text and accompanying illustration can draw enlightenment from nature, having meditated on the abstracted shape or sign that Christ’s branches approxi­ mate and the symbol of God’s love for his created world despite its insatiable inhabitants: a heart.

Epilogue

171

Notes

Introduction 1. Alois Thomas, Die Darstellung Christi in der Kelter: Eine theologische und kulturhistorische Studie, zugleich ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Volkskunde des Weinbaus (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1981), 148; Georg Schreiber, Deutsche Weingeschichte: Der Wein in Volksleben, Kult und Wirtschaft (Cologne: Rheinland-Verlag, 1980), 454–55. 2. For a much abbreviated list on the vast topic of the cross as symbol, tool, and apotropaic instrument in early medieval art, see Celia Martin Chazelle, The Crucied God in the Carolingian Era: Theology and Art of Christ’s Passion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Cynthia Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400—circa 1204 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 73–102, esp. 73–76; and Beatrice Kitzinger, The Cross, the Gospels, and the Work of Art in the Carolingian Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 3. Christine Kelm, “Die Geißelsßäule in der Schloßkirche zu Chemnitz,” Denkmalpege in Sachsen (1996): 39–45; Walter Hentschel, Hans Witten, der Meister H. W. (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1938), 109–15. 4. Joachim Poeschke, ed., Die Soester Antependium und die frühe mittelalterliche Tafelmalerei: Kunsttechnische und kunsthistorische Beiträge, Westfalen 80 (Münster: Aschendor, 2002); Erwin Emmerling and Cornelia Ringer, eds., Das Aschaenburger Tafelbild: Studien zur Tafelmalerei des 13. Jahrunderts, Arbeitshefte des Bayerischen Landesamtes für Denkmalpege 89 (Munich: Lipp, 1997). 5. Rolf Lauer, “The Gero Cross in Cologne Cathedral,” in Christ on the Cross: The Boston Crucix and the Rise of Monumental

172

Notes to Pages 00–000

Wood Sculpture, 970–1200, ed. Shirin Fozi and Gerhard Lutz (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 184–205; Manuela Beer, “Ottonische und frühsalische Monumentalskulptur: Entwicklung, Gestalt und Funktion von Holzbildwerken des 10. und frühen 11. Jahrhunderts,” in Die Ottonen: Kunst Architektur Geschichte, ed. Klaus Gereon Beuckers (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2002), 129–52; Anna Pawlik, Das Bildwerk als Reliquiar? Funktionen früher Großplastik im 9. bis 11. Jahrhundert (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2013); and Beate Fricke, Fallen Idols, Risen Saints: Sainte Foy of Conques and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Medieval Art, trans. Andrew Griebeler (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015). 6. Ilene Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972); for other eleventhand twelfth-century wooden crucixes, see the many essays in Fozi and Lutz, Christ on the Cross; Andreas Huth, Frühgotische Grosskreuze in Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt und Thüringen (Wettin-Löbejün: Janos Stekovics, 2015); Gerhard Lutz, Das Bild des Gekreuzigten im Wandel: Die Sächsischen und westfälischen Kruzixe der ersten Hälfte des 13. Jahrhunderts (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2004); Frank Matthias Kammel, “Kreuz und Kruzixus,” in Mittelalter Kunst und Kultur von der Spätantike bis zum 15. Jahrhundert, ed. Daniel Hess and Jutta Zander-Seidel (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2006), 125–37; and Sible de Blauuw, “Following the Crosses: The Processional Cross and the Typology of Processions in Medieval Rome,” in Christian Feast and Festival: The Dynamics of Western

7.

8.

9.

10.

Liturgy and Culture, ed. Paul Post et al. (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 319–43. See principally Manuela Beer, Triumphkreuze des Mittelalters: Ein Beitrag zu Typus und Genese im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert (Regensburg: Schnell and Steiner, 2005). Godehard Homann et al., eds., Das Gabelkreuz in Saint Maria im Kapitol zu Köln und das Phänomen der Crucixi dolorosi in Europa, (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsanstalt, 2006); Monika von Alemann-Schwartz, “Crucixus dolorosus: Beiträge zur Polychromie und Ikonographie der rheinischen Gabelkreuze” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Bonn, 1976). On the legendary history of the cross as wooden object, as opposed to its use as a sign, see Wilhelm Meyer, Die Geschichte des Kreuzholzes vor Christus (Munich: Franz, 1882); Barbara Baert, A Heritage of Holy Wood: The Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image, trans. Lee Preedy (Leiden: Brill, 2004); and Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), esp. 214–26. For earlier Crucixions in which the cross is rendered as the Tree of Life, see Romauld Bauerreiss, “Arbor Vitae”: Der “Lebensbaum” und seine Verwendung in Liturgie, Kunst und Brauchtum des Abendlandes (Munich: Neuer Filser-Verlag, 1938); and Elizabeth Parker and Charles Little, The Cloisters Cross: Its Art and Meaning (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994). Homann, Das Gabelkreuz in Saint Maria, 94: “ es erscheint einmal mehr als wahrscheinlich, daß Grün die bevorzugte Fassung für Gabelkreuze gewesen ist.” Tree-crosses were painted green as far back as the tenth century, most famously in an illumination

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

from the Sacramentary of Bishop Abraham of Freising (Munich, Bayerische Staatbibliothek, Clm 6421, fol. 33v). Homann, Das Gabelkreuz in Saint Maria, 91–95; Hans Günther Schneider and Berhard Holländer, Das Wundertätige Kreuz zu Haltern: Festschrift zum Kreuzjubiläum und Kreuztracht (Munich: Schnell and Steiner, 1986), 10–11. The Haltern crucix contained relics from Cologne in a cavity on Christ’s dorsal side; a particle of the True Cross, however, cannot be historically tied to the crucix until 1808. Justin Kroesen and Peter Tangeberg, Helgonskap: Medieval Tabernacle Shrines in Sweden and Europe (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2021); Justin E. A. Kroesen and Victor M. Schmidt, eds., The Altar and Its Environment, 1150–1400, Studies in the Visual Culture of the Middle Ages 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009); Donald L. Ehresmann, “Some Observations on the Role of Liturgy in the Early Winged Altarpiece,” Art Bulletin 64 (1982): 359–69; Rainer Kahsnitz, Carved Splendor: Late Gothic Altarpieces in Southern Germany, Austria, and South Tirol (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006), 9–39; Hartmut Krohm, Klaus Krüger and Matthias Weniger, eds., Entstehung und Frühgeschichte des Flügelaltarschreins (Wiesbaden: Reichert, and Berlin: Ruksaldruck, 2001). See principally Johannes Tripps, Das handelnde Bildwerk in der Gotik: Forschungen zu den Bedeutungsschichten und der Funktion des Kirchengebaudes und seiner Ausstattung in der Hoch- und Spätgotik (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1998). Die Ausstattung des Doberaner Münsters: Kunst im Kontext, ed. Gerhardt Wielandt and Kaja von Cossart (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2018); Norbert Wolf, Deutsche Schnitzretabel des 14. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 2002), 22–39; Annegret Laabs, “Das Hochaltarretabel in Doberan: Reliquienschrein und Sakramentstabernakel,” in Krohm, Krüger, and Weniger, Entstehung und Frühgeschichte des Flügelaltarschreins, 143–56. Donna Sadler, Touching the Passion: Seeing Late Medieval Altarpieces Through the Eyes of Faith (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 108–60; on early stone retables, see Pierre-Yves Le Pogam with Christine Vivet-Peclet, eds., Les premiers retables (XIIe—début du XVe siècle): Une mise en scène du sacré (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2009). Justin Kroesen, Seitenaltäre in mittelalterlichen Kirchen: Standort, Raum, Liturgie

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

(Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2010). For his mockery of Catholic interiors crowded with people and artworks, see Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s representation of Faith from the series The Virtues, printed by Hieronymus Cock around 1559–60. See Kahsnitz, Carved Splendor, 180–207 and 470 for an extensive bibliography on the altarpiece. On the painted and carved vault program, see Anna Moraht-Fromm and Wolfgang Schürle, eds., Kloster Blaubeuren: Der Chor und sein Hochaltar (Stuttgart: Theiss, 2002), 46–52. See chapter 4 for a more complete bibliography on the turn to so-called Holzsichtigkeit in late medieval German sculpture. On the emergence of woodvisible altarpieces as a new category in their own right, as opposed to carved altarpieces that were “provisionally” never painted but originally intended to be so, see most recently Georg Habenicht, Das ungefasste Altarretabel: Programm oder Provisorium (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2016), esp. 184–203. Wolf, Deutsche Schnitzretabel, 135–51; Johannes Voss, “Anmerkungen zur Geschichte des Kreuzaltares und seines Retabels im Doberaner Münster: Konzeption und Ergebnisse der Restaurierung, 1975–1984,” in Figur und Raum: Mittelalterliche Holzbildwerke im historischen und kunstgeographischen Kontext, ed. Uwe Albrecht and Jan von Bonsdor (Berlin: Reimer, 1994), 112–23; Stefan Thiele, Die Zisterzienserklosterkirche zu Doberan: Forschung und Denkmalpege am “Doberaner Münster” im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Schwerin: Thomas Helms Verlag, 2016), 195–215. Ludwig Dolberg, “Die Verehrungsstätte des hl. Blutes in der Cistercienser-Abtei Doberan,” Studien und Mittheilungen aus dem Benedictiner und dem Cistercienser-Orden 12 (1891): 594–604; Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 62–64. Svwen Wichtert, Das Zisterzienserkloster Doberan im Mittelalter (Berlin: Lukas, 2000), 151–53; Kahsnitz, Carved Splendor, 22. The abbey’s founder, the Danish queen Margaret Sambiria, brought the heavenly splinter from Rome to Rostock herself; in 1282, she died and was buried in Doberan Abbey; Mecklenburgisches Klosterbuch: Handbuch der Klöster, Stifte, Kommenden und Prioreien, ed. Wolfgang Huschner et al., vol. 2 (Rostock: Hinstor, 2016), 924–61, 926.

24. Jerey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 94–96; Lottlisa Behling, “Die Bäume Mariens auf dem Albrechtsaltar zu Klosterneuburg,” in Album amicorum Jan Gerriet van Gelder, ed. Jan Gerriet van Gelder et al. (The Hague: Nijho, 1973), 15–21; Rachel Fulton, Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 251–308, esp. 303–6. 25. Annales Ordinis Cartusiensis ab anno 1084 ad annum 1429, ed. Carolus Le Couteulx, vol. 7 (Monstrolii: Cartusiae S. Mariae de Pratis, 1890), 46–47; Jürgen Wätjer, Die Geschichte des Kartäuserklosters “Templum Beatae Mariae” zu Ahrensbök (1397–1564) (Husum: Matthiesen, 1988), 16–21. 26. Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 10. 27. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Art, Magic, and Folklore: Western European,” Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph Strayer, 13 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982–89), 8: 25–31; Richard Trexler, ed., Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1985); Stephen Wilson, The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Premodern Europe (London: Hambledon, 2000). 28. Siegfred Zadraa, Schloß Moos-Schulthaus: Eppan an der Weinstraße, Südtirol; Museum für mittelalterliche Wohnkultur mit Fresken, gotischer Stube und Küche (Bozen: Fotolito Longo, 1985). 29. Rudolf Göbel and Christian-Herbert Fischer, “New Findings on the Original Surface Treatment of the Münnerstadt Altarpiece,” in Tilman Riemenschneider, c. 1460–1531, ed. Julien Chapuis, Studies in the History of Art 65 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2004), 124–29. 30. Strasbourg, Stadtarchiv, Hosp. Arch. n. 584, fol. 127, as transcribed in Médard Barth, “Fronleichnamsfest und Fronleichnamsbräuche im Mittelalterlichen Strassburg,” Archives de l’Eglise d’Alsace 9 (1958): 233–35. 31. Sebastian Franck, Weltbuch (Augsburg, 1534), fol. 133a: “So oft ein groß fest ist, ziert man den tempel mit teppichen grossen meyen, thut die altar au, butzt unt mutzt die heyligen au.” 32. Kurt Küppers, Marienfrömmigkeit zwischen Barock und Industriezeitalter: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Feier der Maiandacht in



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33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

174

Deutschland und im deutschen Sprachgebiet (St. Ottilien: EOS, 1987); Luzian Peger, “Zur Geschichte der Marien-Maiandacht im Elsaß,” Straßburger Diözesanblatt 31 (1912): 163–76; Dietrich Schmidtke, Studien zur dingallegorischen Erbauungsliteratur des Spätmittelalters: Am Beispiel der Gartenallegorie (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1982), esp. 1–3, 74–76. Karl-Adolf Knappe, “‘Um 1490’: Zur Problematik der altdeutschen Kunst,” in Festschrift Karl Oettinger, ed. Hans Sedlmayr and Wilhelm Messerer (Erlangen: Universitätsbund, 1967), 303–52; for plant identications, see 338n124. Moraht-Fromm and Schürle, Kloster Blaubeuren, 250n85: “diß Gewölb ward außgemahlt an unser lieben frauen aubenint Kruytwyhin von Daniel Schüchlin von ulm. die Zyt seßhaft zu urach.” A few critical sources on this enormous subject are Ethan Kavaler, Renaissance Gothic: Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe, 1470–1540 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Paul Frankl, Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations Through Eight Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), esp. 233–41; Jan Pieper, “Steinerne Bäume und künstlerischen Astwerk: Die gotischen Theorien des James Hall (1761–1832),” in Zur Geschichte des Konstruierens, ed. Rainer Graefe (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1989), 92–98; Hubertus Günther, “Das Astwerk und die Theorie der Renaissance von der Entstehung der Architektur,” in Théorie des arts et création artistique dans l’Europe du Nord du XVIe au début du XVIIIe siècle, ed. M.-C. Heck et al. (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Université Charles de GaulleLille, 2002), 13–32; Ernst-Heinz Lemper, Das Astwerk: Seine Formen, sein Wesen und seine Entwicklung (Leipzig: KWU-Leipzig, 1950); and Schama, Landscape and Memory, 226–40. Karl Oettinger, “Laube, Garten und Wald: Zu einer Theorie der süddeutschen Sakralkunst, 1470–1520,” in Festschrift für Hans Sedlmayr (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1962), 201–28. In this regard, Oettinger’s project is manifestly a continuation in subject-matter and methodology to that of his mentor Hans Sedlmayr, who theorized the cathedral as Heavenly City in Die Entstehung der Kathedrale (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1950). Wilhelm Schlink, “The Gothic Cathedral as Heavenly Jerusalem: A Fiction in German Art History,” in The Real and Ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Art: Studies

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39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

in Honor of Bezalel Narkiss on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Bianca Kühnel (Jerusalem: Center for Jewish Art, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1998), 275–85; Paul Crossley, “In Search of an Iconography of Medieval Architecture,” in Symbolae Historiae Artium: Studia z historii sztuki Lechowi Kalinowskiemu dedykowane, ed. Jerzy Gadomski et al. (Warsaw: Państw. Wydaw. Naukowe, 1986), 55–66. Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitszch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. 173–202; see also Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone, 2011), 29–30; and Jerey F. Hamburger, “‘On the Little Bed of Jesus’: Pictorial Piety and Monastic Reform,” in The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone, 1998), 383–426, 392. Oettinger attributes the sacred greenery to the “feminine” and Virgincentered character of late Gothic mysticism, which aligns with the fact that at least in its earliest incarnations, may devotion was targeted for a female readership; Oettinger, “Laube, Garten und Wald,” 223–25. Oettinger, “Laube, Garten und Wald,” 224: “Das Anschauliche der Menschenwelt durchdringt so alles Detail mit seinem Realismus, gerade um dem mystischen Ganzen Überzeugungskraft zu verleihen. Aber damit wird dieser Menschenwelt soviel an Bedeutung und Kraft gegeben, daß sie zunächst im Profanen Eigenwert gewinnt und endlich zugunsten dieser neuen Eigenwürde auch im Religiösen den mystischen Rahmen sprengt.” Ethan Matt Kavaler, “Nature and the Chapel Vaults at Ingolstadt: Structuralist and Other Perspectives,” Art Bulletin 87 (2005): 230–48. Luming Guan, “Rose and Thorns: Vegetal Vaults as Signs of Passion at Liebfrauenmünster, Ingolstadt” (paper presented in Gothic Nature graduate seminar, Columbia University, New York, April 22, 2020). On payments for deliveries of greenery (“Laub”) at Ingolstadt, see Alois Mitterwieser and Torsten Gebhand, Geschichte der Fronleichnamsprozession in Bayern (Munich: Weinmayer, 1949), 34–36; and Clemens Schlecht, “Die Rechnungsbücher der Liebfrauenkirche zu Ingolstadt aus den Jahren 1519–1523,” Altbaÿerische Monatsschrift 8 (1908): 75–83, 116–33, esp. 131 on Assumption Day.

44. Paul Crossley, “The Return of the Forest: Natural Architecture and the German Past in the Age of Dürer,” in Künstlerischer Austausch, Artistic Exchange (Akten des XXVIII International Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte 2), ed. Thomas Gaehtgens, vol. 2 (Berlin: Akademie, 1993), 71–80; Larry Silver, “Forest Primeval: Albrecht Altdorfer and the German Wilderness Landscape,” Simiolus 13 (1983): 5–43; Achim Timmermann, “Astwerk and ars moriendi: The Poor Sinner’s Cross in Heilbronn (1514),” in Image, Memory, and Devotion: Liber Amicorum Paul Crossley, ed. Zoe Opacic and Achim Timmermann (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 195–206; Oettinger, “Laube, Garten und Wald,” 224–25; Schama, Landscape and Memory, 100–120. 45. Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 28–31, at 31. 46. Monika Wagner, “Wood: ‘Primitive Material’ for the Creation of ‘German Sculpture,’” in New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History, ed. Christian Weikop (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 71–88, esp. 73–77. 47. Hannjost Lixfeld, Folklore and Fascism: The Reich Institute for German Volkskunde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), esp. 61–120; The Nazication of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich, ed. James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Johannes Zechner, “The Nature of the Nation: The German Forest as Paradigm and Ideology,” in Treading the Arboreal Pathway Through the Backwoods of Black Metal, ed. Una Hamilton Halle and Lotte Brown, Becoming the Forest 3 (Antwerp: Het Bos 2019), 76–91; Johannes Zechner, “Vom Naturideal zur Weltanschauung: Die Politisierung und Ideologisierung des ‘deutschen Waldes’ zwischen Romantik und Nationalsozialismus,” in Mythos Wald: Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung, ed. Ann-Katrin Thomm (Münster: Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe, 2009), 35–41; Albrecht Lehmann, “Mythos Deutscher Wald,” in Der Deutsche Wald, ed. Hans-Georg Wehling et al. (Stuttgart: Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2001), 4–10. 48. Gregory Bryda, “Tainted Trees: Uncovering the Long Shadow over Germany’s Medieval Maypoles and Ancient Tree Cults,” in Art and Environment in the Third Reich, ed. Gregory Bryda and Matthew Vollgra, Special Issue of Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 85 (2022): 337–62.

49. Deiter Manz, Rottenburger Wein und Urbansbruderschaft: 600 Jahre St. Urbansbruderschaft Rottenburg am Neckar (Rottenburg am Neckar: Sülchgauer Altertumsverein, 2001). e 50. Franck, Weltbuch, fol. 133a: “Ist es aber schon / so tragen sy in zum win ins würtzhaus / setzen in hindern tisch / behencken in mit weinraͤben / vnd vertrincken in / bringen im ot ein trunk / vnd haltens von seinetwegen.” 51. Robert Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Ronceverte, 1988), esp. 110–14. 52. For more on the “humiliation of saints,” see Patrick Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 95–115; and Guy Marchal, “Das vieldeutige Heiligenbild: Bildersturm im Mittelalter,” in Macht und Ohnmacht der Bilder: Reformatorischer Bildersturm im Kontext der europäischen Geschichte, ed. Peter Blickle et al. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002), 307–22, 316–21. 53. Tripps, Das handelnde Bildwerk in der Gotik. 54. In the face of continued harvest failure in 1599, the mayor of Horb on the Neckar had grown so contemptuous of the Urban ritual that he said one should both “drown Urban and hang the vintners”; Martin Crusius, Schwäbische Chronik, vol. 2, trans. Johann Jackob Moser (Frankfurt: Wohler, 1738), 355, as quoted in Eugen Stolz, Die Urbansbruderschaft in Rottenburg a.N. (Rottenburg: Wilhelm Bader, 1913), 20. 55. See Tim Ingold, “Toward an Ecology of Materials,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 427–42, esp. 431–35; and Ingold, “Materials Against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2007): 1–16, esp. 4–7. Some indispensable readings on the application of materiality studies to medieval art are Bynum, Christian Materiality; Aden Kumler and Christopher Lakey, eds., Res et Signicatio: The Material Sense of Things in the Middle Ages, Special Issue of Gesta 51 (2012); Ittai Weinryb, “Living Matter: Materiality, Maker, and Ornament in the Middle Ages,” Gesta 52 (2013): 112–32; Bettina Bildhauer, Medieval Things: Agency, Materiality, and Narratives of Objects in Medieval German Literature and Beyond (Columbia: Ohio State University Press, 2020); Cynthia Hahn, “Theatricality, Materiality, Relics: Reliquary Forms and the Sensational in Mosan Art,” in Sensory Reections: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts, ed. Fiona Griths and Kathryn Starkey (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 142–62; and Jutta Eming and Kathryn Starkey,

56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

“Introduction: The Materiality and Immateriality of Things,” in Things and Thingness in European Literature and Visual Art, 700–1600, ed. Jutta Eming and Kathryn Starkey (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 1–20. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 37–42. Latour would also call the artworks “hybrids”; see Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 5–12. A short but valuable list of sources on the broad topic includes Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Georey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); Georey Winthrop-Young, Ilinca Iurascu, and Jussi Parikka, eds., Cultural Techniques: Special Issue of Theory, Culture and Society 30, no. 6 (2013); Sybille Krämer and Horst Bredekamp, eds., Bild, Schrift, Zahl (Munich: Fink, 2003); and Erhard Schüttpelz, “Die medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken,” in Kulturgeschichte als Mediengeschichte (oder vice versa?), ed. Lorenz Engell, Bernhard Siegert, and Joseph Vogl, Archiv für Mediengeschichte 6 (Weimar: Universitätsverlag Weimar, 2006), 87–110. On the environment as media, see John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). On media studies as method for premodern art history, see Roland Betancourt, ed., The Medium Before Modernism, Special Issue of West 86th 23, no. 2 (2016). Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 11–15; Schüttpelz, “Die medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken,” 94–97. Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 14; Siegert also writes, “Cultural techniques precede a distinction of nature and culture.” On cultural techniques showing the “know-how” (Wissen-wie) of people and institutions directing media, see Schüttpelz, “Die medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken,” 89–90. For an overview on the term “cultural landscape” (Kulturlandschaft), which took form in nineteenth-century Germany, see Kerstin Pottho, “The Use of ‘Cultural Landscape’ in 19th Century German Geographical Literature,” Norsk Geogrask Tidsskrift / Norwegian Journal of Geography 67 (2013): 49–54. See also Norbert Krebs, “Natur und Kulturlandschaft,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin (1923): 81–94; and, for its application to August Sander’s landscape

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63.

64.

65. 66.

67.



photographs, Olivier Lugon, “August Sander: Landschaftsphotographien,” in August Sander: Landschaften, ed. Susanne Lange (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1999), 23–51, esp. 34–40. Cultural historians in the Anglophone world prefer the term “hybrid landscape”; see Richard White, “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History,” Historian 66 (2004): 557–64. “Symbolic work” is pivotal to the ecacy of cultural techniques; see Thomas Macho, “Second-Order Animals: Cultural Techniques of Identity and Identication,” Theory, Culture and Society 30, no. 6 (2013): 30–47, 31, as cited in Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 11. For a modern history of how literalizations of plant (specically root) metaphors in literature sought to bridge the nature-culture divide, see Christy Wampole, Rootedness: The Ramications of a Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), esp. 198–99, 249–51. Johannes Kreutzer, “Einen geistlichen Meykess,” Berlin Staatsbibliothek Cod. germ. quart. 202 (late 15th c.), fols. 106b–7a, as transcribed in Peger, “Zur Geschichte der Marien-Maiandanct,” 169: “jo in den kessnap [Käsenapf] des heiligen crutzes geleit und doran geknöyret und gestossen, also, daz alles sat des süssen molcken sines rosavarwen blüttes von im oss und dornach in demselben geschirr des crützes ussgedörret und getrücknet und also ein dürrer hertter kess worden.” Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of Recent German Media Theory,” Theory, Culture and Society 30, no. 6 (2013): 66–82, esp. 72–76. Christian August coined the term “cultural techniques”; see Vogler, Grundlehren der Kulturtechnik, 2 vols. (Berlin: Pary, 1898–99). Schmidtke, Studien zur dingallegorischen Erbauungsliteratur, 220–30. Richard Homann, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 85–112, esp. 108–10. For more on “Handwerkliches Beten,” see Thomas Lentes, “Die Gewänder der Heiligen: Ein Diskussionsbeitrag zum Verhältnis von Gebet, Bild und Imagina­ tion,” in Hagiographie und Kunst: Der Heiligenkult in Schrift, Bild und Architektur, ed. Gottfried Kerscher (Berlin: Reimer, 1993), 120–51; Werner Williams-Krapp, “‘Dise ding sint dennoch nit ware zeichen der heiligkeit’: Zur Bewertung mystischer Erfahrungen im 15. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift

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68.

69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

74.

für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 80 (1990): 61–71; Werner Williams-Krapp, “Frauenmystik und Ordensreform im 15. Jahrhundert,” in Literarische Interessenbildung im Mittelalter, ed. Joachim Heinzle, Germanistische-SymposienBerichtsbände 14 (Stuttgart: 1993), 301–13; and Schmidtke, Studien zur dingallegorischen Erbauungsliteratur, 257–67. Hamburger, “‘On the Little Bed of Jesus,’” esp. 391–92; Wieland Schmidt, “Christus und die sieben Laden: Betrachtungen zur spätmittelalterlichen Literaturgeschichte,” in Festschrift Eugen Stollreither zum 75. Geburtstage gewidmet von Fachgenossen, Schülern, Freunden, ed. Fritz Redenbacher (Erlangen: Universitätsbibliothek, 1950), 261–84. Oettinger, “Laube, Garten und Wald,” 224. Munich BSB, Cgm 4473, yleaf: “Ich ste vor der tur, tue mir auf und laß mich ein du allerliebste mein.” Bridget A. Henisch, The Medieval Calendar Year (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Arno Borst, The Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). For calendars as cultural techniques, see Thomas Macho and Christian Kassung, eds., Kulturtechniken der Synchronisation (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2013), esp. 9–21. Ian Hodder, “The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View,” New Literary History 45 (2014): 19–36. Bruno Latour, “The Berlin Key; or, How to Do Words with Things,” trans. Lydia Davis, in Matter Materiality and Modern, ed. Paul Graves-Brown (London: Routledge, 2000), 10–21. The article was rst printed as “Inscrire dans la nature des choses ou la clef berlinoise,” Alliages 6 (1991): 4–16. See also Wampole, Rootedness, 241–50, esp. 249. I am here indebted to the concept of distributive agency outlined in Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), esp. 87–89, 113–20.

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3.

4.

Chapter 1. The Vegetable Saint 1. On a convincing argument for the terminus ante quem of 1304, see Vivien Bienert, “‘Crux sub odaeo miraculosa’: Leidenskruzixe in Frauenkonventen: Der Gabelkruzixus von St. Maria im Kapitol in Köln,” in Bildwerke für Kanonissen? Neue Bildwerke und Heiligenverehrung in Frauenstiftskirchen, ed. Julia von Ditfurth and Adam Stead (Cologne: Böhlau, 2019), 63–103, esp. 64–76. See also Robert

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Suckale, “Der Kruzix in St. Maria im Kapitol—Versuch einer Annäherung,” in Femmes, art et religion au Moyen Âge, ed. Jean-Claude Schmitt (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2004), 87–102, 98; and Monika von AlemannSchwartz, “Crucixus dolorosus: Beiträge zur Polychromie und Ikonographie der rheinischen Gabelkreuze” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Bonn, 1976), 61–66. Godehard Homann disputes the 1304 dating, preferring a wider range of ca. 1290–1320; see Homann, “Der Crucixus dolorosus in St. Maria im Kapitol zu Köln,” in Das Gabelkreuz in Saint Maria im Kapitol zu Köln und das Phänomen der Crucixi dolorosi in Europa, ed. Homann et al. (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsanstalt, 2006), 21–45, 38. The crucix was likely conceived to be presented from a thirteenth-century choir screen arrangement at the church’s crossing, which was dismantled in the sixteenth century, and thus would have likely adorned the church’s altar, as was convention; see the insightful analysis in Bienert, “‘Crux sub odaeo miraculosa,’” 85–101. The term Pestkreuz is a nineteenthcentury invention; see also Paul Binski, “The Crucixion and the Censorship of Art Around 1300,” in The Medieval World, ed. P. A. Linehan and J. L. Nelson (London: Routledge, 2003), 342–60. Géza de Francovich has advanced the theory that the genre of Crucixi dolorosi was not a German or Rhenish invention but an Italian one, spurred on by Giovanni Pisano’s pulipit reliefs in Pistoia (1298/1301); see Francovich, “L’origine e la diusione del crocisso gotico doloroso,” Kunstgeschichtliches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 2 (1938): 143–261, esp. 145–60. Homann, “Der Crucixus dolorosus,” 26–27. Conservator Hans-Wilhelm Schwanz has observed that the Kapitol cross, while itself medieval, may not have been designed to carry this particular crucied Christ; Schwanz, “Zur Technologie des Crucixus dolorosus in Saint Maria im Kapitol in Köln,” in Homann, Das Gabelkreuz, 151–64, esp. 156–59. Regina Urbanek has detected two layers of medieval polychromy on the cross. The rst (original) layer of green paint contained more white lead and was therefore brighter in hue than what we now see; Urbanek, “Der Crucixus dolorosus in der ehemaligen Johanniterkommende in Lage,” in Homann, Das Gabelkreuz, 182–92, 187–88. Homann, “Der Crucixus dolorosus,” 94: “es erscheint einmal mehr als

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8.

9.

10.

11.

wahrscheinlich, daß Grün die bevorzugte Fassung für Gabelkreuze gewesen ist.” The biography of the Holy Cross is spread across two dierent chapters of the Golden Legend, each related to the respective feast day, The Finding and the Exaltation of the Holy Cross; see Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 277–84, 554–59. Wilhelm Meyer, Die Geschichte des Kreuzholzes vor Christus (Munich: Franz, 1882); Barbara Baert, A Heritage of Holy Wood: The Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image, trans. Lee Preedy (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), esp. 214–26. Baert’s volume was an indispensable resource for this study. See also Holger Klein, Byzanz, der Westen und das Wahre Kreuz: Die Geschichte einer Reliquie und ihrer künstlerischen Fassung in Byzanz und im Abendland (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2004); and Anatole Frolow, La relique de la Vraie Croix: Recherches sur le développement d’un culte (Paris: Institut Français d’Études Byzantines, 1961). For more on Origen, Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job (Parable of the Mustard Seed), Quodvultdeus’s sermon De cataclysmo ad catechumenos, Hippolytus of Rome, and Gregory of Nyssa, see Romuald Bauerreiß, Arbor Vitae: Der Lebensbaum und seine Verwendung in Liturgie, Kunst, und Brauchtum des Abendlandes (Munich: Neuer Filser-Verlag, 1938), 4; and Stephen Jerome Reno, The Sacred Tree as an Early Christian Literary Symbol: A Phenomenological Study (Saarbrücken: Homo et Religio, 1978), 79–123. Romauld Bauerreiss, “Arbor Vitae”: Der “Lebensbaum” und seine Verwendung in Liturgie, Kunst und Brauchtum des Abendlandes (Munich: Neuer Filser-Verlag, 1938); see also Elizabeth Parker and Charles Little, The Cloisters Cross: Its Art and Meaning (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994). Isabelle Marchesin, L’arbre et la colonne: La porte de bronze d’Hildesheim (Paris: Picard, 2017); Ittai Weinryb, “Hildesheim AvantGarde: Bronze, Columns, and Colonialism,” Speculum 93 (2018): 728–82; Adam S. Cohen and Anne Derbes, “Bernward and Eve at Hildesheim,” Gesta 40 (2001): 19–38; Harvey Stahl, “Eve’s Reach: A Note on Dramatic Elements in the Hildesheim Doors,” in Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object, ed. Elizabeth

12.

13.

14.

15.

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Sears and Thelma K. Thomas (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 163–76; Ursula Storm, Die Bronzetüren Bernwards zu Hildesheim (Berlin: ErnstReuter-Ges., 1969); William Tronzo, “The Hildesheim Doors: An Iconographic Source and Its Implications,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 46 (1983): 357–66. On their typological aspects, see Bernd Mohnhaupt, Beziehungsgeechte: Typologische Kunst des Mittelalters, Vestigia Bibliae 22 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), esp. 74–99. Bonaventure, “The Tree of Life,” in Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of Saint Francis, trans. Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 117–75. See also Rab Hateld, “The Tree of Life and the Holy Cross: Franciscan Spirituality in the Trecento and the Quattrocento,” in Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, ed. Timothy Verdon and John Henderson (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 133–60; and Sara Ritchey, Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014), 112–14. On the complex text-image relationship of this painting, see Raphaèle Preisinger, Lignum vitae: Zum Verhältnis materieller Bilder und mentaler Bildpraxis im Mittelalter (Paderborn: W. Fink, 2014), 122–34. Georg Wagner, Volksfromme Kreuzverehrung in Westfalen von den Anfängen bis zum Bruch der mittelalterlichen Glaubenseinheit, Schriften d. volkskundl. Kommission d. Landschaftsverbandes Westfalen-Lippe 11 (Münster: Aschendor, 1960), esp. 168; Anton Schlotmann, Dahl im Wandel der Zeiten (Paderborn: Dr. der Bonifacius-Dr., 1936), 60. Baert, Heritage of Holy Wood, 422–25, 432–44; Graf Georg Sigmund Adelmann von Adelmannsfelden, “Die Kreuzkapelle bei Duttenberg und zur Geschichte des Heiligen Kreuzes,” Nachrichtenblatt der Denkmalpege in Baden-Württemberg 3 (1960): 5–9; Hans Bachmann, “Die Kirche in Wiesendangen und ihre Wandgemälde,” Anzeiger für schweizerische Altertumskunde 18 (1916): 118, 134, 186–203, 290–300; Hermann Koller, “Der Thron Khosraus II. zu den Chorgemälden in der Kirche von Wiesendangen,” Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 27 (1970): 93–100; Jürgen Michler, Gotische Wandmalerei am Bodensee (Friedrichshafen: Robert Gessler, 1992), 134–50. For more on Haggenberg as the court painter of the bishop of Constance, see

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18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

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Christoph and Dorothee Eggenberger, Malerei des Mittelalters, Ars Helvetica 5: Die visualle Kultur des Schweiz (Bern: Pro Helvetia/Desertina Verlag, 1989), 162–67; and Walter Hugelshofer, Die Zürcher Malerei bis zum Ausgang der Spätgotik 2 (1929): 63–79. Beart, Heritage of Holy Wood, 444n185. See also Frolow, La relique de la Vraie Croix, 508, no. 715; and Rüdiger Becksmann et al., Die mittelalterlichen Glasmalereien in Schwaben von 1350 bis 1530, ohne Ulm (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1986), 42–55, plates 23–24. The collegiate church in nearby Tal had an altar to the “heiligen kreuz.” See Ludwig Frohnhäuser, Geschichte der Reichsstadt Wimpfen (Darmstadt: Hist. Verein, 1870), 85. On Duttenberg’s cross processions, see Baert, Heritage of Holy Wood, 422. Von Adelmannsfelden, “Die Kreuzkapelle bei Duttenberg,” 5: “bei den Weingärten am Kapellenweg” and “bei den Kreuzäckern” are the Flurnamen, or landscape markers, in the archival documents. For more on the mechanics of the monumental wall painting of the legend painted in Italy by Piero della Francesca, see Christopher S. Wood, “Piero della Francesca, Liminologist,” in Bilder, Räume, Betrachter: Festschrift für Wolfgang Kemp, ed. Steen Bogen et al. (Berlin: Reimer, 2006), 252–69; and Baert, Heritage of Holy Wood, 333–48. Baert, Heritage of Holy Wood, 310–33; Barbara Baert, “Adam, Seth and Jerusalem: The Legend of the Wood of the Cross in Medieval Literature and Iconography,” in Adam, le premier homme, ed. A. Paravicini Bagliani (Florence: Sislem, 2012), 69–99; Esther Casier Quinn, The Quest of Seth for the Oil of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). The manuscript is held in Österreichsische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna (Codex Vindob. 2980; ca. 1450) and was produced at the workshop of Deitbold Lauber in Haguenau in Alsace. Brian Murdoch, The Apocryphal Adam and Eve in Medieval Europe: Vernacular Translations and Adaptations of the Vita Adae et Evae (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 137–207, esp. 155–66; Mary-Bess Halford, Illustration and Text in Lutwin’s Eva und Adam: Codex Vindob. 2980 (Stuttgart: Kümmerle, 1980); Mary-Bess Halford, Lutwin’s Eva und Adam: Study, Text, Translation (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1984); Baert, Heritage of Holy Wood, 409–23. For the comparable image in the Lutwin manuscript of Seth receiving a tripartite twig from Michael at the Gates of Paradise,

24. 25.

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see Codex Vindob. 2980, fol. 73v. An illuminated version of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (1322) now in the British Libray (MS 24189, fol. 13; 1410–20) shows Seth as a pilgrim receiving a golden twig bearing three fruits at the Gates of Paradise; Josef Krása, ed., The Travels of Sir John Mandeville: A Manuscript in the British Library, trans. Peter Kussi (New York: G. Braziller, 1983), 12. On Paradise as a place on earth, see Reinhold Grimm, Paradisus Coelestis, Paradisus Terrestris: Zur Auslegungsgeschichte des Paradieses im Abendland bis um 1200 (Munich: Fink, 1977); and Kathryn Moore, The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land: Reception from Late Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 141–51. Baert, Heritage of Holy Wood, 317–25, 408. This portion of the wall painting in Wiesendangen is severely damaged, but it originally depicted Seth receiving the twig. Baert, Heritage of Holy Wood, 434–35; Michler, Gotische Wandmalerei am Bodensee, 469. Manuel Hagemann, “Zur Frühgeschichte der Kranenburger Kreuzverehrung: Ein Beitrag zum 700 jährigen Wallfahrtsjubiläum,” Kalender für das Klever Land 58 (2008): 88n20; Benedikt Benninghaus, Die Kontinuität der Wallfahrt zum Heiligen Kreuz in Lage, Forschungen zur Volkskunde 60 (Cologne: Monsenstein und Vannerdat, 2014), 39; Bernd Holtmann, Der Malteserorden im Bistum Osnabrück (Osnabrück: Kirchenbote, 1980), 82. The cross withstands centuries buried in the so-called Piscina Probatica. Helena threatens the Jews, particularly a Judas Cyriacus, with re, should they withhold from her the location of the cross. While the cross itself is not subject to the blazes, it guratively triumphs over them. At Wiesendangen, the formal pendant to the Threat of the Fire is the Finding of the Cross. The original copy of the “Ratione sanctae Crucis in Lage” was located in one of the order’s missals, which was lost at some point after 1708, the most recent year in which an inventory mentions a “Missale Joannitarium. Ubi in principio conscripta . . . historia de Sancta et miraculosa Cruce”; Pfarrarchiv Lage, B-01. Three copies from the early eighteenth century survive, one of which bears the seal and signature of Johannes Caspar Windthorst, the apostolic and imperial notary and assistant secretary (Beigeordneter) of the bishopric of Osnabrück, who certied the document as a faithful copy

Notes to Pages 00–000

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(“die richtige Übereinstimmung mit der Urkunde”); Pfarrarchiv Lage, C-314-1. Benedikt Benninghaus has transcribed Pastor Franz Anton Pollmann’s copy of the notarized version (Pfarrarchiv Lage, B-02, fols. 3–9); Latin quotations come from his edition, Die Kontinuität der Wallfahrt zum Heiligen Kreuz, 108–23. See also Bernhard Berentzen, Das Kreuz zu Lage: Geschichte und Zeitgeschichte eines Kreuzes (Osnabrück: Fromm, 1987); and Hubert Quebbemann, Die Johanniterkommende in Lage und das wundertätige Kreuz, Wissenschaftliche Arbeit des Collegium Borreanum (Münster, 1951), 21–34. Benninghaus, Die Kontinuität der Wallfahrt zum Heiligen Kreuz, 121: “Many came to Lage and even to the Hundewinkel yard, to the exact place where the tree once stood. As they kneeled and bowed to the stump, they rose at once unharmed. / Plures namque venientes versus Lage per illam viam, ubi est mansus Hundewinkel ad locum, ubi arbor praedicta quondam steterat, cum in trunco—up den Stamme—sederent et requiscerunt, statim incolumnes surrexerunt.” Urbanek, “Der Crucixus dolorosus,” 186. At the end of the nineteenth or early twentieth century, an oak conlike structure was installed around the body of Christ to protect the medieval sculpture from frequent handling at outdoor processions. On the diculty of ascribing a more specic date for the Lage crucix, which, like its counterparts in Cologne, emerges almost singularly without formal comparanda in the region, see Benninghaus, Die Kontinuität der Wallfahrt zum Heiligen Kreuz, 33–35; Homann, “Der Crucixus dolorosus,” 85–102; and Uwe Pleninger and Peter Königfeld, “Der Crucixus dolorosus aus Kloster Lage: Resaturierung eines bedeutenden Wallfahrtkreuzes,” Berichte zur Denkmalpege in Neidersachsen 2 (2003): 78–91, 80. The gilding and polychromy were stripped o between 1853 and 1855 when the altarpiece was being restored by the Tienen joiner Henri Sondervorst; the altarpiece was never intended to be monochrome. Baert, Heritage of Holy Wood, 431; Marjan Buyle and Christine Vanthillo, Vlaamse en Brabantse retabels in Belgische monumenten (Brussels: Ministerie van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap, 2000), 212–13; Robert Didier and John Steyaert, “Meister des Hakendover Retabels,” in Die Parler und der Schöne Stile, 1350–1400, vol. 1 (Cologne: Legner, 1978), 88–90; Roger Marijnissen and Herman van Lieeringe, “Les retables de Rheinberg et de Haekendover,” Jahrbuch der Rheinischen

Notes to Pages 00–000

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34.

35.

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Denkmalpege 27 (1967): 75–89; Brigitte D’Hainaut-Zveny, Miroirs du sacré: Les retables sculptés à Bruxelles, XVe–XVIe siècles; Production, formes et usages (Brussels: CFCÉditions, 2005), 176–77. Benninghaus, Die Kontinuität der Wallfahrt zum Heiligen Kreuz, 113: “Hoc unum verum est, nunquam mihi facultas fuit etiam minima, quid de lignis fabricandi aut operandi, sicut nec vobis, quomodo ergo talismodi Crucem et imaginem ita pulchras et decoras facere possemus?” The relics are inside the head cavity and sealed with a silver plate. The only surviving report of the Lage cross’s relics comes from Pastor Anton Pollmann in 1842, who transcribed the list of relics in Latin, as they were inscribed by a predecessor of his in the year 1800. The rst in his list is “de s. Cruci Cristi”; Homann, “Der Crucixus dolorosus,” 89. In her dissertation on the genre, Monika von Alemann-Schwartz points to the work that remains to be done in investigating additional examples of late medieval Crucixi dolorosi in which cross relics are embedded; see Alemann-Schwartz, “Crucixus dolorosus,” 264. Conrmed late medieval Crucixi dolorosi containing cross relics are those mentioned in the text above plus the cross in the cathedral of Saint John in Perpignan (Roussion, France), Homann, “Der Crucixus dolorosus,” 127–30; the Westphalian parish church of Saint Lambertus in Coesfeld, Homann, “Der Crucixus dolorosus,” 95; Saint Christopher in Gehrden (Osnabrück), Homann, “Der Crucixus dolorosus,” 99, and Alemann-Schwartz, “Crucixus dolorosus,” 349; the parish church of HonnefSelhof, Alemann-Schwartz, “Crucixus dolorosus,” 365–66; and Saint Remigius in Borken, Alemann-Schwartz, “Crucixus dolorosus,” 368–69. Cynthia Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400– circa 1204 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 73–102; Klein, Byzanz, der Westen und das Wahre Kreuz, 206–19; Kelly Holbert, “Relics and Reliquaries of the True Cross,” in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, ed. Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 337–63. The cranial cavities in heads of Christ from triumphal carved crucixes in Germany in the thirteenth century in most cases indicate the carver’s use of a lathe or clamp rather than the containment of relics.

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According to Manuela Beer, “No denitive statement can be made regarding the nature of relics kept in carved triumphal crosses.” See Beer, Triumphkreuze des Mittelalters: Ein Beitrag zu Typus und Genese im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2005), 57; and Klaus Endemann, “Wood-Carving and Staering Techniques in Early Monumental Sculpture,” in Christ on the Cross: The Boston Crucix and the Rise of Monumental Wood Sculpture, 970–1200, ed. Shirin Fozi and Gerhard Lutz (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 155–57. One of the few relics Homann discovered inside the Kapitol crucix that corresponds to the relics identied inside the sculpture in 1636 by the Cologne canon Aegidius Gelenius is one of the wood of the cross (“de ligno domini”); Homann, “Der Crucixus dolorosus,” 35f. For more on parchment authentics, see Reliquienauthentiken: Kulturdenkmäler des Frühmittelalters, ed. Kirsten Wallenwein and Tino Licht (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2021). Friedrich Gorissen, Kranenburg: Ein altes Heiligtum des Niederrheins (Kranenburg, 1950); Hagemann, “Kranenburger Kreuzverehrung,” 82–89; Heinrich Janssen and Udo Grote, Zwei Jahrtausende Geschichte der Kirche am Niederrhein (Münster: Dialogverlag, 2001), 397–411. Joannes van Wanray, Historia S. Crucis Cranenburgensis ofte grondelicke beschrijvinge van’t oude mirakeleuse cruys-beelt tot Cranenburch (Kranenburg: Gedrukt voor de Uytgeevers, 1666), 1–6. For more on the reference to the now-lost primary source from 1308, see Wilhelm Classen, Das Erzbistum Köln: Archidiakonat von Xanten, Germania Sacra 3.1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1938), 208. An archival repository from the sixteenth century shows “ein copie der legende van teicken vnd miracul deß heiligen Cruyß van Crannenborch actum anno 1308,” HstAD Stift Kranenburg-Zyich Hs./Rep. 1, fol. 25r, as cited in Hagemann, “Kranenburger Kreuzverehrung,” 88. The van Wanray text was translated from Dutch into German by Friedrich Gorissen in 1953 and reproduced in Hagemann, “Kranenburger Kreuzverehrung,” 82–83, from which I quote. For the language of the indulgence, see Gorissen, Kranenburg, 30. Hagemann, “Kranenburger Kreuzvere­ hrung,” 82: “[er] kletterte mit dem heiligen Sakrament auf einen Baum und ließ das würdige Sakrament aus seinem Mund zwischen zwei Äste gleiten.” Hagemann, “Kranenburger Kreuzvere­ hrung,” 82–83: “Da kletterte der Priester auf

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den Baum und wollte das Sakrament herunterholen; als er danach tastete, entsank ihm das Sakrament in den Baum, so dass er es nicht mehr sah.” Hagemann, “Kranenburger Kreuzvere­ hrung,” 83: “als er auf den Baum schlug, brach der Baum entzwei, daraus el das heilige Kreuz in der Form und Weise, wie man es noch heutigen Tages sieht. Und daran kam nie ein Messer oder Eisen zum schneiden oder bearbeiten, und es ist gewachsen und gesprossen aus dem selben Baum, in den das heilige Sakrament gesunken war.” A short selection from the vast body of literature on the topic includes Peter Browe, “Die Hostienschändungen der Juden im Mittelalter,” Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte 34 (1926): 167–98; Mitchell Merback, Pilgrimage and Pogrom: Violence, Memory, and Visual Culture at the Host-Miracle Shrines of Germany and Austria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Herbert Kessler and David Nirenberg, eds., Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Hagemann, “Kranenburger Kreuzverehrung,” 83: “so hat der [Gott] gefügt, dass ein Bildnis, das nach seiner Menschlichkeit geformt ist, wie er am heiligen Kreuz gehangen hat, durch die Heiligkeit und die Kraft des heiligen Sakraments in einem Baum gewachsen ist.” Louis Marin, “Representation and Simulacrum,” in On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 316; Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Georey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 166– 91, 166; see also Helga Lutz and Bernhard Siegert, eds., Exzessive Mimesis: Trompel’Œils und andere Überschreitungen der ästhetischen Grenze (Munich: Metzel, 2020). Hagemann, “Kranenburger Kreuzvere­ hrung,” 83: “Danach war das genannte Kreuz ein Jahr in dieser Kirche ohne erhöht zu warden.” In 1372, all three altars in the church are named together: “deß heiligen Cruyß altar, dat hoich altar, St. Catharinen altar”; see HstAD Stift Kranenburg-Zyich Hs./ Rep. 1, fol. 80, as cited in Hagemann, “Kranenburger Kreuzverehrung,” 88n20; Classen, Das Erzbistum Köln, 234. HstAD Stift Kranenburg-Zyich Hs./Rep. 1, fol. 23; Classen, Das Erzbistum Köln, 208.

50. HstAD Hs. A III 15 alte, fols. 133–34: “dat in onser kirken to Cranenborg steit ende dagelix grote zeiken, mirakulen ende gnade duet ind bewiset.” Classen, Das Erzbistum Köln, 235; Hagemann, “Kranenburger Kreuzverehrung,” 89n27. 51. Hagemann, “Kranenburger Kreuzverehrung,” 88n28. The original quotation is found in the Bistumsarchiv Münster (Depositum Pfarrarchiv Saint Nikolai Kalkar, Stadtrechungen 1419), reprinted in Margret Wensky, ed., Kalkar (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001), 29. I thank Manuel Hagemann for sending me a copy of this invaluable secondary source. 52. Gorissen, Kranenburg, 22–23. 53. The primary studies on church rituals involving natural events remain Adolph Franz’s foundational chapter on “Natureignisse” in Die kirchlichen Benediktionen im Mittelalter, vol. 2 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1909), 1–123, esp. 37–44, 49–74; and Wagner, Volksfromme Kreuzverehrung. Some folklore historians have sought to establish the processions’ heritage in what they believed to be a preChristian Germanic devotion to nature; see principally Heino Pfannenschmid, Germanische Erntefeste im heidnischen und christlichen Cultus, mit besonderer Beziehung auf Niedersachsen: Beiträge zur germanischen Alterthumskunde und kirchlichen Archäologie (Hanover: Hahn, 1878); and Ulrich Jahn, Die deutschen Opfergebräuche bei Ackerbau und Viehzucht (Breslau: W. Koebner, 1884). 54. For more on what are known in German as Flurumgänge, Schauerprozessionen, and Hagelfeiern, see Nikolaus Kyll, “Die Hagelfeier im alten Erzbistum Trier und seinen Randgebieten,” Rheinisches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde 13/14 (1962/63): 113–71; and Franz, Die kirchlichen Benediktionen, 68, 71–75. 55. Konstanzer Chronik, 1441, as transcribed in Franz Joseph Mone, ed., Quellensammlung der Badischen Landesgeschichte, vol. 1 (Karlsruhe: Macklot, 1848), 342. 56. Benninghaus, Die Kontinuität der Wallfahrt zum Heiligen Kreuz, 122: “Anno Christi 1489 in die trinitatis Joannis Baptististae . . . et cum fecisset votum s. Cruci in Lage, quod anue vellet ir cum Cruce at praedictum locum—uppen Cruceberch—et dare eidem semel duo crura de duobus talentis cerae.” 57. Andreas Heniz, “Bittprozession,” in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, vol. 2 (Freiburg: Herder, 1994), 512–13; Otto Rühle, “Bittgang,” in Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, vol. 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000), 1348–54; Franz, Die kirchlichen

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Benediktionen, 49–123; Franz Xaver Haimerl, Das Prozessionswesen des Bistums Bamberg im Mittelalter (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1973), 8–22. Stadtarchiv Nürnberg cod. man. 169, fols. 55a–56b, as cited in Albert Gümbel, Das Mesnerpichtbuch von St. Lorenz in Nürnberg vom Jahre 1493 (Munich: Chr. Raiser, 1928), 20–21; see also Haimerl, Das Prozessionswesen des Bistums Bamberg, 13. On Hagelkreuze and Schauerkreuze, which are named so in archives as early as 1200, see Heinrich Dittmaier, Rheinische Flurnamen (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1963). Ascension week was also called Schauerwoche in Bavaria, while in Baden the Friday following Ascension was called Hageltag; see Pfannenschmid, Germanische Erntefeste, 371–75; and Elard Hugo Meyer, Badisches Volksleben im 19. Jahrhundert (Strasbourg: Theiss, 1900), 505. The literature on processions is vast, but some key texts include John Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship: The Origins, Development, and Meaning of Stational Liturgy, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 228 (Rome: Pontical Institute, 1987); Sabine Felbecker, Die Prozession: Historische und systematische Untersuchungen zu einer liturgischen Ausdruckhandlung, Münsteraner theologische Abhandlungen 39 (Münster: Altenberge Oros-Verlag, 1995); Daniela Wagner, “Kongurationen der Wahrnehmung: Die Prozession als Stifter narrativer Ambivalenz in den Wundern des Wahren Kreuzes der Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista,” in Rahmen und Frames: Dispositionen des Visuellen in der Kunst der Vormoderne (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 129–44; Jürgen Barsch, “Liturgische Sachkultur und ihre rituelle Präsenz in mittelalterlichen Prozessionen: Überlegungen zu Funktion und Bedeutung materieller Ausstattung gottesdienstlicher Züge,” in Prozessionen und ihre Gesänge in der mittelalterlichen Stadt (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2017), 101–18; and Sible de Blauuw, “Following the Crosses: The Processional Cross and the Typology of Processions in Medieval Rome,” in Christian Feast and Festival: The Dynamics of Western Liturgy and Culture, ed. Paul Post et al. (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 319–43. The best medieval source that expressly connects the celebration of the Christian Rogation with its antique roots in the Ambarvilia comes from the Abbess Marksvith in Westphalian convent of Schildesche (940): “Statuimus ut annuatim secunda feria Pentecostes spiritu Sancto

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cooperante eundem Patronum in Parochiis vestris longo ambitu circumferentes et domos vestras lustrantes et pro gentilicis Ambarvali in lacrymis et et varia devotione vos ipsos mactetis et ad refectionum pauperum eleemosynam comportetis,” as cited in Franz, Die kirchlichen Benediktionen, 9. Sebastian Franck, Weltbuch (Tübingen: Morhart, 1534), 132: “Au diß fest kumpt die Creüz woch / da geht die ganz statt mit dem creüz wallen auß der statt / etwann in ein dor zú eim heiligen / dz er das treyd bewaren wóll / und wolfeyle zeyt umb Gott erwerben.” Franck, Weltbuch, 51: “Die drey tag vor dem Auart tag so man mit dem creüz geht / kummen etwan vil creüz in ein kirch zusamen / da singen sy nit miteinander / sunder ein yedes creüz sein lied so best es mag.” Froben Christoph von Zimmern and Johannes Müller, Zimmerische Chronik, ed. Karl August Barack et al., vol. 2 (Tübingen: Laupp, 1869), 223. On Öschprozessionen, see Friedrich Kluge et al., eds., Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1995), 233. Franz Xaver Haimerl cites the Staatsarchiv Bamberg (nach Repertorium und Stücknummer 25, 822) and Lauenstein bei Mainz in 1514; see Haimerl, Das Prozessionswesen des Bistums Bamberg, 19. Pfannenschmid, Germanische Erntefeste, 371. Karl von Leoprechting, Aus dem Lechrain: Zur deutschen Sitten- und Sagenkunde (Munich: Literarisch-artistische Anstalt, 1855), 177. On blessed crosses planted in the earth, see Franz, Die kirchlichen Benediktionen, 12–15. A shower mass (Schauermesse) was performed in Vienna’s Church of Mary am Gestade in 1479; see Karl Uhlirz, ed., Quellen zur Geschichte der Stadt Wien, vol. 3 (Vienna: Alterthums-Vereine zu Wien, 1904), no. 4783. Wagner, Volksfromme Kreuzverehrung, 152, 156. Sources in 1481 called the twin holidays “tw des hilligen Cruzes Dage.” Heinrich Kraienhorst, “Das Beispiel Lage: Von der Kommende zur Pfarrei,” in 1803: Umbruch oder Ubergang; Die Säkularisation von 1803 in Norddeutschland, ed. Thomas Scharf-Wrede (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2004), 355–91, 365. For more information on medieval celebrations related to Saint John’s Day, such as the Saint John bonres, see Franz, Die Kirchlichen Benediktionen, 72–74. On pagan Germanic associations, see Wagner, Volksfromme Kreuzverehrung, 157. Roswitha Poppe, “Kommende Lage in Rieste,” in Führer zu vor- und frühgeschichtlichen Denkmälern: Das Osnabrücker Land,

Notes to Pages 00–000

71.

72. 73.

74.

75. 76.

77.

78.

79.

ed. Heinrich Feldwisch-Drentrup (Mainz: Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseum, 1979), 172–73. Otto zu Hoene, Die Ehemalige JohanniterMalteser-Kommende Lage (Quakenbrück, 2010), 41. Hoene, Die Ehemalige Johanniter-MalteserKommende Lage, 41. The comparison of the Virgin (virgo) to the rod of Jesse (virga) is a staple of Christian iconography; see Jerey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 94–96; and Lottlisa Behling, “Die Bäume Mariens auf dem Albrechtsaltar zu Klosterneuburg,” in Album amicorum Jan Gerriet van Gelder, ed. Jan Gerriet van Gelder et al. (The Hague: Nijho, 1973), 15–21. For Richard of SaintLaurent’s long thirteenth-century exposition on the scriptural images of Mary as tree, see Rachel Fulton, Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 251–308, esp. 303–6. For more on the iconography of the Credo, see Martin Segers, ed., Das Glaubensbekenntnis auf dem Portal der Klosterkirche Marienthal (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2002); and Pierre Lacroix et al., eds., Pensée, image et communication en Europe médiévale: À propos des stalles de Saint-Claude; colloque international qui s’est tenu dans le Jura, à Saint-Claude et à Lons-le-Saunier en septembre 1990 (Besançon: Asprodic, 1993). Baert, Heritage of Holy Wood, 442–44. Arthur Watson, The Early Iconography of the Tree of Jesse (London: Oxford University Press, 1934); Marita Lingren-Fridell, “Der Stammbaum Mariä aus Anna und Joachim,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 11–12 (1938–39): 289–307; Joan Holladay, Genealogy and the Politics of Representation in the High and Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Susan L. Green, Tree of Jesse Iconography in Northern Europe in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (London: Routledge, 2019). For more on the Berlin woodcut (Inv. 129-1), see Max Lehrs and Paul Kristeller, eds., Holzschnitte im Königlichen Kupferstichkabinett zu Berlin, vol. 2 (Berlin: Cassirer, 1915), no. 94, Tafel XLVI. For more on the Heggbach Altarpiece, see the section on this topic in chapter 2. Otto von Simson, “‘Compassio’ and ‘Co-Redemptio’ in Roger van der Weyden’s ‘Descent from the Cross,’” Art Bulletin 35 (1953): 9–16. The Tree of the Virgin motif is

80.

81.

82.

83.

84.

85.

86.

also emblematic of the increasing popularity around the cult of Saint Anne, Mary’s mother, and Christ’s extended family descending from her—the so-called Holy Kinship (die Heilige Sippe), which is sometimes expressed in arboreal terms. For Richard of Saint-Laurent’s exposition on the scriptural images of Mary as fountain, see Fulton, Mary and the Art of Prayer, 278–80. Friedrich Muthmann, Mutter und Quelle: Studien zur Quellenverehrung im Altertum und im Mittelalter (Basel: Archäologischer Verlag, 1975), 365–413; Karl Weinhold, Die Verehrung der Quellen in Deutschland (Berlin: Verlag der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1898). Hanns Hubbach, “‘. . . adder wasserkunstmacher’: Annäherung an den ‘anderen’ Grünewald,” in Grünewald und seine Zeit: Große Landesausstellung BadenWürttemberg; Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, 8. Dezember 2007—2. März 2008 (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007), 30–38; Hans Hubbach, Matthias Grünewald: Der Aschaenburger Maria-Schnee-Altar: Geschichte, Rekonstruktion, Ikonographie (Mainz: Selbstverlag der Gesellschaft für Mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte, 1996). Otto Böcher, “Zur jüngeren Ikonographie der Wurzel Jesse,” Mainzer Zeitschrift 67/68 (1972/73): 153–68, 157, 163, 166; Anne Harris, “Water and Wood: Ecomateriality and Sacred Objects at the Chapel of SaintFiacre, Le Faouët (Brittany),” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44 (2014): 585–615; Baert, Heritage of Holy Wood, 317–25, 408. Homann, “Der Crucixus dolorosus,” 91–95; Hans Günther Schneider and Berhard Holländer, Das Wundertätige Kreuz zu Haltern: Festschrift zum Kreuzjubiläum und Kreuztracht (Munich: Schnell und Steiner, 1986), 10–11. For the Netherlandish context on miraculous Marian trees and the specic motif of Madonna in the Dry Tree—itself a typological tree from scripture—see Hugo van der Velden, “Petrus Christus’s ‘Our Lady of the Dry Tree,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 60 (1997): 89–110. Norbert Wand, Mittelalterliche Einsiedeleien, Quellheiligtümer und Wallfahrtsstätten im Odenwald (Heppenheim: Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Geschichts- und Heimatvereine im Kreis Bergstraße, 1995), 36, 60; “Odenwaldkreis—Hesseneck— Schöllenbach,” Kulturdenkmäler in Hessen, Landesamt für Denkmalpeger in Hessen, https://denkxweb.denkmalpege-hessen.

87.

88. 89.

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91. 92.

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de/11169/; Daniel Schneider, Vollständige hochgräich Erbachische Stammtafel nebst deren Erklär—und Bewährungen oder hochgräich Erbachische Historia (Frankfurt, 1736), 280. On the Schöllenbach Altarpiece, see Elsbeth de Weerth, “Das Schöllenbacher Wurzel Jesse Retabel,” Kunst in Hessen und am Mittelrhein, NF 1 (2005): 77–92; Green, Tree of Jesse Iconography, 119–40; and Hilja Droste, “Schöllenbach, ehem. Ev. Pfarrkirche—Schöllenbacher Altar, 1515— Heute Schloss Erbach, Hubertuskapelle,” arthistoricum.net, January 28, 2016, https:// doi.org/10.11588/artdok.00003522. On the Amorsbrunn retable, see Weerth, “Das Schöllenbacher Wurzel Jesse Retabel,” 87. Böcher, “Zur jüngeren Ikonographie der Wurzel Jesse,” 163. Karl-Heinz Bachmann and Wolfgang Specht, Glaube, Wunder, Kunst und Geld: 700 Jahre Wallfahrt nach Hessenthal (Mespelbrunn: Gemeinde Mespelbrunn, 1993), 28–66, esp. 47–49. Elmar Weiß, “Hans Böhm, der Pfeifer von Niklashausen,” Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv 96 (1976): 5–73, esp. 67. Pfarr- und Wallfahrtskirche Schneeberg (Passau: Kunstverlag Peda, 1988), 2–4. Hartmut Kühne, “‘Die do lauen hyn und her, zum heiligen Creutz zu Dorgaw und tzu Dresen . . .’: Luthers Kritik an Heiligenkult und Wallfahrten im historischen Kontext Mitteldeutschlands,” in “Ich armer sundiger mensch”: Heiligen- und Reliquienkult am Übergang zum konfessionellen Zeitalter, ed. Andreas Tacke (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 499–522, esp. 518–20; for much of the background information and source material on both Rötha and Eicha, see Otto Clemen, “Zwei ehemalige Wallfahrtsorte in der Nähe Leipzigs,” in Studium lipsiense: Ehrengabe Karl Lamprecht dargebracht aus Anlass der Erönung des Königlich sächsischen Instituts für Kultur- und Universalgeschichte bei der Universität Leipzig (Berlin: Weidmann, 1909), 185–91. Lindner as later transcribed in Johann Burkhard Mencke, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum (Leipzig: Impensis Ioannis Christiani Martini, 1728), vol. 2, col. 1549; Clemen, “Zwei ehemalige Wallfahrtsorte in der Nähe Leipzigs,” 187. Chronicon terrae Misnensis in Universitäts­ biblio­thek Leipzig MS 1317m (1516–18), fol. 5r, transcribed by Ernst Gotthelf Gersdorf, Chronicon terrae Misnensis seu Buchense (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1839), 20. On vital materiality and distributive agency, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political

Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), esp. 1–19, 87–89, 113–20. 96. For more on how recursion across natureculture divides indicates the work of cultural techniques, see Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 11–15; and Erhard Schüttpelz, “Die medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken,” in Kulturgeschichte als Mediengeschichte (oder vice versa?), ed. Lorenz Engell, Bernhard Siegert, and Joseph Vogl, Archiv für Mediengeschichte 6 (Weimar: Universitätsverlag Weimar, 2006), 87–110, esp. 89–90, 94–97; for calendars as cultural techniques, see Thomas Macho and Christian Kassung, eds., Kulturtechniken der Synchronisation (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2013), esp. 9–21.

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6.

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Chapter 2. The Spiritual Maypole 1. Epigraph: Philipp Wackernagel, Das deutsche Kirchenlied von der ältesten Zeit bis zu Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1865), no. 822. Wackernagel transcribed the lyrics from the Meynz Cantual of 1605 and notes that portions of the hymn can also be found in the Paderborn Gesangbuchlein of 1609 and 1616. 2. Henry Suso, Horologium Sapientiae, ed. Pius Künzle (Freiburg, Switzerland: Universitätsverlag, 1977), book 2, chap. 7, 600–601; for the English translation, see Edmund Colledge, Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 325–26. 3. Neidhart von Reuenthal, Die Lieder Neidharts, ed. Edmund Wießner (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984), summer poems (Sommerlieder) nos. 2–4, 10, 15, and 30; see also Hellmut Rosenfeld, “Maitanz, Maien, Maienbüschel, Maibaum: Neidhart von Reuental und die Linde in Dichtung und Brauch,” Schönere Heimat 77 (1988): 371–74. 4. For other depictions of the dance about the May woods in books of hours, see Anthoine Vérard’s Grandes heures royales, published as Horae ad usum Romanum (Paris: Philippe Pigouchet and Antoine Vérard, 1490), “ad tercia” (not paginated); and Mara Hofmann, “Miniaturen in Inkunablen: Die Grandes Heures des Pariser Verlegers Anthoine Vérard,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 58 (2009): 183–204, esp. 191. There is a case to be made that the drolleries beneath a scene of the Visitation in The Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux, Queen of France (ca. 1324–28; Metropolitan Museum MS 54.1.2, fols. 34v– 35r) refer to the maypole dance: four farmers, two with musical instruments, make

8.

9.

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merry along a frame that ramies upward into a trunk that owers at its apex. Anthoins du Breuil, Le sandrin; ou, Verd galand où sont naïfvement deduits les plaisirs de la vie rustique (1609; reprint, Brussels: Impr. de A. Mertens et ls, 1863), 7. The locus classicus on the historical tradition of the maypole in German-speaking lands is Hans Moser, “Maibaum und Maienbrauch: Beiträge und Erörterungen zur Brauchforschung,” Bayerisches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde (Munich, 1961), 115–60; see also Ernst Christmann, “Von ‘Mai’- und ‘Pngst’-Flurnamen und Mai- und Pngstbrauchtum,” Beiträge zur Flurnamenforschung: Festschrift Eugen Fehrle, ed. Herbert Derwein (Karlsruhe: Südwestdeutsche Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft, 1940), 19–41. Johannes Boemus, Repertorium librorum trium de omnium gentium ritibus (Augsburg: Grimm, 1520), fol. 59v; cited in Moser, “Maibaum und Maienbrauch,” 137. Charles Du Fresne Du Cange, “maium” and “maius,” in Glossarium mediae et inmae latinitatis, vol. 5 (1885): 189; cited in Moser, “Maibaum und Maienbrauch,” 123. Kurt Küppers, Marienfrömmigkeit zwischen Barock und Industriezeitalter: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Feier der Maiandacht in Deutschland und im deutschen Sprachgebiet (Saint Ottilien: EOS, 1987); Luzian Peger, “Zur Geschichte der Marien-Maiandacht im Elsaß,” Straßburger Diözesanblatt 31 (1912): 163–76; Dietrich Schmidtke, Studien zur dingallegorischen Erbauungsliteratur des Spätmittelalters: Am Beispiel der Gartenallegorie (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1982), 1–3, 74–76. My use of mediation and inter-mediation is inspired by Bruno Latour’s conception of the terms “mediator” and “hybrid”; see Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 37–42; and Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 5–12. On the maypole and ceremonial trees as totems, see Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Macmillan, 1995), 231–36; and Aby Warburg, “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 2 (1939): 277–92, 284–85. Judith Theben, Die Mystische Lyrik des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts: Untersuchungen, Texte, Repertorium (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 246–57, 431, 460–61, 485, 511. Joseph Kehrein, Das deutsche kath. Kirchen­ lied in seiner Entwicklung von den ersten

Notes to Pages 00–000

181

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

182

Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart: Zunächst für höhere Lehranstalten, vol. 2 (Neuburg: Verl. des Kath. Erziehungs-Vereins, 1874), no. 685. Key to Kehrein’s supposition that the hymn was sung in the Cross Week is its placement just before a hymn denitively sung at that time in the Great Catholic Hymnal (1625) of the German Benedictine abbot David Gregor Corner. The standard, if outdated, historical text comparing global religions’ tendencies toward tree worship is James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion, abridged ed. (London: Macmillan, 1922), 109–12; for criticism of Frazer, see Mary Beard, “Frazer, Leach, and Virgil: The Popularity (and Unpopularity) of the Golden Bough,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (1992): 203–24. Caesarius von Heisterbach, Libri miraculorum, I.17, in Die Wundergeschichten des Caesarius von Heisterbach, ed. Alfons Hilka, vol. 3 (Bonn: Peter Hanstein Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1937), 38–40: “Aquisgrani cum corona fuisset erecta.” Hugo Loersch, “Dar Hadde Hê Werf Alse Meibôm Tô Aken: Ein Erklärungsversuch,” Zeitschrift der Aachener Geschichtsvereins 2 (1880): 117–26. Caesarius von Heisterbach, Libri miraculorum, I.17, 38: “In Hertene villa dyocesis Coloniensis dives quidam arietem sericis vestitum malo inposuit atque iuxta theatrum erexit . . . Dictum fuit voce preconaria, ut choros circa arietem ducerent et, remota omni personarum acceptione, quicumque corizando cunctos precelleret, illum cum suis insigniis sibi vendicaret.” Hilka notes that malo comes from malus, which he translates to the German Mastbaum. Caesarius von Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, X.29, ed. Josephus Strange, vol. 2 (Cologne: Heberle, 1851), 238–39. In 1875, Johann Wilhelm Mannhardt cited Caesarius’s Aachen case in Der Baumkultus der Germanen und ihrer Nachbarstämme: Mythologische Untersuchungen, Waldund Feldkulte, vol. 1 (Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1875), 154–311, 160–70. Johannes Geiler von Kaysersberg, Predigen teütsch und vil gütter leeren (Augsburg: Hausen Otmar, 1510), fol. 142v: “Wann es heüt d maitag ist / an dem man spylet maien e o o und baume aufzurichten und stecken fur die e heesser der liebgehabten / Also bin ich auch in willen in eüer herzn stecken den maien un baum vo siben grünen esten dar au man mag jesum sehen.” Kaysersberg, Predigen teütsch, fol. 142v. The date of 1500 is mentioned on fol. 141v;

Notes to Pages 00–000

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22.

23.

24.

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he delivered the sermon in Strasbourg. “An sanct Philips vnd jacobs tag . . . es ist der tag de zwaier hailigen zwölpotten Philippi vnnd Jacobi / deren der erste in Scithia umbwar den abgot genant Mars und aurichtet den baum des hailigen creüzes augerichtet den baum des hailigen creützes / Darumbe er auch an ain kreütz gehenckt ward.” Jacobus de Voragine, “Saint Philip, Apostle,” in The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 267. The primary text of “Eyn lere sshone / Teghen dantzen vnde van den maybome” is handed down in a manuscript now in the Kruisherenklooster Sint Agatha in Cuijk, Netherlands, Hs. C 2o 10, fols. 223r–26v (1473; originally from the AugustinerChorherrenstift Frenswegen). See Christine Stöllinger-Löser, “Lehre gegen das Tanzen und von dem Maibaum,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. Kurt Ruh et al., vol. 5 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1985), 670; and Rudolf Langenberg, Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte der deutschen Mystik (Bonn: P. Hanstein, 1902), 67–71. I thank Wim van Anrooij of Leiden University for his English translations of this text. Langenberg, Quellen und Forschungen, 68: “De dans is eyn sirckel, dar al gewiss de duuel dat rechte myddel is.” Langenberg, Quellen und Forschungen, 69: “Den kinderen van israhel vnde grot vnuromen, / Do se danseden to vnwillen gode / Vmme dat gülden kalf, do moyses brachte / De twe tafeln myt den teen geboden, / Dar se van beeiden so luttick achte, / Dat moyses so vnudldich wort / Da he de tafelen warp dar neder.” Keith Moxey, “Sebald Beham’s Church Anniversary Holidays: Festive Peasants as Instruments of Repressive Humor,” Simiolus 12 (1981): 107–30, esp. 110–12. In his composition of the peasant holiday, Sebald was inspired by a print designed by his brother Barthel a few years earlier; Moxey, “Sebald Beham’s Church Anniversary Holidays,” 112–13. A large maypole appears also in the center of Daniel Hopfer’s double-plate etching of the same theme from 1533–36; see Robert Koch, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 17 (New York: Abaris, 1981), no. 74. May devotion was particularly beloved by Nuremburg nuns. The oldest variant of this chapter’s epigraphic hymn (“Wer nu wölle meyen gen in diser lieben zeit”;

28.

29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

Nürnberger Handschrift StB, Cent. VI, 82, fols. 32v–33v, ca. 1400–1425) was written in a manuscript that once belonged to the Dominican nun Klara Nützlin (d. 1455) from Nuremberg’s Saint Catherine’s convent. Katharina Tucher, a lay sister in the same convent, copied Nützlin’s version but added an additional sixth stanza of rhyming couplets (Strasbourg Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire [BNU] MS 2195, fols. 161v–63r; 15th c.); Theben, Die Mystische Lyrik des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts, 511. The Exemplar, which survives in seven complete and eight partial manuscripts, was edited by Karl Bihlmeyer, Heinrich Seuse: Deutsche Schriften (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1907); citations from Suso’s original text, as found in Bihlmeyer’s edition, will henceforth employ the abbreviation DS. Four vernacular works together comprise his Exemplar: “Life of the Servant,” “Little Book of Eternal Wisdom,” “Book of Truth,” and “Little Book of Letters.” For the sake of clarity, I dierentiate them from the italicized volume in which Suso published them by putting their titles in quotation marks. The best English translation of these texts was done by Frank Tobin, Henry Suso: The Exemplar with Two German Sermons (New York: Paulist, 1989). I use this translation unless otherwise noted. DS, 32–33, author’s translation. Modern German editions (and English ones that follow) mistranslate the chapter’s opening sentence as the Servant “planting” a spiritual maypole, which obscures the actual practice of the May Day ritual he spiritually allegorizes. The verb for “planting” replaced the original for “setting” and gives the reader the impression of a tree rooted in the earth. But this is a ceremonial object. The rst time the word “panzen” replaced “saste” was in Lehmann’s edition, Heinrich Seuses Deutsche Schriften, trans. Walter Lehmann, vol. 1 (Jena: Diederichs, 1911), 28f. See also Elsbeth Stagel, Das Leben des seligen Heinrich Seuse, trans. Georg Hofmann and Walter Nigg (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1966), 82f.; Tobin, Henry Suso, 83. Georg Hofmann and Walter Nigg translate the “ast des heiligen crúzes” as “Querbalken,” or cross beam, muddying Suso’s extended arboreal metaphor; Stagel, Das Leben des seligen Heinrich Seuse, 82–83. DS, 32–33. Susan Boynton, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–1125 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 162–66. The fourth line of the rst stanza, which is believed

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

to have been added in the late fourteenth century, contemporary with the life of Suso, mentions the vitality and life-giving qualities of the wood: “Vitale lignum, Vitam portans omnium.” DS, 7. DS, 33. DS, 33. Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500) (New York: Crossroad, 2005), 195–239, esp. 209–11; Bruno Boesch, “Seuses religiöse Sprache,” in Festgabe für Friedrich Maurer zum 70.-Geburtstag (Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann, 1968), 223–45, 236–45; Heinrich Stirnimann, “Mystik und Metaphorik: Zu Seuses Dialog,” in Das ‘Einig Ein’: Studien zu Theorie und Sprache der deutschen Mystik, ed. Alois M. Haas and Heinrich Stirnimann, Dokimon 6 (Fribourg: Universitätsverlag, 1980), 230–53. For example, in the opening lines of his Exemplar, Suso sets out to “describe in an image-giving manner [bildgebender wise] the life of a beginner . . . and how a beginner should order his inner and outer self according to God’s dear will,” DS, 3; Jerey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone, 1998), 198–207, 234. For more on release (Gelassenheit), see McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, 217–22. Bihlmeyer, Heinrich Seuse, 57*–62*; McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, 206–10; Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, 207–19. Strasbourg BNU MS 2929 was produced for Rulman Merswin, the Strasbourger nancier and Friend of God (Gottesfreund) who founded the Cloister zum Grünen Wörth; Theben, Die Mystische Lyrik des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts, 301–4; Georg Steer, “Merswin, Rulman,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. Kurt Ruh et al., vol. 6 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987), 420–42; Edmund Colledge and J. C. Marlier, “Mystical Pictures in the Suso ‘Exemplar’: M.S. Strasbourg 2929,” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 54 (1984): 292–354, esp. 294–300; Jerey F. Hamburger, “The Use of Images in the Pastoral Care of Nuns: The Case of Heinrich Suso and the Dominicans,” Art Bulletin 71 (1989): 20–46, esp. 24–25 and n. 32. On the motif’s relevance to Suso’s May Day practice in chapter 12 of the Life, see Colledge and Marlier, “Mystical Pictures in the Suso ‘Exemplar,’” 350–51. The motif also alludes to aspects of both chapters 34 and 20 of the Life and should thus be understood

43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

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as embracing Suso’s larger intertextuality, by which multiple moments of devotion intertwine around key images of the rosebush, springtime trees, and the season of the cross. The placement of the “Rose Tree” motif within bound copies of the Exemplar is also unxed, sometimes accompanying chapter 34 of the Life, but mostly, as in the Strasbourg manuscript, alongside chapter 13 from the Exemplar’s second book, “The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom”; see also Bihlmeyer, Heinrich Seuse, 54*–55*. Ernst Robert Curtius, “The Book of Nature,” in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013), 319–25; Willemien Otten, “Nature and Scripture: Demise of a Medieval Analogy,” Harvard Theological Review 88 (1995): 257–84; Constant J. Mews, “The World as Text: The Bible and the Book of Nature in Twelfth-Century Theology,” in Scripture and Pluralism: Reading the Bible in the Religiously Plural Worlds of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Thomas J. Heernan and Thomas E. Burman (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 95–122. DS, 171; Tobin, Henry Suso, 187. Jerey F. Hamburger, “Speculations on Speculation: Vision and Perception in the Theory and Practice of Mystical Devotion,” in Deutsche Mystik im abendländischen Zusammenhang: Neu erschlossene Texte, neue methodische Ansätze, neue theoretische Konzepte; Kolloquium, Kloster Fischingen 1998, ed. Walter Haug and Wolfram SchneiderLastin (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000), 353–408. Tobin, Henry Suso, 187. Tobin, Henry Suso, 188 and n. 185, 392. Suso added stems to the root verb “to image” (bilden) to articulate the process of “release,” whereby one de-images (entbilden) from the creaturely, re-images (bilden) with Christ, and trans-images (überbilden) into the Godhead. DS, 191: “Ein gelassener mensch muͦss entbildet werden von der creatur, gebildet werden mit Cristo, and úberbildet in der gotheit.” For an exhaustive discussion on the ways to translate Suso’s verbal triad, see Stirnimann, “Mystik und Metaphorik,” 247–49. Denys Turner, The Darkness of God (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 137–67, 142; Stirnimann, “Mystik und Metaphorik,” 245–49; McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, 237–39; Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, 226. The church also incriminated many innocent people by falsely associating them with the Free Spirits; Richard Kieckhefer,

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53. 54.

55.

56.

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Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 19–52, esp. 29–32; McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, 48–79. McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, 575n81: “Suso shows surprisingly little interest in traditional mystical speculation on man as the imago dei/trinitatis”; Stirnimann, “Mystik und Metaphorik,” 251: “Vom natürlichen Menschen als Bild und Gleichnis Gottes ist nirgends die Rede.” On Eckhart’s anthropocentrism, see Bernard McGinn, “Introduction: Theological Summary,” in Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1981), 24–61, esp. 55–61. McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, 239. Petra Seegets, Passionstheologie und Passionsfrömmigkeit im ausgehenden Mittelalter: Der Nürnberger Franziskaner Stephan Fridolin (gest. 1498) zwischen Kloster und Stadt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 91–92. See also Dietrich Schmidtke, “Fridolin, Stephan,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. Kurt Ruh et al., vol. 2 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980), 918–22. The Spiritual May survives in three extant manuscripts in Augsburg, Berlin, and Munich. I cite the manuscript in Munich, in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (hereafter BSB), Cgm 4473 (1529), which is written in Middle Bavarian and has never been transcribed. It includes pen illustrations. Karin Schneider, Die deutschen Handschriften der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München: Die mittelalterlichen Handschriften aus Cgm 4001–5247, Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Monacensis, vol. 7 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996), 130–32. Der geistliche Mai was printed in Landshut in 1533, Munich in 1549 and 1550, and Dillingen in 1581. Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 1r–v: “An der hylligen zwolfpotten tag sandt philyph undd jacob der der erst tag ist in dem naturlychen lustlichen mayen in dem das ertrych sich verneut und alles laub und graß graint dye paum plyeen und dye minnigklychen pluemlein her fur springen und jeder man spazyern get in die lustlichen garten und auf die gruen wyessen und dye augen erwitert in dem wunniglichen mayen.” On the Maikur and Osterspaziergang, see Christmann, “Von ‘Mai’- und ‘Pngst’Flurnamen,” 37–41. The May calendar page of Jean, the Duke of Berry’s Trés Riches Heures (Musée Condé Bibliothèque MS 65; fol. 5v) shows young noblemen and

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59.

60.

61.

62.

63.

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women wearing green on a May Day jaunt and sporting green branches they gathered that day. Roland Schmitt, Grenzsteine: Zur Geschichte, Typologie und Bewahrung von historischen Grenzzeichen aus Stein (Mandelbachtal: Edition Überwald im Verlag Faber, 2003); Achim Timmermann, Memory and Redemption: Public Monuments and the Making of Late Medieval Landscape (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 192–218. Schmitt, Grenzsteine, 23: “Die Waldgrenz’ soll die Jungend merken, die Pritsche hilft’s Gedächtnis stärken.” See also “Der grosse ‘Waldumbgang’ zu Kaiserslautern,” Das Bayerland 24 (1913): 638–39. Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 7v: “gee dar nach in deen grossen wald aller heylligen vatter.” Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 8r: “so pyt deine lyebe gespyllein [heilige] das sy dich doch fyeren in den rechten mayengarten da der aller pegierlich ast may wegst.” Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fols. 9r, 10r: “an dem hochen ast des heylligen kreuz,” “an dem pluenten paum des heylligen creuzs.” Fridolin Der geistliche Mai, fol. 10v, uses the verbs “suechen, aussuechen, erwollen.” For more on the lumber rights associated with Walpurgis, also known as the Walperzug, Holzschalgrecht, and Holzsammeln, see multiple period examples enumerated in Moser, “Maibaum und Maienbrauch,” 130–35. The correspondence took place in the sixteenth century; however, no exact date survives. Paul Walther, Schwäbische Volkskunde (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1929), 147. “Ir haben unsers gedenken wol wisse, daß bisher die jungen gesellen und sonderlich unserer landort brauch und gewonheit gehapt, auf den maytag mayen abzuhowen, und daß sy solch mayen für die heuser gesteckt und ufgericht. Desselben abhowens ist sovil ingerissen, das u solchen tag von zway bis in die drewhundert mayen oder tennelin [Tannen] und darzu nur die allerhübschten und gradisten abgehowen worden sein.” Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 10v: “An dem andern tag solltu in den hollesaligen mayen des heylligen creüz hubpsche spyegelein hancken oder ansehen dye liechten schonen spyegel der sysser wunsam may vol hangt under den sind vyer sunderlych spyegel dye der hoch gelert spyegler doctor genant sant paulus an den vyer orten des hochen mayen paüms des hylligen creüz zaygt.” Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 11r: “In dem hubpschen spyegle der da hangt an der hoch des spiz des mayen paums schau die

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gotlichen ewigen weyshayt.” 68. Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 11v: “Item in den spiegel der an der rechten seiten des mayen paüms hangt schau dye götlich gerechtigkayt dye ain so streng gerecht urteil geföllt hat uber alles menschlych geschlacht das alle adams kinder dem ewigen tod sind verfallen gewessen.” 69. Heiner Lück, “Gerichtsstätten,” in Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, ed. Wolfgang Stammler, Adalbert Erler, et al. (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 2004), 174; Annette Lenzing, Gerichtslinden und Thingsplätze in Deutschland (Königstein im Taunus: Langewiesche Nachfolger Köster, 2005). 70. Lenzing, Gerichtslinden und Thingsplätze, 43; see also Rudolf Hahn, Heimatbuch der Gemeinde Unterharmersbach (Harmersbach, 1980), 19. The chapel that now stands replaced an older one in 1567. 71. Diebold Schilling der Jüngere’s Schweizer Bilderchronik, 1513 (Luzern Zentralbibliothek HS. S. 23, fol. 127v). See Alois Niederstätter, Das Jahrhundert der Mitte: An der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit, 1400–1522, Österreichische Geschichte 5 (Vienna: Carl Ueberreuter, 1996). Schilling was author and illustrator of the chronicle, which he presented to the city council of Lucerne on January 15, 1513. For more on the so-called Amstaldenhandel, see Dora Suter-Schmid, Koller-, Mötteli- und Amstaldenhandel: Ein Beitrag zur Politik Unterwaldens in der 2. Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts (Zurich: Juris Druck, 1974). 72. Konrad Gusinde, “Spiegelraub,” in Neidhart mit dem Veilchen (Hildesheim: Olms, 1977), 129. 73. Wilhelm Homann, Rheinhessische Volkskunde (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1932), 249; Moser, “Maibaum und Maienbrauch,” 137. 74. Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fols. 10v–11r: “under den [spygel] sind vyer sunderlych spyegel dye der hoch gelert spyegler doctor genant sant paulus an den vyer orten des hochen mayen paüms des hylligen creüz zaygt.” Sehen, Ersehen, Schauen, and Betrachten are verbs that Fridolin commonly employs to command his ock of nuns to observe with their eyes. 75. Victor Ieronim Stoichiță, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern MetaPainting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, 355. 76. Portable convex mirrors had been exported to Venice out of southern Germany as early as the fourteenth century; in 1373 there was already a guild of glass-mirror

77.

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makers in Nuremberg. Beckmann, A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins, vol. 1 (London: Bohn, 1846), 74–77; Sara J. Schechner, “Between Knowing and Doing: Mirrors and Their Imperfections in the Renaissance,” Early Science and Medicine 10 (2005): 137–62; Heinrich Schwarz, “The Mirror of the Artist and the Mirror of the Devout,” Studies in the History of Art Dedicated to William E. Suida (London, 1959), 90–105, esp. 94, 101. Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 13r: “an dye andern spyegelein der dysser may an aller orten umb und umb vol hangt das sind dye edlen manigfalten schonen art und aigenschaft des heylligen creuz . . . das alle augen sein hubscheyt mit all mogen schauen noch.” Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 18r: “Sei gegrust du kostpers creuz wan du die geziert und schon von den gelydern meines herren an dych gezogen hast.” Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 18v: “An dem dryten tag . . . laden all dein guet frenndt die du hast in dem hymelyschen hof und sy piten das sy dir helfen umb tragen den hochselligen mayen durch alle gassen das ist durch alle thor der heylligen engeln und liebe heyllen vatterlands und das sy dyr in dissem spazier helfen singen das minigklych lyedlein.” Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 19r: “Bitt die grossen lyeb haber des heyligen creuz petrus und paulus das sy die dissen greud gebeten mayen hellfen stecken fur deiner aller leybsten freundt thur aber zum ersten aus kindlicher lyeb dye du vor allen dingen sollt haben in deinen hymellischen vatter so stock den mayen des haylsamen creuzes fur dye thur das ist fur die augen got des hymelischen vatters.” Moser, “Maibaum und Maienbrauch,” 129–30; Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, “Rosen-Metamorphosen: Von unfesten Zeichen in spätmittelalterlichen Texten: Heinrich Seuses ‘Exemplar’ und das Mirakel ‘Marien Rosenkranz,’” in Der Rosenkranz: Andacht—Geschichte—Kunst, ed. Urs Beat Frei and Fredy Bühler (Bern: Benteli, 2003), 48–67. See also Anne-Winston Allen, “Gardens of Heavenly and Earthly Delight: Medieval Gardens of the Imagination,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 99 (1998): 83–92. Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 46r; the caption reads, “Ich Jhesus clar pring mit mir vil guetter jar und ain krenczlein das haist vergißnitmein.” See also Schneider, Die deutschen Handschriften, 131; Jerey F. Hamburger, “‘In gebeden vnd in bilden

83.

84.

85.

86.

87.

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geschriben’: Prints as Exemplars of Piety and the ‘Culture of the Copy’ in FifteenthCentury Germany,” in The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe, ed. Peter Parshall (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2009), 155–89, esp. 157–58. The anonymously written Geistlicher Maibaum was composed at the end of the fteenth century in Swabia, southern Germany. One of the ve surviving manuscript copies is found in a codex (Freiburg Universitätsbibliothek HS 210; 1490–92) that also contains “The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom” and other excerpts from Suso’s Exemplar. Anton Birlinger transcribed the text from Staatsbibliothek Berlin mgq 1112 (ca. 1500, written in Bavarian) in “Asketische Traktate aus Augsburg IV,” Alemannia 8 (1880): 103–17. Illustrations included in this book come from printed edition that once belonged to the Bridgettine convent at Altomünster; see Bayerische Staatsbibliothek: Inkunabelkatalog, vol. 2 (1991): G-63. Geistlicher Maibaum, in Birlinger, “Asketische Traktate aus Augsburg IV,” 109: “Oben auf den tolden [Dolde] dises maien ist der lieblich schön rossen krancz, wunigclich ze schawen, aber gar schmerzlich vnd greulich ze empfachen, wan er das mark des edelen gesponsen durchdrungen hat mit seinen scharpfen dornen.” Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 19r: “So stöck den mayen des haylsame creuz fur dye thur das ist für die augen got des hymelischen vatters bit in durch die lieb seines ein gepornen Süns der an dissem haylsamé mayen gehangen ist.” On the speculative gaze and its capacity to challenge readers to evaluate morally the beautiful surfaces of lay, courtly objects, see Aden Kumler, “Seeing the Worldly with a Moral Eye: Illuminated Observation as Introspection,” in Optics, Ethics, and Art in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: Looking into Peter of Limoges’s Moral Treatise on the Eye, ed. Herbert Kessler, Richard Newhauser, et al. (Toronto: Pontical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2018), 47–63. Kerstin Pottho, “The Use of ‘Cultural Landscape’ in 19th Century German Geographical Literature,” Norsk Geogrask Tidsskrift / Norwegian Journal of Geography 67 (2013): 49–54. The closest parallel of complete circumambulation in the use of Christian devotional imagery available to the laity is Strasbourg’s Pillar of Angels. Most recently, Jacqueline Jung has drawn stylistic comparisons between Strasbourg’s Pillar and pagan Jupiter Columns that remained extant at the

89.

90.

91.

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93. 94.

time of its manufacture; Jacqueline Jung, Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 90–132, esp. 121–24. On the relationship between Jupiter Columns, the Saxon Irminsul, and Bernward’s bronze column in Hildesheim, see Ittai Weinryb, “Hildesheim AvantGarde: Bronze, Columns, and Colonialism,” Speculum 93 (2018): 728–82. Among the rst to draw connections between the spiritual maypole and the whipping posts adorned with the Arma Christi was Georg Schreiber, Deutsche Weingeschichte: Der Wein in Volksleben, Kult und Wirtschaft (Cologne: Reinland-Verlag, 1980), 452. Gregory Bryda, “Tainted Trees: Uncovering the Long Shadow over Germany’s Medieval Maypoles and Ancient Tree Cults,” in Art and Environment in the Third Reich, ed. Gregory Bryda and Matthew Vollgra, Special Issue of Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 85 (2022): 337–62; Jerey K. Wilson, The German Forest: Nature, Identity, and the Contestation of a National Symbol, 1871–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Albrecht Lehmann, “Mythos Deutscher Wald,” in Der Deutsche Wald, ed. Hans-Georg Wehling et al. (Stuttgart: Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2001), 4–10; Bernd Rusinek, “Wald und Baum in der arisch-germanischen Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte: Ein Forschuntsprojekt des ‘Ahnenerge’ der SS 1937–1945,” in Der Wald—Ein Deutscher Mythos? Perspektiven eines Kulturthemas, ed. Albrecht Lehmann and Klaus Schriewer (Berlin: Reimer, 2000), 267–360. Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Bavaria: Landesund volkskunde des königreichs Bayern, vols. 1–5 (Munich: Cotta, 1860–68); Mannhardt, Der Baumkultus, 154–311; Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, vol. 2 (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1844), 613–60. Hannjost Lixfeld, Folklore and Fascism: The Reich Institute for German Volkskunde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), esp. 61–120; The Nazication of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich, ed. James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Bryda, “Tainted Trees,” 340–46. Johannes Moser, Irene Götz, and Moritz Ege, eds., Zur Situation der Volkskunde, 1945– 1970: Orientierungen einer Wissenschaft in Zeiten des Kalten Krieges, Münchner Beiträge zur Volkskunde 43 (Münster: Waxmann, 2015).

95. On Riehl’s “völkisch” motivations and their contribution to Nazi ideology, see George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 23. 96. Riehl, Bavaria, vol. 1, Ober- und Niederbayern, 372. 97. Marie Andree-Eysn, “Maibaumbilder,” Volkskundliches aus dem bayrisch-österreichischen Alpengebiet (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1910), 187. 98. Hermann Fillitz, Die Insignien und Kleinodien des Heiligen Römischen Reiches (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1954); Franz Kirchweger, ed., Die Heilige Lanze in Wien: Insignie—Reliquie—Schicksalsspeer (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Msueum, 2005); on the feast’s misuse by National Socialists, see Annelies Amberger, “Bildhafte Zeichen der Macht als sakrale Symbole in der atheistischen Diktatur: Zur Funktionalisierung der Reichskleinodien durch die Nationalsozialisten,” in Mittelalterbilder im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Bruno Reudenbach, Hamburger Forschungen zur Kunstgeschichte 9 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 119–35; and William Diebold, “The Nazi Middle Ages,” in Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past, ed. Andrew Albin et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 104–15. 99. Franz Falk, “Die Einführung des Festum lanceae et clavorum sive armorum Christi,” in Der Katholik: Eine religiöse Zeitschrift zur Belehrung und Warnung 2 (1883): 544–46. See also Mitchell Merback, Pilgrimage and Pogrom: Violence, Memory, and Visual Culture at the Host-Miracle Shrines of Germany and Austria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 199–200. 100. Johann Christian Lünig, Des Teutschen Reichs-Archivs Spicilegii Ecclesiastici Fortsetzung des I. Theils (Leipzig: Lanckisch, 1716), 78. 101. Gerd Treer, “Der Heiltumsschatz des Ingolstädter Münsters,” in Liebfrauenmünster Ingolstadt, ed. Ludwig Brandl, Christina Grimminger, and Isidor Vollnhals (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2007), 42. The thorn relic was housed at Ingolstadt’s Church of Our Lady and came from a piece of the crown housed at Sainte-Chapelle. 102. Chronicon Hirsaugiense (Saint Gall: Monasterius S. Galli, 1690), 244; Falk, “Die Einführung des Festum,” 200; Klaus Arnold, Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte des Bistums und Hochstifts Würzburg 23 (Würzburg: Schöningh, 1991), 144–57. 103. For more on Speerfreitag, Lanzenfest, and



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104.

105.

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Fest der Wundun Christi, see Falk, “Die Einführung des Festum,” 200. Arne Holtorf, “Neujahrslied,” Handbuch des Volksliedes 1 (1973): 363–89, esp. 363, 384, 386; Ute Nürnberg, Der Jahreswechsel im Kirchenlied: Zur Geschichte, Motivik und Theologie deutscher und schweizerischer Lieder (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2016), 35. On the Berlin woodcut, see Paul Heitz, Neujahrswünsche des XV. Jahrhunderts (Strasbourg: J. H. E. Heitz, 1909), no. 1; Karl Heinz Schreyl, Der graphische Neujahrsgruß aus Nürnberg (Nuremberg: Verlag Hans Carl, 1979); and Rudolf Berliner, “Arma Christi,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 6 (1955): 35–116, esp. 68–75. See also the famous Master E. S. engraving now in Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett, Inventar 384– 1. On rhymes between the modern German Christmas Tree and the Paradise Tree from liturgical Paradise Plays, see Mannhardt, Der Baumkultus, 242. In the same printed codex, whose compiler must have been keenly interested in arboreal resonances of the cross, an illustrated version of the widely popular Palm Tree Allegory (Palmbaumallegorie) can also be found. According to Wolfgang Fleischer, the text’s subject embodies both an Orientalized notion of the Tree of Life as a palm tree and popular xations with trees lingering from Germanic, Celtic, and other pre-Christian tree cults in late medieval Germany; see Wolfgang Fleischer, “Palmbaumtraktate,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. Kurt Ruh et al., vol. 7 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1989), 277–87, esp. 280. Gert von der Osten, “Christus im Elend (Christus in der Rast) und Herrgottsruhbild,” Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte 3 (1953): 644–58; Mitchell B. Merback, “The Man of Sorrows in Northern Europe: Ritual Metaphor and Therapeutic Exchange,” in New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows, ed. William L. Barcham and Catherine R. Puglisi (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute, 2013), 77–116, 97–112; Sabine Fehlemann, “Christus im Elend: Vom Andachtsbild zum realistischen Bilddokument,” in Ikonographia: Anleitung zum Lesen von Bildern (Festschrift Donat de Chapeaurouge), ed. Bazon Brock (Munich: Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1990), 79–96; Ulrike Surmann, Christus in der Rast (Frankfurt: Liebighaus, 1991). For Suso as source of Christus im Elend iconography, see von der Osten, “Christus im Elend,” 648; quotation from the prologue of Suso’s Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, DS,

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108.

109.

110.

111.

112.

113.

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198; and Colledge, Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours, 352. Anton Legner in Stadt im Wandel Kunst und Kultur des Burgertums in Norddeutschland, 1150–1650, ed. Cord Meckseper, exh. cat., vol. 2 (Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Cantz, 1985), nos. 1104, 1105; Merback, “Man of Sorrows,” 98–100. Stone versions can be found outside the parish church of Saint John the Baptist in Billerbeck (ca. 1505–15) and inside the church (seated Christ lost) in Metelen. Christine Kelm, “Die Geißelsßäule in der Schloßkirche zu Chemnitz,” Denkmalpege in Sachsen (1996): 39–45; Walter Hentschel, Hans Witten, der Meister H. W. (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1938), 109–15. The Spiritual Maypole, as in Birlinger, “Asketische Traktate aus Augsburg IV,” 109: “der gaisselung hat disen maien vill pitterlich durchweet die pletter und plust so peinlichen durchachtet, das sy gerissen send pis auf die erden”; Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 223r–v: “Das salve [salvia; Salbei] plat ist lang und rauch und hat vyl rüngelein. Pey dem petracht dye geschyklykayt des garten junckfreulychen leybs an der seul.” Jürgen Sarnowsky, “Die Bibliothek des Klosters Chemnitz am Vorabend der Reformation: Ein Bücherverzeichnis von 1541,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige 108 (1997): 321–73, esp. 352. The shaping of the trunk as four twisting trunks also shortened the wood bers and minimized the risk of the wood cracking as it dried; Kelm, “Die Geißelsßäule in der Schloßkirche zu Chemnitz,” 40. The object is rst mentioned in records in 1628; it now stands in the northeast transept of the Chemnitz Schloßkirche. The earliest description of its original placement can be found in Adam Daniel Richter, Umständliche aus zuverläßigen Nachrichten zusammengetragene Chronik der am Fuße des Meißnischen Ertzgebirges gelegenen Königl. Pohln. und Churfürstl. Sächß. Stadt Chemnitz nebst beygefügten Urkunden (Zittau: Schöps, 1763), 81; see also Kelm, “Die Geißelsßäule in der Schloßkirche zu Chemnitz,” 39–41. For more on the practice of self-agellation, see Giles Constable, Attitudes Toward Self-Inicted Suering in the Middle Ages (Brookline, Mass.: Hellenic College Press, 1982); and John Howe, “Voluntary Ascetic Flagellation: From Local to Learned Traditions,” Haskins Society Journal 24 (2012): 41–62. Erwin Treu and Gerald Jasbar, eds., Bildhauerei und Malerei vom 13. Jahrhundert

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120.

121.

bis 1600: Kataloge des Ulmer Museums, vol. 1 (Ulm: Das Museu, 1981), no. 128; Jutta Frings and Jan Gerchow, eds., Krone und Schleier: Kunst aus Mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern, (Munich: Hirmer, 2005), no. 240; Hamburger, “‘In gebeden vnd in bilden geschriben,’” 177–78; Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, 252–56; Berliner, “Arma Christi,” 73–74. For more on heart imagery in female monastic settings, see Jerey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists:The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 137–76. See also the olive tree on the Staufener Altar; Daniel Hess, “Der Sogennante Staufener Altar und seine Nachfolge: Zur oberrheinischen Malerei um 1450,” in Begegnungen mit alten Meistern—altdeutsche Tafelmalerei auf dem Prufstand, ed. Frank Kammel and Carola Beltina Gries (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2000), 77–87. Wilhelm Ludwig Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte des XV. Jahrhunderts, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1927), 191, no. 1699; two other copies, in Nuremburg and Stuttgart, survive. The banderole inscription reads, “I will pluck roses and bestow many sorrows on my friends” (Ich wil rosen brechen und l liden uf min frund trechen). It quotes text both from chapter 34 of Suso’s Life and from one of his devotional poems, “The Mournful Maxim of the Suering Person Under the Rose Tree” (Die clagsprúch dez lidenden menschen under dem rosbom); see DS, 102, 397; as well as Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, 253–54; and Theben, Die Mystische Lyrik des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts, 263–79. Five copies of this motif survive. For more information on those now in Munich and Nuremburg, see Wilhelm Ludwig Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte des XV. Jahrhunderts, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1926), nos. 821–23. For information on the two copies that are in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, see Max Lehrs and Paul Kristeller, eds., Holzschnitte im Königlichen Kupferstichkabinett zu Berlin, vol. 2 (Berlin: Cassirer, 1915), no. 83, Tafel XXXV. For that in Karlsruhe, see Erwin Vischer, Formschnitte des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts in der Großherzogl: Hof- und Landesbibliothek zu Karlsruhe (Strasbourg: Heitz, 1912), no. 5. For illuminated and printed versions of the “Rose Tree” motif from the fteenth century, see Einsiedeln Stiftsbibliothek Codex 710(322), fol. 129v (ca. 1480–1500); and

Henry Suso, Das Buch, das der Seuse heist (Augsburg: Anton Sorg, 1482), fol. 59v. 122. Hamburger, “‘In gebeden vnd in bilden geschriben,’” 177–81. 123. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3–25, esp. 20–21; see also Christy Wampole, Rootedness: The Ramications of a Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 14–19, 218–36. On the application of the rhizome as a metaphor for the dissemination of early modern prints in Europe and the Americas, see Aaron M. Hyman, Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2021), 55–59.

6.

7.

Chapter 3. Grünewald’s Greenery in Spring and Summer 1. Walther Karl Zülch, Der Historische Grünewald: Mathis Gothardt-Neithardt (Munich: Bruckman, 1938), 261; Jessica MackAndrick, “Von beiden Seiten betrachtet: Überlegungen zum Tauberbischofsheimer Altar,” in Grünewald und seine Zeit: Große Landesausstellung Baden-Württemberg; Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, 8. Dezember 2007—2. März 2008 (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007), 68–77, 71, 75. 2. For more on the technical training involved with Grünewald’s occupation as a Wasserbaukünstler, see Hanns Hubach, “‘. . . adder wasserkunstmacher’: Annäherung an den ‘anderen’ Grünewald,” in Grünewald und seine Zeit, 30–38. Hubach has written the authoritative biography of Grünewald; see “Grünewald,” in Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, vol. 63 (Munich: Saur, 2009), 386–96. 3. This double-sided sheet belongs to a bundle of four plant study sheets from Wilhelmshöhe Palace in Kassel; see Michael Roth, “Blumenbeet,” in Matthias Grünewald: Zeichnungen und Gemälde, ed. Michael Roth, Antje-Fee Köllermann, et al. (Berlin: Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2008), no. 33, 209–13. 4. Renate Kroll, “Eine Blume für den Jubilar: Matthias Grünewald zugeschrieben,” in Aus Albrecht Dürers Welt: Festschrift für Fedja Anzelewsky (Turnout: Brepols, 2001), 135–42. 5. An inventory of the monastery from 1628 (“Isenheimer Visitationsprotokoll von 1628”) describes a T-shaped silver reliquary that was “elevated” (elevata) by the canons. The identities of the relics installed in the T-cross were inscribed on a blue piece of silk. “De ligno sanctae crucis; item sanctorum apostolorum Pauli, Bartholomei, Jacobi minoris; item de capite sancti Antonij; item

8.

9.

10.

de brachio et osse sancti Stephani . . . Crux argentea semipedalis in forma gurae T. ex qua pendet cum catenula argentea minus T argenteum, in qua sunt reliquae incertae”; Franz Xaver Kraus, Kunst und Alterthum im Ober-Elsass (Strasbourg: Schmidt, 1884), 190. Aymar Falco, “Qualiter ab antiquo in die dominice ascensionis processionaliter sanctum corpus deferri consuevit,” in Antonianae Historiae Compendium (Lyon: Excudebat Theobaldus Payen, 1534), chap. 40, fol. 52r–v; Adalbert Mischlewski, Grundzüge der Geschichte des Antoniterordens bis zum Ausgang des 15. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Böhlau, 1976), 29–33, 98. Falco, “Qualiter ab antiquo,” fol. 52r: “Antique litere perhibent non esse novi moris ut in die dominice ascensionis maxima conuente peregrinorum turba corpus sanctum ab excelsiore quo repositum est loco demittatur et subinde lustratio seu processio solennis at”; Falco, “Qualiter ab antiquo,” fol. 52v: “divine virtutis.” Andrée Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 38; Timothy B. Husband, “The Winteringham Tau Cross and Ignis Sacer,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 27 (1992): 23; Ernest Wickersheimer, “Le signe tau: Faits et hypothèses,” Strasbourg Médical 88 (1928): 241–48; and Gregory C. Bryda, “The Exuding Wood of the Cross at Isenheim,” Art Bulletin 100, no. 2 (2018): 6–36. The relics of Saint Anthony had been translated in about 1070 from Constantinople to SaintDidier-La-Mothe in the south of France, where Gaston was a lord. Laura Fenelli, Il tau, il fuoco, il maiale: I canonici regolari di sant’Antonio Abate tra assistenza e devozione (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sull’ Alto Medioevo, 2006), 65, in Christopher Wood, “The Votive Scenario,” RES 59–60 (2011): 207–27, at 212: “habitu cum signo T quod potentia vocant.” For more on the order’s heritage in caring for the poor and sick, see Mischlewski, Grundzüge der Geschichte des Antoniterordens, esp. 17–47; and Veit Harold Bauer, Das Antonius-Feuer in Kunst und Medizin (Berlin: Springer, 1973), 61–71. As recorded by the Greek bishop Athanasius, Anthony regularly attributed his miraculous acts to the image and suering of his lord, Christ. Athanasius, The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. Robert C. Gregg (New York: Paulist, 1980); Christ on a T-cross also recalls the Te igitur initials in missals that introduce the consecration prayer of the Canon and that hence evoke the Eucharist; see R. Suntrup,

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.



“Te igitur-Initialen und Kanonbilder in mittelalterlichen Sakramentarhandschriften,” in Text und Bild: Aspekte des Zusammenwirkens zweier Künste in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Christel Meier and Uwe Ruberg (Wiesbaden: L. Reichert, 1980), 278–382. Lottlisa Behling, Die Panze in der mittelalterlichen Tafelmalerei (Cologne: Böhlau, 1967), 140–49. For a similar symbolic analysis of Grünewald’s depiction of plants, see Wolfgang Kühn, “Grünewalds Isenheimer Altar als Darstellung mittelalterlicher Heilkräuter,” Kosmos: Handweiser für Naturfreunde 12 (1948): 327–33. Hubach, “‘. . . adder wasserkunst­macher,’”30–38. According to Karl Arndt, it remains unclear how or why the term “Grünewald” was rst tied to Master Mathis. Karl Arndt, “Die historische ‘Grünewald’: Anmerkungen zum Forschungsstand,” in Kirche und Gesellschaft im Heiligen Römischen Reich des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hartmut Boockmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1994), 116–47. For his dictionary entry on the artist, see Joachim von Sandrart, “Matthaeus Grünewald von Aschaenburg / Mahler,” in Der Teutschen Academie, vol. 2 (Nuremberg: Miltenberger Wolfenbüttel Herzog August Bibliothek, 1675), book 3.2, 236–37. Crucixion in the Kunstmuseum, Basel (1501); Small Crucixion in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (1502); Standing Man of Sorrows from the Lindenhardt Altarpiece (1503; attributed to Grünewald); Crucixion from the Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–15); Lamentation of the Magdalene (date unknown; survives from a copy by Christoph Krat, ca. 1648); Study of the Crucixion in the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe (ca. 1520); Tauberbischofsheim Crucixion in the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe (1523–25); Saint John Under the Cross (reported by Joachim von Sandrart); “I(tem) crucix, Maria und Sant Johannes” (1528, reported in Grünewald’s estate inventory). Hayum, Isenheim Altarpiece, 80. James Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, the Graphic Arts from 1350 to 1575 (New York: Abrams, 1985), 349: “A similar emaciated and deformed image of Christ on the cross is found in the so-called Plague Crucixions, a type of Andachtsbild in sculpture such as the expressionistic Crucix in the convent of Santa Maria im Kapitol Cologne that served as a mystical devotional piece.” See also Astrid Reuter, “Zur expressiven Bildsprache Grüne­ walds am Beispiel des Gekreuzigten,” in Grünewald und seine Zeit, 78–86. Wilhelm Pinder, Die Deutsche Plastik vom

Notes to Pages 00–000

187

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

188

ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zum Ende der Renaissance, vol. 1 (Berlin: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1914), 96. An indispensable resource on late medieval branchy crucixes is Godehard Homann et al., Das Gabelkreuz in Saint Maria im Kapitol zu Köln und das Phänomen der Crucixi dolorosi in Europa, Arbeitsheft der rheinischen Denkmalpege 69 (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsanstalt, 2006). Signs of the branchy scourge also punctuate the Corpus Christi in his Tauberbischofsheim Altarpiece and in his Small Crucixion now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The anonymously written Geistlicher Maibaum was composed at the end of the fteenth century in Swabia, southern Germany. Anton Birlinger transcribed the text from Staatsbibliothek Berlin mgq 1112 (ca. 1500, written in Bavarian) in “Asketische Traktate aus Augsburg IV,” Alemannia 8 (1880): 103–17. Illustrations included in this book come from printed edition that once belonged to the Bridgettine convent at Altomünster; see Bayerische Staatsbibliothek: Inkunabelkatalog, vol. 2 (1991): G-63. Birlinger, “Asketische Traktate aus Augs­ burg IV,” 109: “des feuchtigkaitt gesprenget hat seine nest, das sit sein zerspanen arm und die grünen pletter seiner gebenedeitten hend vnd auch die zwen est susamen geochten siner hailigen pain, dardurch unser lieb und vmbfachung des gemuttes gevestiget und geplanczet ist.” Achim Timmermann, “A View of the Eucharist on the Eve of the Protestant Refor­mation,” in Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation, ed. Lee Palmer Wander (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 365–98, esp. 381–83; Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Signicance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 68. The dermatological signs of Saint Anthony’s re, or ergotism, as it is now known, are only the outward manifestations of a disease that attacks the nervous and vascular systems, inturn leading to seizures, hallucinations, and gangrene. Behling, Die Panze, 145; Kühn, “Grünewalds Isenheimer Altar” 20–27. It has been proposed that Christ’s body in both the Crucixion and the Lamentation, which split apart from its limbs with the opening of the altarpiece’s wings and predella, served as a model for amputee victims of Saint Anthony’s re; Hayum, Isenheim Altarpiece, 31. Das puch der himlischen Oenbarung der heiligen wittiben Birgitta von dem Künigreich

Notes to Pages 00–000

25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

Schweden (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1502). Saint Bridget, Revelations, 4, quoted in Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art, 349; see also Zülch, Der Historische Grünewald, 146. Kurt Küppers, Marienfrömmigkeit zwischen Barock und Industriezeitalter: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Feier der Maiandacht in Deutschland und im deutschen Sprachgebiet (Saint Ottilien: EOS, 1987); Luzian Peger, “Zur Geschichte der Marien-Maiandacht im Elsaß,” Straßburger Diözesanblatt 31 (1912): 163–76; Dietrich Schmidtke, Studien zur dingallegorischen Erbauungsliteratur des Spätmittelalters: Am Beispiel der Gartenallegorie (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1982), esp. 1–3, 74–76. The medicinal aspect of Fridolin’s text is woefully understudied and latent in Johannes Kreutzer’s version of the Spiritual May. An invaluable source on the herbal incunabula published out of Mainz is Brigitte Baumann’s Die Mainzer Kräuterbuch-Inkunabeln Herbarius Moguntinus (1484), Gart der Gesundheit (1485), Hortus sanitates (1491): Wissenschaftshistorische Untersuchung der drei Prototypen botanischmedizinischer Literatur des Spätmittelalters (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 2010). Jerry Stannard, “Medieval Herbalism and Post-Medieval Folk Medicine,” Pharmacy in History 55 (2013): 47–54; Stannard, “GrecoRoman Materia Medica in Medieval Germany,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 46 (1972): 455–68. On the heart as a house, see Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 151–58. Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fols. 196v–97r: “suech erzeney gang an deinen aller getreursten arzt Jesu . . . Wan du dan dysen gelerten doctor deiner selen kranckhayt dar legst so rat her dyr . . . das kostlych mayen pedlein seines rossenfarben pluots vergiesen aus dem du dych von allen wasser aller unrainigkayt mag waschan wan er hat uns lyeb gehabt und hat uns gewaschen von unssern sunden.” For more on the trope of Christ as doctor, see David Knipp, “‘Christus Medicus” in der frühchristlichen Sarkophagskulptur: Ikonographische Studien zur Sepulkralkunst des späten vierten Jahrhunderts, Vigiliae christianae 37 (Leiden: Brill, 1998); Johann Anselm Steiger, Medizinische Theologie: Christus medicus und theologia medicinalis bei Martin Luther und im Luthertum der Barockzeit (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Hubertus Lutterbach, “Der Christus medicus und die Sancti medici: Das wechselvolle Verhältnis zweier Grundmotive christlicher Frömmigkeit zwischen

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

Spätantike und Früher Neuzeit,” Saeculum 47 (1996): 239–81; and Martin Honecker, “Christus medicus,” in Der kranke Mensch in Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Peter Wünderli, Studia humaniora 5 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1986), 27–43. Jerry Stannard, “The Theoretical Bases of Medieval Herbalism,” Medical Heritage 1 (1985): 186–98, 190, reprinted in Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Variorum, 1999), part 4, 4. Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 232v: “Item in dyssem siechkobel lygt auch dein arme ellente sell kranck an ainem grosen haubt wee der aygen synnigkayt, dye entspringt aus der hochfart [Hoart].” Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 235r: “So zaigt er dyr, wy mit den wercken was erzeney du prauchen sollt, wan dye kranckhayt deiner aussezigen hochfart [aussätzigen Hoart] ist so gros und unhaylper, das sy mit nichte pas mag gerainigt werden, den mit kospar teurem pluet des hoch wyrdigen may[e]stetlychen haubts des sun gottes, welches durch scharpfe eindruckung der angstlychen dörnen kron . . . auß getruckt ist worden.” Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fols. 236v–37v: “corda benedycta [Cardo benedictus], das gesunt ist fur alle weetagen des haubts und störckt vast das hyrn . . . Pey disem kraut, das ein grob kraut ist und vyl spiziger stechenter dorn hat in seinen pluemen und pletern, wūrt inigklych erinnert der dornenkron Christi . . . Item pesteck das pad auch mit Pronelen [Prunella] kraut, das auch vast gesundt ist fur das haubtwee und hat in seiner plume schöne praune kōlblein.” The Gart der Gesundheit (Augsburg: Schönsperger, 1487), chap. lxxii, prescribes Prunella to treat headache: “Brunella latine et grece. Die meÿster sprechen dz diß kraut sey heyß und trucken ann dem dritten grade. Der meister Isaac spricht das der sat von disem krautte gemüschet mit rosen wasser und auf dz haubt gelegt vertreibt das wee darinne.” Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 224r–v: “Pey den manigfalltigen runzelein des salve plats petracht die manigfalltigkayt der wunden xpi dem das heilig blut xpi gestanden und . . . erstockt gewesen wolliche wunden doch zum dyckern mal ernuert aufgerysen zerhackt sindt worden.” Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 229v: “als ysayas sagt das er sey geosen ein man der schermzen der wolwaist von kranckhait zu sagen.” The inscription on the Tauberbischofsheim painting reads, “Er ist

37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

umb unser sund willen gesclagen” (He was bruised for our sins); see Mack-Andrick, “Von beiden Seiten betrachtet,” 72–74. Hans von Gersdor, Feldtbuch der Wundartzney (Strasbourg: Schott, 1517); Jerry Stannard, “Hans von Gersdor and Some Anonymous Strassburg Apothecaries,” Pharmacy in History 13 (1971): 55–65, esp. 60; and Stannard, “Vegetable Gums and Resins in Medieval Recipe Literature,” Acta Congressus Internationalis Historiae Pharmaciae Bremae MCMLXXV (1978), 41–48, reproduced in Pristina Medicamenta: Ancient and Medieval Botany (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1999), part 17. William E. Hillis, Heartwood and Tree Exudates (Berlin: Springer, 1987), 4–6. Hillis, Heartwood and Tree Exudates, 14. I am greatly indebted to Alan Phenix of the Getty Conservation Institute, whose expertise on turpentine has been pivotal to my research. I have beneted from his published research as well as our conversations, which took place during my fellowship at the Getty Research Institute during the academic year 2015–16. See Phenix, Some Instances in the History of Distilled Oil of Turpentine, the Disappearing Painters’ Material (Los Angeles: printed by author, 2015). There are ten copies of the Livre des simples médecines in Paris alone: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (BNF), fr. 623 (fol. 180v), fr. 1307 (fol. 234r–v), fr. 1309–12 (fol. 43r), fr. 9136 (fol. 288r–v), fr. 12317 (fol. 241v), fr. 12319 (fol. 312r–v), fr. 12320 (fol. 206r–v), fr. 12321 (fol. 220r), fr. 19081 (fol. 199r–v). Others are in Bibliothèque municipal, Dijon, MS 0391 (fol. 202v), Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, MS GKS 227 2° (fols. 207v–8r), and Wellcome Library, London, MS 626 (fol. 249r–v). For more on the complicated attribution of the Livre, see Jean A. Givens, “Reading and Writing the Illustrated Tractatus de herbis, 1280–1526,” in Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200–1550, ed. Jean A. Givens, Karen M. Reeds, Alain Touwaide (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2016), 115–46; and Phenix, Some Instances in the History of Distilled Oil of Turpentine, 19–26. A thirteenthcentury Latin copy (Circa instans) made in southern Germany (Alsace or Pfalz) from Heidelberg’s Bibliotheca Palatina (Pal. lat. 1227) is now in the Vatican. For the most part, though, the depicted trees of the Livre des simples médecines are European conifers rather than deciduous terebinths because, as has been mentioned, Europeans used the eastern Mediterranean

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

de Grünewald et de ses contemporains: Colloque international des 24, 25, et 26 janvier 2006, ed. Pantxika Béguerie-De Paepe (Colmar: Musée d’Unterlinden, 2006), 49–60. Although a targeted “destructive” study of Grünewald’s painting medium and lacquer has not been conducted, technical analysis attests to the widespread employment of turpentine in the mixing of pigments in the early modern period. The fugitive volatile oil of turpentine (paint thinner), however, leaves no trace evidence in the paint lm; its presence is undetectable to scientists. Billinge et al., “Methods and Materials,” 41–42. That said, the circumstantial evidence points to its use in the early fteenth century, if not before. For the best summary on this topic, see Phenix, Some Instances in the History of Distilled Oil of Turpentine. 49. Historians have noted that tree and shrub exudations including turpentine and conifer resins but also cassia, frankincense, and myrrh were valued by ancient Greeks and Akkadians as analgesics and adhesive plasters for skin excoriations. Guido Majno, The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 63–65, 208. 50. Trained in Paris, Montpellier, and then Italy, Henri de Mondeville (ca. 1260–1316) compiled his Latin treatise on surgery at a time of internecine conict among physicians, who were skeptical of absorbing what they deemed the vocational eld of surgery into academic medicine. His pioneering text made an indelible impact on the eld, paving the way for such works as Guy de Chauliac’s Inventarium chirurgia magnum of 1363. For the original Latin text of Mondeville’s Surgery, see Julius Leopold Page, ed., Die Chirurgie des Heinrich von Mondeville (Hermondaville) nach Berliner, Erfurter und Pariser Codices zum ersten male, ed. (Berlin: Hirschwald, 1892). There is an English version based on a French translation: Henri de Mondeville, The Surgery of Master Henry de Mondeville: Written from 1306 to 1320, trans. Leonard D. Rosenman (Philadelphia: XLibris, 2003). For an edited volume of Chauliac’s treatise, see Inventarium sive chirurgica magna, ed. Michael R. McVaugh and Margaret Ogden, vol. 1, Studies in Ancient Medicine 14/1 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 354. 51. Hieronymus Brunschwig, Dis ist das Buch der Cirurgia: Hantwirckung der Wund Artzny (Strasbourg: Grüninger, 1497). Hieronymus Brunschwig’s surgical text was translated into English within thirty years of its

term “turpentine resin” to refer to the exuding species that were indigenous to their continent. Geistlicher Maibaum, in Birlinger, “Asketische Traktate aus Augsburg IV,” 113– 14; the inscription on the woodcut reads, “Dis yst die lengt vnd gestalt des wairhaptigen Nagels Cristi.” The nail wounding both Christ and the Wood of the Cross hearkens to the tenthcentury Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood, in which from rst-person narrative the cross describes itself receiving the same torments as Christ. “They pierced me through with darksome nails . . . They mocked us both together. All bedewed with blood was I, gushing from the Hero’s side.” See “The Dream of the Rood,” in The Poems of Cynewulf, trans. Charles W. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2018), 306–11, at 307–8, cited by Simon Schama, Landscape and Mem­ory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 219. The various allegorizations of Christ’s bloodshed on the spiritually exuding tree do not participate in the theological discourse around Christ’s blood—namely, the one promulgated by Gerhard of Cologne (1210– 1271) and David of Augsburg (d. 1272)—that connes sacrality to liquidity; Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 106–8, 167. While we think of distilled oil of turpentine as a paint thinner, the addition of undistilled resin thickens and renders it pasty. For the eect of an increased proportion of medium to red pigment (lake or madder), see Rachel Billinge et al., “Methods and Materials of Northern European Painting in the National Gallery, 1400–1550,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 18 (1997): 6–55, esp. 41–42; Mark David Gottsegen, The Painter’s Handbook: A Complete Reference (New York: Watson-Guptill, 2006), 111–25; Victoria Finlay, The Brilliant History of Color in Art (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2014), 30–33; Unn Plahter and Raymond White, “Binding Media,” in Painted Altar Frontals of Norway: 1250–1350, ed. Unn Plahter et al., vol. 2 (London: Archetype, 2004), 160–75, esp. 162–64. I must credit Alan Phenix of the Getty Conservation Institute for these sources, and thank him for proofreading this text. Stannard, “Vegetable Gums and Resins”; Rutherford Gettens and George Stout, Painting Materials: A Short Encyclopedia (New York: Dover, 1942), 17–24. Michel Menu et al., “Analyse de la palette des couleurs du Retable d’Issenheim par Matthias Grünewald,” La technique picturale



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57. 58. 59.

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original publication. Brunschwig, The Noble Experyence of the Vertuous Handy Warke of Surgeri (London: Peter Treveris, 1525). Brunschwig, Dis ist das Buch der Cirurgia, fol. 118a–b: “Ein dyaquilon paster das nach de Anthidotario Mesue gemachet wirt. Nym Silberglet (xxiii.lot.) . . . Terbentim. vi.lot Weiß viechten dannenharz.” Stannard, “Vegetable Gums and Resins.” Inventories for hospital pharmacies and apothecaries as well as the guild statutes that stipulated their minimum requirements all name crude coniferous or pure turpentine resins. A single apothecary in Marseille, for example, was in possession of 4.5 pounds of turpentine in 1404; see BNF, nouvelles acquisitions latines MS 1351, which is transcribed in Jean-Pierre Bénézet, Pharmacie et médicament en Méditerranée occidentale (XIIIe–XVIe siècles) (Paris: Champion, 1999). Surviving transcriptions of mandatorily stockpiled pharmaceuticals in Toulouse from the years 1471, 1501, and 1513 all mention conifer resins; see Marcel Pistre, Histoire toulousaine du métier d’apothicaire (Toulouse: Paillés et Chataigner, 1943). See von Gersdor, Feldtbuch, v, on the amputations he carried out in the Antonite hospital in Strasbourg, and xxvi, for his recipe on skin plasters, “ein güt wund paster zü dé wunden unfür die stich . . . vn ale dan thůn dorin das wachs vn dé terpentin.” Clémentz, “Vom Balsam der Antoniner,” 14 (cited from Archives Départementales du Haut-Rhin, Colmar, Isenheim 23): “Der Wundarzt soll die Sankt Antoniussalbe, wenn man sie benötigt, nach dem Hausrezept herstellen; die Kräuter dazu hat er zu sammeln und zu bereiten, die anderen Ingredienzen sollten ihm geliefert werden.” Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fols. 208v–9r: “Das ist dye vergiesung seines kostpern plutigen schweiss am olperg . . . Der engstlich plut schwaiss so reyclich aufgetrung ist an allem sinen junckfreulichen leyb durch die klaider das die pluots tropfen seines kospern schwais lyefen auf das ertrych . . . da von Feucht wart.” Birlinger, “Asketische Traktate aus Augsburg IV,” 114. Birlinger, “Asketische Traktate aus Augsburg IV,” 109–10. Joris-Karl Huysmans, “Les Grünewald du Musée Colmar,” Le Mois Littéraire et Pittoresque 11 (1904): “Je l’ai vue, détrempée par la pluie, pareille à des boues d’abbattoir, à des mares de sang.” Huysmans’s writings on Grünewald in Là-bas (1891) and Trois primitifs (1905) contributed signicantly

Notes to Pages 00–000

60.

61.

62.

63.

64. 65.

to the rediscovery and appreciation of Grünewald around the turn of the twentieth century. Anthony Zielonka, “Huysmans and Grünewald: The Discovery of ‘Spiritual Naturalism,’” NineteenthCentury French Studies 18 (1989–90): 212–30; Katharina Heinemann, “Entdeckung und Vereinnahmung: Zur Grünewald-Rezeption in Deutschland bis 1945,” in Grünewald in der Moderne: Die Rezeption Matthias Grünewalds im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Brigitte Schad and Thomas Ratzka (Cologne: Wienand, 2003), 8–17. The monk Sigebert of Gembloux, writing in Lotharingia in 1089, described the sickness in his Chronicle: “The intestines eaten up by the force of Saint Anthony’s Fire, with ravaged limbs, blackened like charcoal; either they die miserably, or they live more miserably seeing their feet and hands develop gangrene and separate from the rest of the body; and they suer muscular spasms that deform them”; trans. from the Latin in Hayum, Isenheim Altarpiece, 21. See also Mischlewski, Grundzüge der Geschichte des Antoniterordens, 22; and Bauer, Das AntoniusFeuer, 7–32. Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 235v: “wunden seines kunigklychen haubts, die pech des haysen pluets sindt geosen uber sein heyllige styrn, uber sein heyllige wang, uber sein heyllige oren und augen, das sein ganz mynigklich angesycht, sein heylliger nack[en] und part [Bart], ja auch sein heyllig schulter ganz pluetig sindt worden.” Geistlicher Maibaum, in Birlinger, “Asketische Traktate aus Augsburg IV,” 115: “Sein erwirdiges haupt was durchstochen mit tausent wunden der scharpfen doren, die inn seyn hiren getruckt warden, dardurch der inwendig keren und marck seins hirns versert ward, . . . sein zartes geäder stund an manigen enden ploß, sein antlücz was schwarz geleich der erden von der vermischung der juden spaicheln und des staubs und des gerunnen gestanden plutes, das alles zesamen gepachen.” “Pichen,” in Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, www.woerterbuchnetz.de/ DWB/pichen. Lothar Suhling, “Erdöl und Erdölprodukte,” in Europäische Technik im Mittelalter: 800 bis 1400 Tradition und Innovation, ed. Uta Lindgren (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1996), 257–62; Georg Hansen, Steinöl und Brunnenfeuer (Kassel: Wintershall, 1975), 103–30. See “Iudenleym,” chap. lxxx, in the Gart der Gesundheit. Suhling, “Erdöl und Erdölprodukte,” 261. “Sankt Antoniussalbe—für 2 Pfund

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

Pechharz 2 Batzen—für ein Viertel Terpentin 1 Batzen,” as given in Elisabeth Clémentz, “Vom Balsam der Antoniner,” in Antoniter-Forum 2 (1994): 15. Clémentz quoted it from the original source in the Archives Départementales du Haut-Rhin, Colmar, Isenheim 21 and 22. As it does for the quince, the Gart der Gesundheit recommends turpentine electuaries, mixed with sugar and honey, and applied to the chest, to relieve coughing and pain from blisters; “Terpentin,” chap. ccccv: “Dises genüczet gůt den die do haben einen kalten hůsten und dienet sunderlichen wol ptisicis [phthisic] das ist die dz abnemen haben und terpentin also genüczet sol vorhin bereitet werden mit hônig unnd zucker geleich als ein latwerg und aussen auf die brust geleget geleich einem paster. Terpentin gemischet mit hônig und auf die bôsen schwarczen blatern gelegt benÿmmt das wee davon und weichet sÿ behend.” Handwörterbuch des Deutschen Aberglaubens 4 (1931/32): 740–60; Christ and John the Baptist appear together on single-sheet calendars in this period to demarcate the two halves of the year; see Heitz, Neujahrswünsche, 26n1. At this time, a rivalry over the true site of the Magdalene’s remains broke out between the town of Saint-Maximin, near the Sainte-Baume grotto, and the Benedictine monks of Vézelay, farther north, whose Romanesque basilica is dedicated to the biblical saint. Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Achim Timmermann, “Sacred Mountaineering and the Imagery of Ascent from Catalonia to Provence, c. 1370–c. 1520,” Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual / Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur 1 (2020): 39–50. All quotations from the “Balsam of Marseille” are my translation from an extant copy printed by Anton Koberg in Augsburg in 1478 and now housed in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, 2. Exemplar: B-22,2. Elly Truitt, “The Virtues of Balm in Late Medieval Literature,” Early Science and Medicine 14, no. 6 (2009): 711–36; and Ernest Wickersheimer, “Exégèse et matière: Le baume et ses vertus (Moyen-Âge),” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Pharmacie 10 (1952): 385–89. In its record for the balsam tree, the Book of Simple Medicines instructs its readers on how to identify synthetic versions, which

71.

72.

73. 74.

75.

76.

include turpentine; see Carmélia OpsomerHalleux and William T. Stearn, eds., Livre des simples médecines: Codex Bruxellensis IV. 1024; A 15th-Century French Herbal, trans. Enid Roberts and William T. Stearn (Antwerp: De Schutter, 1984), 86–88. See also Phenix, Some Instances in the History of Distilled Oil of Turpentine, 14. Phenix, Some Instances in the History of Distilled Oil of Turpentine, 10–11. Phenix claries how the resins shipped to medieval England were measured in “cakes.” For more on medieval mortuary and funerary practices (especially embalming), see Colette Beaune, “Mourir noblement à la n du Moyen Âge,” Actes des Congrès de la Société des Historiens Médiévistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur Public 6 (1975): 125–44; Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 63–65; Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); and Roberta Gilchrist and Barney Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain (London: Museum of London Archaeology Service, 2005). Mondeville, Surgery of Master Henry de Mondeville, 736–40. When both wax and tree resin are used in equal measure, the resulting salve, which Brunschwig calls an incarnative (incarnatiuum), stimulates the regrowth of muscle tissue; Brunschwig, Dis ist das Buch der Cirurgia, fol. 199a–b. The mixable resins, which absorb the active ingredients of the other herbs in the plaster simples, harden after they are smeared. They thus protect and medicate wounds as a second, plantbased skin; Brunschwig, Dis ist das Buch der Cirurgia, fol. 199b. Magdalena Hawlik-van de Water, “Die Methoden des Einbalsamierens vom Altertum bis zur Neuzeit,” in Der Schöne Tod: Zeremonialstrukturen des Wiener Hofes bei Tod und Begräbnis zwischen 1640 und 1740 (Vienna: Herder, 1989), 203–11, at 207. Joseph Bernhart, Die Symbolik im Menschwerdungsbild des Isenheimer Altars (Munich: Callwey, 1975), 11; Ruth Mellinko, The Devil at Isenheim: Reections of Popular Belief in Grünewald’s Altarpiece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 45; Behling, Die Panze, 147; and Hayum, Isenheim Altarpiece, 92. On the symbolism of the g tree, see Wolfgang Prohaska, “Feige, Feigenbaum,” Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte 7 (1981): 1010–56; Rafael Garceia Mahíques, “Aspects of the Fig Tree

77.

78.

79.

80.

81.

82.

83.

84. On the Song of Songs and the mystical marriage in medieval art, see Jerey F. Hamburger’s Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 70–87; and Hamburger, Nuns as Artists. Michael Grandmontagne oers a Solomonic interpretation of late medieval sculpture in Claus Sluter und die Lesbarkeit mittelalterlicher Skulptur: Das Portal der Kartause von Champmol (Worms: Werner, 2005), 189–96. See also E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1990), esp. 151–77; Denys Turner, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian, 1995); and Ann Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). 85. For early fteenth-century wall paintings of this subject in the hospital chapel of Blaubeuren’s Heilig-Geist-Spital (founded 1424), see Wolfgang W. Schürle, “Das Spital zum Heiligen Geist in Blaubeuren: Ein Überblick,” in Blaubeuren: Die Entwicklung einer Siedlung in Südwestdeutschland, ed. Hansmartin Decker-Hau and Immo Eberl (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1986), 347–446. 86. Kreutzer never completed his exegesis, which was inspired by Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the Song of Songs. The tract ceases at chapter 2, verse 13—perhaps because of Kreutzer’s death. Florent Landmann, “Johannes Kreutzer aus Gebweiler (†1468) als Mystiker und Dichter geistlicher Lieder: Der Bestand seiner Schriften und das Hauptwerk; Auslegung von Cant. Cant. Kap. I bis II, 13,” Archives de l’Église d’Alsace 5 (1953–54): 21–67, at 33. See also Landmann, “Johannes Kreutzer aus Gebweiler (†1468) als Mystiker und Dichter geistlicher Lieder: Die Unterweisung an eine Klosterfrau und Zwei Sammelwerke; Ein Geistlicher Mai und eine Geistliche Ernte,” Archives de l’Église d’Alsace 8 (1957): 21–52; Luzian Peger, “Johannes Kreutzer: Ein elsässischer Prediger und Reformator des 15. Jahrhunderts,” Historisch-politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland 150 (1912): 178–91, 241–47; Wieland Schmidt, “Johannes Kreutzer: Ein elsässischer Prediger des 15. Jahrhunderts,” in Festschrift Helmut de Boor zum 75. Geburtstag am 24. März 1966 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1966), 150–92; and Theben, Die mystische Lyrik, 71–75. 87. Kreutzer’s Spiritual May survives in three manuscripts in Stuttgart, Berlin, and Moscow; I cite Moscow State Library,

and Its Fruits in Emblematics,” in In nocte consilium, Saecvla spiritalia 46 (BadenBaden: Koerner, 2011), 373–94; and Oswald Goetz, Der Feigenbaum in der religiösen Kunst des Abendlandes (Berlin: Mann, 1965). Bridget of Sweden compares the Virgin to the Tree of Life in her “Angel’s Discourse” (Sermo angelicus), a collection of Matins readings for nuns of the Birgittine order. See Saint Bridget, “Sermo Angelicus,” chap. xxi, lesson 3, in The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, vol. 4, The Heavenly Emperor’s Book to Kings, The Rule, and Minor Works, trans. Denis Searby (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 190–96. Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 8r–v: “so fueren sy dich zu dem hymelischen vatter; der ist der recht wa[h]r paumayster, der den edlen meyen Jesum Christi, den ainigen sun seines herzen gepanzt hat auf das weyt feldt, das wyr i[h]n all mugen prochen, wan wyr sein pege[h]rn, da er i[h]n gesant hat, in dysses jamertal, das vol dystel und dorn ist, sych an dissen edlen mayen, wie er sych selber ruemt, so er sprycht. Ich pin ain pluem des veldes . . . an das furchtpar eya, das gewendeit ertrych, dye hoch gelobt junckfrau Marya, in das der hymelisch vatter dysse edele pluem gepanzt hat.” Hanns Hubach, Matthias Grünewald: Der Aschaenburger Maria-Schnee-Altar: Geschichte, Rekonstruktion, Ikonographie (Mainz: Selbstverl. der Gesellschaft für Mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte, 1996), 152, 216–19. Fridolin often refers to Mary’s virginal body as fertile ground or “guetigen ertrych.” See Der geistliche Mai, fols. 69v–70r: “Sych dyse edele benigna rossen an die jechling uber handt wechst und grunt. Dapey pedracht, das Jesus benignus von lauter erpert [Erdbeer] von hymel kummen unnd aus dem guetigen ertrych des junckfraulychen leybs Marya gewachsen ist.” Again, Fridolin refers to Song of Songs 2:1 in his botanical portrayal of the Incarnation. Chronicon terrae Misnensis in Universitäts­ bibliothek Leipzig MS 1317m (1516–18), fol. 5r, transcribed by Ernst Gotthelf Gersdorf, Chronicon terrae Misnensis seu Buchense (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1839), 20. On proleptic anticipations of Christ’s Passion, see Alfred Acres, Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy (London: Harvey Miller, 2013). Rudolf Günther, Die Bilder des Genter und des Isenheimer Altares: Ihre Geschichte und Deutung, vol. 2, Die Brautmystik im Mittelbild des Isenheimer Altars (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1924).



Notes to Pages 00–000

191

88.

89.

90.

91.

92.

93.

192

Fonds 68, inv. no. 446 (1477; Alemannic language), as transcribed in Natalija Ganina, “Bräute Christi”: Legenden und Traktate aus dem Straßburger Magdalenenkloster (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 217–74. For the quoted text, see Kreutzer, Geistlicher Mai, fol. 116r; and Ganina, “Bräute Christi,” 261. Ganina, “Bräute Christi,” 141, and Schmidtke, Die deutsche Literatur, 232, believe that Kreutzer wrote his devotional allegories for reformed Dominican nuns, specically those in Strasbourg. Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 263v: “auf das hört [harte] syechpet des heylligen fronkreuz.” Bonaventure employs the term “hard bed of the cross [durum lectum crucis]” in the rst of two Good Friday sermons. Bonaventure, Doctoris seraphici S. Bonaventurae opera omnia, ed. Patres Collegii a S. Bonaventura, 10 vols. (Florence: Quaracchi, 1882–1902), 9:261, col. 2. On mystical bed thematics in convents, see also Bynum, Dissimilar Similitudes, 59–96. Stephan Hoppe, “Northern Gothic, Italian Renaissance and Beyond: Toward a Thick Description of Style,” in Le gothique de la Renaissance: Actes des quatrième Rencontres d’architecture européenne, Paris, 12–16 juin 2007, ed. Monique Chatenet (Paris: Picard, 2011), 47–64. The structure demonstrates Grünewald’s knowledge of local Flamboyant Gothic style; he designed a chimney and sophisticated doorway for Aschaenburg Castle. For more, see Pierre Vaisse and Piero Bianconi, Tout l’oeuvre peint de Grünewald (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), 92; and Hubach, “Grünewald,” esp. 394. Kreutzer, Geistlicher Mai, fols. 114v–15r; Ganina, “Bräute Christi,” 258–59. Probably based on the trees Isaiah lists that will “make the place of my feet glorious” (Isa. 60:13), Jacobus de Voragine, “The Finding of the Holy Cross,” in The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 278, reports that the Holy Cross was composed of four manners of trees: the palm, cypress, cedar, and olive. That said, in their extended vegetal mirror metaphors of the cross, neither Kreutzer nor Fridolin limited himself to these four arboreal species. Kreutzer, Geistlicher Mai, fol. 114v; Ganina, “Bräute Christi,” 258. For more on the metaphorics of monastic and mystical enclosures in the area of female piety, see Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, esp. 124–76. Kreutzer, Geistlicher Mai, fols. 117v–18r; Ganina, “Bräute Christi,” 262–63. See also

Notes to Pages 00–000

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95.

96.

97.

98.

99. 100.

101.

Landmann, “Johannes Kreutzer: Die Unterweisung,” 40. Kreutzer, Geistlicher Mai, fol. 127r–v; and Ganina, “Bräute Christi,” 273. See also Landmann, “Johannes Kreutzer: Die Unterweisung,” 60. For translation of “Nagel” as the peg of a string instrument, see “Nagel,” in Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, www. woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/nagel. Kreutzer writes that the devout soul also gures in the story of David playing his lyre to draw the evil spirit from King Saul (1 Sam. 16:23). The church fathers drew comparisons between the healing resonance of Christ’s esh and David’s lyre. Hartmut Beckers, “Harfenspiel vom Leiden Christi,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. Kurt Ruh et al., vol. 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1981), 472–74; Hayum, Isenheim Altarpiece, 44; Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 27–60. Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 217r: “Ich, Jesus, wyl dyr wol und sues hofyern [harfen], das du dem fyeber mugst entpyechen.” André Schnyder, “Die geistliche Padstube: Eine spätmittelalterliche Andachtsübung,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 113 (1984): 146–57. A copy of the “Spiritual Bath House,” written in the fteenth century (Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, mgq 405, fols. 62r–65v) was produced for the Brotherhood of Saint Ursula, which was founded in Strasbourg in 1475. Akten des Waldenburger Kapitels, 1606: “Anzug des Bades halben zu Ramsen in Homburger Vogtey gelegen, von wegen dz es, aus Aberglauben, vom Landvolck au den tag der Himmelfahrt, Meytag, und S. Johanstag besucht wirt,” as quoted in Alfred Martin, Deutsches Badewesen in Vergangenen Tagen (Jena: Diederichs, 1906) 10–21, esp. 15–16. See also Alois Thomas, Die Darstellung Christi in der Kelter: Eine theologische und kulturhistorische Studie, zugleich ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Volkskunde des Weinbaus (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1981), 68–77. Hayum, Isenheim Altarpiece, 39–40, notes the proximity of thermal baths in the nearby region of the Vosges Mountains. Kreutzer, Geistlicher Mai, fol. 127r; Ganina, “Bräute Christi,” 272. Fridolin, Der geistliche Mai, fol. 206r: “Ich hab vil zu hayß gepadet un bedorft dz man mich labet.” Thomas Murner, Ein andechtig geistliche Badenfart (Strasbourg: Grüninger, 1514), in

102.

103.

104.

105.

106.

107.

108.

109.

Badenfahrt, ed. Ernst Martin (Strasbourg: Heitz, 1887), iv. Ernst Martin indicates that the text was intended for general audiences and perhaps even based on sermons Murner delivered throughout Alsace. Murner, Ein andechtig geistliche Badenfart, XXXIV, 6: “Als mich die not bezwungen hat / Zuo ben in ein mayen badt / Da ich durch frost und wetters we[h], / Regen wint und kalten schne / Erforen was mit herter pein.” Murner, Ein andechtig geistliche Badenfart, XXVII, 2: “Das holz des lebens wachset dran / Es ist das holz darumb got sacht / ob Adam seines tods bedacht / So wirt her dises holzes nemen / und anders zu dem legen zemen.” Birgit Tucher, Öentliche Badhäuser in Deutschland und der Schweiz im Mittelalter und der frühen Neuzeit (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2003), 154–59. Kreutzer, Geistlicher Mai, fols. 125v–127r, on the “hirtze” and “hirtzelen”; Ganina, “Bräute Christi,” 271–72. Johannes Tauler, “Si quis sitit, veniat et bibat,” in Die Predigten Taulers, ed. Ferdinand Vetter (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1910), 50–56, 51, ll. 34–35. Based on stylistic and dendrochronological analysis, the consensus is that the project was initiated no later than 1490, when Jean d’Orliac, who is pictured at the foot of Saint Augustine to Anthony’s right, retired from his post. Christian Heck and Roland Recht, Les sculptures de Nicolas de Haguenau: Le retable d’Issenheim avant Grünewald (Colmar: Musée d’Unterlinden, 1987). Heck repeats his conservational analysis later, in “De Nicolas de Haguenau à Grünewald: Origine et structure du retable d’Issenheim,” in Flügelaltäre des Späten Mittelalters, ed. Hartmut Krohm and Eike Oellermann (Berlin: Reimer, 1992), 223–37. A later dating of the shrine is postulated in Berenike Berentzen, Niclaus Hagenower: Studien zum bildhauerischen Werk (Petersburg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2014). Regarding the sources in English, Haguenauer is mentioned only once and in passing in both Hayum’s and Mellinko’s monographs on the altarpiece; Hayum, Isenheim Altarpiece, 53; Mellinko, Devil at Isenheim, 2. Chrisian Heck, “La partie sculptée du retable d’Issenheim: Bilan d’une première analyse et problèmes de restauration,” in Heck and Recht, Les sculptures de Nicolas de Haguenau, 48–69. Behling, Die Panze, 145; and Kühn, “Grünewalds Isenheimer Altar,” 331. See also Pierre Bachoner, “Bemerkungen zur Therapie des Antoniusfeuers,” AntoniterForum 4 (1996): 82–89.

110. Hayum, Isenheim Altarpiece, 31–32. 111. Zülch, Der Historische Grünewald, 131–227, esp. 132–40; Hubach, “Grünewald,” 388–90; Hubach, “Nikolaus Hagenauer,” Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon 67 (2010): 441. 112. “Ubi eras ihesu boni, ubi eras? Quare non auisti ut sanares vulnera mea?” The translation belongs to Hayum, Isenheim Altarpiece, 31. 113. Clémentz, “Vom Balsam der Antoniner,” 14; Kühn, “Grünewalds Isenheimer Altar,” 327.; Behling, Die Panze, 140–47. Kühn’s and Behling’s studies compare the painted plants with illustrations from the works of the so-called German founders of botanical studies, Hieronymus Bock, Otto Brunfels, and Leonhart Fuchs, to determine a plant’s medicinal or symbolic purpose in a painting. 114. Kreutzer, Geistlicher Mai, fol. 111r; Ganina, “Bräute Christi,” 255. See also Landmann, “Johannes Kreutzer: Die Unterweisung,” 38. 115. Bodo Brinkmann and Stephan Kemperdick, Deutsche Gemälde im Städel, 1500–1550 (Mainz: Von Zabern, 2005), 353–74. 116. Burkhard Hofmann, Kranker und Krankheit um 1500: Die Darstellung des Kranken im Zusammenhang mit den spätgotischen Bildnissen der Heiligen Elisabeth (Herzogenrath: Murken-Altrogge, 1983); Elisabeth in Marburg: Der Dienst am Kranken, ed. Paul Jürgen Wittstock (Marburg: Universitätsmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, 2007); Ortrud Reber, Elisabeth von Thüringen: Landgrän und Heilige (Regensburg: Pustet, 2006), 140–62. 117. Behling, Die Panze, 140–49. 118. The laurel Lawrence wears might also refer to Apollo, the great healer under the Olympians. For the healing properties with which the ancient god was associated, it has been suggested that the depiction of Saint Sebastian at Isenheim reects the antique sculpture of the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican; see Henry E. Siegerist, “Sebastian—Apollo,” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 19 (1927): 301–17; and Adolf Max Vogt, “Grünewalds Sebastianstafel und das Sebastiansthema in der Renaissance,” Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 18 (1958): 172–76. 119. For an English translation of Lawrence’s Vita, see Jacobus de Voragine, as in The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 2 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013), 67–74; for Latin, see Jacobi a Voragine, “De sancto Laurentio martire,” in Legenda aurea, ed. Johann Georg Theodor Graesse (Leipzig: Impensis librariae Arnoldianae,

120.

121.

122.

123.

124.

125.

126.

127.

1850), 488: “Haec autem arbor est victoriae ostensiva, continua viriditate amoena, odore grata et ecacia virtuosa.” Voragine, “De sancto Laurentio martire,” 488: “Viriditatem habuit in cordis munditia et puritate . . . et debit pauperibus et ideo justitia ejus manet in saeculum saeculi.” Behling, Die Panze, 140–41; Gart der Gesundheit (Augsburg: Schönsperger, 1487), “Hopfen,” chap. ccxv, and “Lorberbaum,” chap. ccxxvii. Victoria Sweet, Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky: Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine (New York: Routledge, 2006), 125– 54; Constant Mews, “Religious Thinker: ‘A Frail Human Being’ on Fiery Life,” in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed. Barbara Newman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 52–69, esp. 56–61, 64–67. Florence Eliza Glaze, “Medical Writer: ‘Behold the Human Creature,’” in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed. Barbara Newman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 125–48. For the inuence of Dioscorides’s De materia medica on Hildegard, see most recently Alina Graz, “Hildegard von Bingens ‘Physica’: Untersuchungen zu den mutmaßlichen Quellen am Beispiel der Heilanwendungen exotischer und ausgewählter heimischer Gewürzpanzen” (Ph.D. diss., University of Würzburg, 2020). Sweet, Rooted in the Earth, 135, in relation to the following quotation from Hildegard: “In winter, the roots of plants have viriditas within them, which they put forth in summer as owers / Radices herbarum in hyeme viriditatem in se habent, quam in estate in ores emittunt.” Hildegard, “Epistola CI,” in Hildegardis Bingensis, Epistolarium, 2 XCI–CCLr, Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio mediaeualis 91A, ed. Lieven van Acker (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993), 257–58: “Lux gratie Dei operiat te, et unctione misericordia . . . Ipse enim unctione viriditas Spiritus Sancti te ungat et bona ac santa opera in te faciat.” The letter was written between 1152 and 1173, after Adelheid’s departure from Hildegard’s community and before Hildegard’s death. Albrecht Dürer, Dürer: Schriftlicher Nachlass, ed. Hans Rupprich, vol. 1 (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), 65. The list of publications related to the Heller Altarpiece is too long to enumerate here. Consulting the lion’s share of them, though, this chapter cites the highlights in the course of its argumentation. A volume

128.

129.

130.

131. 132.

133.

134.

135.

136.



on Grünewald that is written in English, however, oers an exhaustive overview of the history and equally complicated state of the scholarship on this altarpiece. See Horst Ziermann and Erika Beissel, Matthias Grünewald, trans. Joan Clough-Laub (Munich: Prestel, 2001), 48–73. Heinrich Weizsäcker, Die Kunstschätze des Ehemaligen Dominikanerklosters in Frankfurt a.M., 2 vols. (Munich: Bruckmann, 1923), 24, 178. Weizsäcker came to this conclusion for the location after consulting the altar registry of 1492. Bernhard Decker, Dürer und Grünewald: Der Frankfurter Heller-Altar: Rahmenbedingungen der Altarmalerei (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1996), 56–75. Johannes Didenberger, prior of the Domini­ can monastery, on April 4, 1523, describes the gifts Heller bestowed on the monastery after his death in a quotation published in Weizsäcker, Die Kunstschätze des Ehemaligen Dominikanerklosters, 352–53. Weizsäcker, Die Kunstschätze des Ehemaligen Dominikanerklosters, 144. Very little has been written about either work. Kurpfälzisches Museum, Heidelberg, inv. No. G 493. The four feast days are identical for the city’s brotherhood and are the Presen­ta­tion of the Temple, Annunciation, Death and Assumption, and her Nativity. Wolfgang Johannes Kliem, “Die spätmittelalterliche Frankfurter Rosenkranzbruderschaft als volkstümliche Form der Gebetsver­ brüderung” (Ph.D. diss., University of Frankfurt, 1963), 119, 132. The dramatic backand-forth between Dürer and Heller over his fee is apparent in Dürer’s extant letters and recounted well in Bernhard Saran, Matthias Grünewald: Mensch und Weltbild (Munich: Wilhelm Goldmann, 1972), 126–35. Saran, Matthias Grünewald, 129. Dürer’s letters are also transcribed in Otto Cornill, Jacob Heller und Albrecht Dürer: Ein Beitrag zur Sitten- und Kunst-Geschichte des alten Frankfurt am Main um 1500 (Frankfurt: Selfpublished, 1871), 29. From a letter written on August 26, 1509: “ich hab sie mit grosem Fleiss gemahlt alss ihr sehen werdt, ist auch mit den besten Farben gemacht alss ich sie hab mögen bekhomen.” For a timeline of the altarpiece’s construction and afterlife, see Decker, Dürer und Grünewald, 108–12. Heinrich Wölin, Die Kunst Albrecht Dürers (Munich, 1908), 341; Ernst Holzinger, “Von Körper und Raum bei Dürer und Grünewald,” De Artibus Opuscula: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss

Notes to Pages 00–000

193

137.

138.

139.

140.

141.

142.

194

(New York, 1961), 238–53, 239; Heinrich Feuerstein, Matthias Grünewald (Bonn: Verlag der Buchgemeinde, 1930), 61. The panels were reunited for a temporary exhibition at the Städel in 2013; see Jochen Sander and Johann Schulz, “‘Wil ich noch etwaß machen, das nit viel leut khönnen machen’: Dürer und der Heller-Altar,” in Dürer: Kunst, Künstler, Kontext, ed. Jochen Sander (Frankfurt: Städel Museum, 2013), 219–25. From the cloister’s historian Jaquin: “Condidit idem (Jac. Heller) dom ex opposite parvae portae praedicatorum, in qua hypocaustum constituit publicum, in quo paupers se calefacerent hueme,” in Heinrich Hubert Koch, Das Dominikanerkloster zu Frankfurt am Main: 13. bis 16. Jahrhundert (Freiburg: Herder, 1892), 37. Zülch writes that “Jakob Heller war als Rasherr Almosenpeger der Stadt”; Der Historische Grünewald, 114. Georg Ludwig Kriegk, Deutsches Bürgerthum im Mittelalter: Nach Urkundlichen Forschungen und mit Besonderer Beziehung auf Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt: Rütten and Löning, 1868), 163–64; Georg Ratzinger, Geschichte der Kirchlichen Armenpeger (Freiburg: Herder, 1884), 353. Miriam Hall Kirch, “Faith Embodied: Jacob Heller, Catharina von Melem, and Their Altarpiece,” in Imagery and Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Jerey Chipps Smith, ed. Catharine Ingersoll et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 191–200, 194. On the specic almsgiving of medicine, see Frankfurter Rechenbuch from 1496, fol. 34v, as quoted in Kriegk, Deutsches Bürgerthum im Mittelalter, 543n145: “Meister Heinrich sal den armen luden vß der apotecken nemen . . . , vnd der Rat wil es bezalen.” Walter Haas, “Die mittelalterliche Altaranordnung in der Nürnberger Lorenzkirche,” in 500 Jahre Hallenchor St. Lorenz zu Nürnberg, 1477–1977, ed. Herbert Bauer et al. (Nuremberg: Verein für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg, 1977), 63–108; Paul Crossley, “The Man from Inner Space: Architecture and Meditation in the Choir of St. Laurence in Nuremberg,” in Medieval Art: Recent Perspectives: A Memorial Tribute to C. R. Dodwell, ed. Gale Owen-Crocker and Timothy Graham (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1998), 165–82. Max Höer, “Der Frauen-Dreißiger,” Zeitschrift für Österreichische Volkskunde 18 (1912): 133–61, 157. “Cranttwitper schol man prechen zwischen der zwayer unser frawntag an dem heribst vnd schol si

Notes to Pages 00–000

143.

144.

145.

146.

dann syeden an weyn, vnd wer dann izzet drey tag margen nüechter dem wirt daz des ebers puez vnd auch für den raten,” Gottfried von Franken, Pelzbuch, as in Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, Cod. 13647, fol. 170v (ca. 1380). On juniper (Wacholder): “Die (weckhalter) pe[e]r schol man prechen zwischen unser frawn tac ze wurtzweihe und als vnser frauwe geporn wart,” Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Clm 17188, fol. 100r (ca. 1300–1350). On periwinkle (Immergrün), see Gart der Gesundheit, chap. lxxix: “Dises kraut (Syngrün) sol gesamelt werden zwischen den zweÿen unser frauwen tagen assumptionis und nativitatis das ist unser frauwen wurczweÿ vnd ir geburt.” For Eisenkraut or verbena: “Der die selber wurtz graben will, der sol an unswer frowen aubent zu wurtzwichi, da die wurtz stat und umbrisse sy mit gold und mit silber und sprich ain pater noster und ain credi in Deum und sprich: ‘by der edlen frown unsers herren Jhesu Cristi, und by den vier engeln Michael, Gabriel, Raphahel, Anassahel, und by den vier ewangelisten Lucas, Marcus, Matheus, Johannes,’” from Cod. german. Monac. 384, fols. 64b–65a (15th century), as cited in Anton E. Schönbach, “Zweites Stück: Zeugnisse Bertholds von Regensburg zur Volkskunde,” in Studien zur Geschichte der altdeutschen Predigt (Vienna: Gerold in Komm., 1900), 83–156, 140–41. For more on the digging up and blessing of gratiola, see the Munich Cod. lat. 7021, fol. 167v (14th century), parts of which are transcribed in Schönbach, 146–47. “In wuerz messe sint die gense zehnde verdinet”; Sachsenspiegel (1225), book 2, article 58 (Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg; Cod. Pal. Germ. 164, fol. 9r). For more on the topic of the church’s consecration of herbs on Assumption Day, see Heinrich Marzell, “Kräuterweihe,” Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens 5 (1932/33): 440–46. “Grundzehnt,” in Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste in alphabetischer Folge von genannten Schriftstellern, ed. Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1875), 238–61, esp. 257 on “Gänsezehnten.” A Sachsenspiegel copy now in Wolfenbüttel is a close variation but includes depictions of all the saints and the corresponding payments made on their feasts; see Wolfen­ büttel, Herzog August Bibl., Cod. 3.1 Aug. 2°, fol. 39r; and Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand, “Die Wolfenbütteler Bilderhandschrift im Kreis der Codices picturati des Sachsenspiegels,”

147.

148.

149.

150.

151.

152.

153.

154.

155.

in Sachsenspiegel: Die Wolfenbütteler Bilderhandschrift (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 1–24, esp. 10. The reciprocity between civic community and patron saint in medieval Italy was researched by Hans Conrad Peyer, Stadt und Stadtpatron im mittelalterlichen Italien (Zurich: Europa, 1955). Gart der Gesundheit, “Syngrün,” chap. lxxix: “diß kraut ist und vil besser [wenn] es so auch geweÿhet wirt mitt andern kreüttern.” Hieronymus Brunschwig, Liber de arte distilandi de Compositis (Straßburg, 1512), fol. 209a: “Ingrien (Pervinca): Welicher das krut by im tragen ist, vber den hat der teufel keinen gewalt. Ouch ob welicher huß thür diß krut hanget, in das selbig huß mag kein zoubery kummen, kumpt sie aber daryn, so würt die darinn verraten vnd weichent damit bald daruß . . . Aber on zweifel mag kein böser geist gewalt haben in einem hauß, darinn diß krut ist. Vnd vil besser ist es, so es geweihet würt zwischen den zweien vnser lieben frowen tagen.” Gart der Gesundheit, “Orant also genant,” chap. ccxcv: “Wer dises kraut beÿ jm hatt unnd geweÿhet wirt zů unser lieben frauwen tag assumpcionis·dem mag kein zaubereÿ geschaden.” Robert Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon, 1988), 32–33; Josef Pascher, “Die Kräuterweihe am 15. August,” Liturgisches Jahrbuch 17 (1967): 176–81. Johannes Tripps, Das handelnde Bildwerk in der Gotik: Forschungen zu den Bedeutungsschichten und der Funktion des Kirchengebaudes und seiner Ausstattung in der Hoch- und Spätgotik (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1998), 174–90. Sebastian Franck, Weltbüch: spiegel vn[d] bildtniß des gantzen erdbodens (Tübingen: Morhart, 1534), 132: “Darnach kompt vnser frawen himmelfart / da tregt alle elt [people of all ages] obs / büschel allerley kretuer / in die kirchen zu weihen / für alle sucht [sick] und plag [diseased] uberlegt / bewert. Mit disen kreutern geschicht seer vil zauberei.” In Franconia, and likely other areas, the celebration of Mary’s Dormition and Coronation were celebrated on the same day as her Assumption. Gerhard Weilandt, Die Sebalduskirche in Nürnberg: Bild und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der Gotik und Renaissance (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2007), 194. “In festo assumptionis Marie Virginis Benedictio herbarum: Domine exaudi orationes meas. Supplices atque obnixis precibus tuam deprecamur omnipotentiam,

156.

157. 158. 159.

160.

161.

qui mirabiliter cuncta creasti ex nichilo, et de terra edita diversa germina proferre precepisti, atque unumcumque semen in semetipso manere precepisti, super terram ambulasti, et diversa medicamentorum genera ad sanandi generis humani corpora imposuisti, benedicere et sancti+icare digneris has diversi generis herbarum creaturas, ut quicumque ex eis in hac sollempnitate [sic] sumpserunt, tam anime quam corporis sanitatem percipiant quatenus in tuorum odore unguentorumque paradisi mereantur adire ianuas per Christum dominum. Amen. Et benedictio Dei omnipotentis Patris et lii et spiritussancti descendat super has creaturas herbarum et maneat semper. Amen.,” in Eichstätt Cod. Saint 109, fol. 176r–v. The Dominican Ritual inside the manuscript was written by Conradus (Frater Ambrosius), priest and confessor of the convent in Mödingen; Hardo Hilg, Die mittelalterlichen Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Eichstätt, Aus Cod. st 1–Cod. st 275 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994), 32–34. Marzell, “Kräuterweihe,” 442; Hieronymus Bock, Kreutterbuch (Strasbourg: Duch Wendel Rihel, 1539), chap. 166, Von Megerkraut, Wålstro: “unser lieben Frawen betstro”; Gart der Gesundheit, “Leberkraut,” chap. clvi. “Labkraut,” in Handwörterbuch des Deutschen Aberglaubens 5 (1932/33): 865–66. Weizsäcker, Die Kunstschätze des Ehemaligen Dominikanerklosters, 168. Franziska Sarwey, Grünewand-Studien zur Realsymbolik des Isenheimer Altars (Stuttgart: Urachhaus, 1983), 37–39, 89–90; M. J. Mulder, “Die Bedeutung von Jachin und Boaz in 1 Kön. 7:21,” in Tradition and Re-Interpretation in Jewish and Early Christian Literature: Essays in Honour of Jürgen Lebram, ed. J. W. van Henten et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 19–26. Adolf Franz, Die Kirchlichen Benediktionen im Mittelalter, vol. 1 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1909), 398. “Deus, qui universis generibus herbarum humanis necessitatibus prestitisti remedia, hanc herbarum collectionem tuae miserationis benedic† dextera, ut quisquis languor depressus ex eis aliquid gustaverit Ecclesiae tuae sanctae repraesentatus, optatae munus salutis te donante percipiate. Per Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum lium tuum, qui tecum vivit etc. Amen . . . Deinde herbae thuricentur et aqua benedicta aspergantur,” in Agenda secundum morem Spirensem (Speyer: Peter Drach, 1512), 121–22. For text of the entire blessing, see Alfred Peger,

162.

163.

164. 165.

166.

167.

168.

“Die Elsässischen Kräuterweihen,” Archiv für Elsässische Kirchengeschichte 11 (1936): 236–37. Johannes Geiler von Kaysersberg, Die Emeis oder Quadragesimale (Strasbourg, 1516), “Sermon 15: An dem Mitwoch nach mittfast,” fols. 51b–52b. August Stöber transcribed and edited Geiler’s volume in Zur Geschichte des Volks-Aberglaubens im Anfange des XVI. Jahrhunderts (Basel: Schweighauserische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1875), see esp. 55–57. Geiler, Die Emeis, fol. 51b: “Die heilige kirch bruchet wider die zauberey.” On ubiquitous blessing of things, see Aden Kumler, “Manufacturing the Sacred in the Middle Ages: The Eucharist and Other Medieval Works of Art,” English Language Notes 53 (2015): 9–44. Geiler, Die Emeis, fol. 52b. Maria Consuelo Oldenbourg, Die Buchholzschnitte des Hans Baldung Grien: Ein bibliographisches Verzeichnis ihrer Verwendung (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1962). For more on the Frankfurt Master, see Gemälde des Historischen Museums Frankfurt am Main, ed. Wolfram Prinz (Frankfurt: Kramer, 1957), 50–55; Extravagant! A Forgotten Chapter of Antwerp Painting, 1500– 1538, ed. Peter van den Brink et al. (Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 2005), no. 5. Dietmar Lüdke, “Grünewalds Grisaillen und die Erscheinungsformen monochromer Kunst in seiner Zeit,” in Grünewald und seine Zeit: Grosse Landesausstellung Baden-Württemberg, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007), 140–208, at 140; Michaela Krieger, “Grünewald und die Kunst der Grisaille,” in Grünewald und seine Zeit, 58–67. Grünewald’s Heller panels depart in conceit and technique from later brunailles painted in brown tones, such as the wings from the Marian altarpiece in Alpirsbach monastery in Swabia. The woodish color palette of those painted wings highlights the compositions’ illusory and graphic qualities. When juxtaposed with the unpolychromed wood sculpture in the retable’s neighboring shrine, they give the distinct visual impression of inked woodblocks. See Anna Moraht-Fromm, “Bilder aus Licht und Schatten: Die ‘holzfarbenen’ Gemäldeügel des Alpirsbacher Marienretabels,” in Meisterwerke massenhaft: Die Bildhauerwerkstatt des Niklaus Weckmann und die Malerei in Ulm um 1500, ed. Heribert Meurer (Stuttgart: Württembergisches Landesmuseum, 1993), 153–60.

169. See Christian Altgraf Salm, “Grünewalds Flügel zum Helleraltar,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, 3rd ser., 2 (1951): 118–23, at 121, for reports on the physical probes taken of the paintings’ pigments. 170. Sandrart, “Matthaeus Grünewald,” 236, my emphases: “vier Flügel von aussenher / wann der Altar zugeschlossen wird / dieser Matthaeus von Aschaenburg mit liecht in grau und schwarz diese Bilder gemahlt.” 171. The Frankfurt and Karlsruhe panels dier in their conservation histories, the former possessing a gold-yellow varnish that gives the mistaken impression of greenish tonalities on the male saints’ robes and leafwork surrounding their bodies; Salm, “Grünewalds Flügel,” 120–21. My profound gratitude to Jochen Sander of Frankfurt’s Städel Museum and the curatorial and conservation sta at Karlsruhe’s Kunsthalle, particularly Thomas Heidenrich and Karin Achenbach-Stolz, for the generous time they devoted to answering my questions and inviting me to the galleries for discussion and closer inspection. 172. Wood sculpture was often installed in stone niches, including on the famous example of Veit Stoß’s Saint Roch, ca. 1505/1520, in the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata in Florence; see Thomas Eser, “Ein Leuchter, drei Rätsel, ein Kartelspiel: Nürnberger Kunst in Italien,” in Quasi Centrum Europae: Europa kauft in Nürnberg, 1400–1800, exh. cat. (Nuremberg: Verlag des Germanisches Nationalmuseums, 2002), 45–71, 56–62. 173. Rudolf Preimesberger, Paragons and Paragone: Van Eyck, Raphael, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), 23–51; Preimesberger, “Zu Jan van Eycks Diptychon der Sammlung Thyssen-Bornemisza,” in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 54 (1991): 459–89; see also Frank Fehrenbach, “Come Alive: Some Remarks on the Rise of ‘Monochrome’ Sculpture in the Renaissance,” Notes in the History of Art 30 (2011): 47–55; and Fehrenbach, “The Colors of Monochrome Sculpture,” in The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy, ed. Amy Bloch and Daniel Zolli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 64–82. 174. Saran, Matthias Grünewald, 143. 175. Jerey F. Hamburger, “Seeing and Believing: The Suspicion of Sight and the Authentication of Vision in Late Medieval Art and Devotion,” in Imagination und Wirklichkeit: Zum Verhältnis von Mentalen und Realen Bildern in der Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Krüger and Alessandro Nova (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2000),



Notes to Pages 00–000

195

176.

177.

178.

179.

47–69, esp. 52–53; Colin T. Eisler, Early Netherlandish Painting: The ThyssenBornemisza Collection (London: P. Wilson, 1989), 50–61. Frank Matthias Kammel, “Skulptur der Dürerzeit: Traditionelle Motive und neue Formen,” in Renaissance, Barock, Aufklärung: Kunst und Kultur vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Daniel Hess and Dagmar Hirschfelder, Die Schausammlungen des Germanischen Nationalmuseums 3 (Nuremberg: Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2010), 60–73; Quasi Centrum Europae, 458–59. Mitchell B. Merback, “Immanence and Intercession: Rooted Sanctity and the Creglingen Marienaltar,” in Riemenschneider in Situ, ed. Katherine M. Boivin and Gregory C. Bryda (Turnhout: Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2021), 197–229. Decker extrapolates from this visual parallel a collaboration, perhaps even simultaneous, between Dürer and Grünewald. Decker, Dürer und Grünewald, 63–68, esp. 68. Albrecht Dürer to Jakob Heller, Nuremberg, August 26, 1508, as in Rupprich, Dürer: Schriftlicher Nachlass, 72.

Chapter 4. The Spiritual Vintage 1. The sculpted crucix, with its Calvary base, is a modern addition. The inclusion of a “Sacramentsgehäwße . . . unden in sarch” is accounted for in the original contract, which is transcribed in Justus Bier, Tilmann Riemenschneider: Die reifen Werke (Augsburg: Filser, 1930), 171–72. The bibliography for this monument is too extensive to list here, but a comprehensive treatment of it and the historical literature can be found in Rainer Kahsnitz, Carved Splendor: Late Gothic Altarpieces in Southern Germany, Austria and South Tirol, trans. Russell Stockman (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006), 222–37, 470. More recent literature includes Katherine Boivin, Riemenschneider in Rothenburg: Sacred Space and Civic Identity in the Late Medieval City (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2021); and several essays in Katherine M. Boivin and Gregory C. Bryda, eds., Riemenschneider in Situ (Turnhout: Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2021). 2. Eike Oellerman, “Der Hochaltar in Saint Martin zu Lorch am Rhein,” in Flügelaltäre des späten Mittelalters, ed. Hartmut Krohm and Eike Oellerman (Berlin: Reimer, 1992), 8–22; Hans Heid, “Die älteste Beschreibung der Wallfahrtskirche Lautenbach,” in Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv 14/15 (1962/3): 518–23.

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Notes to Pages 00–000

3. Bonaventure, The Mystical Vine, in The Works of Bonaventure: Cardinal, Seraphic Doctor, and Saint, vol. 1, Mystical Opuscula, trans. José de Vinck (Paterson, N.J.: St. Anthony Guild, 1960), 157–62. For an analysis of Bonaventure’s Mystical Vine, see Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 45–48. For more on the genre of this seasonal metaphor that was found in songs, sermons, and prayer books, see Dietrich Schmidtke, Studien zur dingallegorischen Erbauungsliteratur des Spätmittelalters: Am Beispiel der Gartenallegorie (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1982), 18, 26, 58, 119, 270; and Schmidtke, “Geistliche Weinrebe,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. Kurt Ruh et al., vol. 2 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980), 1180–81. 4. Stephan Fridolin, Das puchlein wirdt genendt der edel weinreb Jesu, der so spricht, Ich bin der waer Weinreb (Landshut: Weißenburger, 1530)—henceforth referred to as Geistlicher Herbst. It is a printed edition based on a manuscript copy of Fridolin’s Geistlicher Herpst in Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Hdschr. 110 (ca. 1500–1525); see also Carmen Stange, “Stephan Fridolin: Geistlicher Mai, Geistlicher Herbst,” in Aderlaß und Seelentrost: Die Überlieferung deutscher Texte im Spiegel Berliner Handschriften und Inkunabeln, ed. Peter Jörg Becker and Eef Overgaauw (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 2003), no. 132, 258 –260; and Petra Seegets, Passionstheologie und Passionsfrömmigkeit im ausgehenden Mittelalter: Der Nürnberger Franziskaner Stephan Fridolin (gest. 1498) zwischen Kloster und Stadt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 91–122. 5. Fridolin, Geistlicher Herbst, fol. AIII: “Besunder in dem natürlichen Herbst des Monats September . . . Also mag ein Mensch annfahen an dem tag Exaltationis sancte crucis. In diesem geisliche herbst zugeen.” 6. “Herbstmost I and II” Moscow State Library (RGB) Fonds 68, inv. no. 446, fols. 149v–152r, as transcribed in Natalija Ganina, “Bräute Christi”: Legenden und Traktate aus dem Straßburger Magdalenenkloster (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 299–304. Kreutzer’s prayers can also be found in Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. theol. et phil. qt. 190, and Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Ms. germ. qu. 202; “Herbstmost I” was printed in Betrachtung des lidens Jesu Christi (Basel: Nikolaus Lamparter, 1509), 3–5. 7. Marie-Dominique Chenu, Man, Nature and Society in the Twelfth Century, trans.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155 (1967): 1203–7; David J. Herlihy, “Attitudes Towards the Environment in Medieval Society,” in Historical Ecology: Essays on Environment and Social Change, ed. Lester J. Bilsky (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1980), 100–16, 102–4; Ruth Groh and Dieter Groh, Weltbild und Naturaneignung: Zur Kulturgeschichte der Natur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), esp. 11–91. I thank Frank Fehrenbach for the Grohs’ source. The greatest dedication to Harschner’s contribution to the altarpiece remains Justus Bier’s monographic study: Bier, Die reifen Werke, 14–20. The contract text along with all of the nancial and delivery transactions can be found in Bier, Die reifen Werke, Anhang, 160–75, nos. 58–76. The rst recorded transaction related to the altarpiece is the “Verdingung des Gehäuses an Erhart Harschner” on June 30, 1499 (Bier, Die reifen Werke, 170, no. 58); multiple payments ensue thereafter. Two years later, in April 1501, the contract was signed (Bier, Die reifen Werke, 171, no. 61); for an English translation of a large excerpt of the contract, see Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 174. Gerhard Weilandt, “Der wiedergefundene Vertrag Jörg Syrlins des Älteren über das Hochaltarretabel des Ulmer Münsters: Zum Erscheinungsbild des frühesten holzsichtigen Retabels,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 59 (1996): 437–60. Harschner’s bonus was a form of debt forgiveness or charity; it consisted of eight Malters (a medieval unit of measure for ground grain) of grain. See Bier, Die reifen Werke, 11; “Zahlungen an Harschner. 1499–1501,” 170, no. 59; and “Zahlungen an Harschner. 1502/03, Geschenk in Korn,” 173, no. 65b. Riemenschneider’s bonus was ten Gulden plus a gratuity for his assistants. Helmut Harthausen, “Peter Drach der mittlere (um 1450–1504),” Pfälzer Lebensbilder 3 (1977): 7–29; Helmut Harthausen, “Das erste Jahrhundert des Speyerer Buckdrucks,” in Speyerer Buchdruck in fünfhundert Jahren, ed. Jürgen Vorderstemann (Speyer: Pfälzische Landesbibliothek, 1981), 13–20. Petrus de Crescentiis, Petrus de Crescentijs zu teutsch mit guren, trans. of Peter Drach der Mittlere, Liber ruralium commodorum (Speyer: Peter Drach der Mittlere, 1495), book 4, chap. 14, fol. 50: “Je weingarten soll

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

man erhebê un(d) die stœck au bindê eh wann die augê an fahê ser zuo schwellê.” The text is cited in Günther Franz, Quellen zur Geschichte des deutschen Bauernstandes im Mittelalter (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1967), 207. Georg Schreiber, Deutsche Weingeschichte: Der Wein in Volksleben, Kult und Wirtschaft (Cologne: Rheinland-Verlag, 1980), 424–37. Hildegard von Bingen, Physica: Liber subtilitatum diversarum naturarum creaturarum— Textkritische Ausgabe, ed. Reiner Hildebrandt und Thomas Gloning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), Liber tertius, III–54, p. 223: “Unde etiam ille magnus ignis lignum eius ita aridum facit, quod aliis lignis fere dissimile est. Et vitis est lignum de terra extorsum et magis ad similitudinem arborum.” Mary herself is compared with a grapevine; see Alois Thomas, “Maria die Weinrebe,” Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch 10 (1970): 30–55; and Thomas, “Maria der Acker und die Weinrebe in der Symbolvorstellung des Mittelalters” (Habilitation thesis, University of Trier, 1952). D. Heubach, “Zur Madonna aus der Korbgasse in Mainz,” Mainzer Zeitschrift 11 (1916): 51. The miniature is painted on a single leaf that was later pasted into a younger manuscript; see Marlis Stähle, Handschriften der Dombibliothek zu Hildesheim. T. 1, Hs 124a— Hs 698, Mittelalterliche Handschriften in Niedersachsen 8 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991), 110–12; and Thomas, “Maria der Acker,” 111. Franz Irsigler, “Viticulture, vinication et commerce du vin en Allemagne occidentale des origins au XVIe siècle,” in Le Vigneron, la viticulture et la vinication en Europe occidentale au Moyen Âge et à l’époque moderne (Auch: Comité départemental du tourisme du Gers, 1991), 59. For an excellent overview of wine culture in late medieval Germany, see Tom Scott, “Medieval Viticulture in the GermanSpeaking Lands,” German History 20 (2002): 95–115, esp. 104. See also Andreas Otto Weber and Jesko Graf zu Dohna, eds., Die Geschichte des fränkischen Weinbaus: Von den Anfängen bis 1800 (Erlangen: Zentralinstitut für Regionenforschung, 2012). After 1400, wines of Franconia began to compete in the domestic market against the wines of Alsace, Rhineland, and Mosel. Winfried Schenk, “Mainfränkische Kulturlandschaft unter klösterlicher Herrschaft: Die Zisterzienserabtei Ebrach als raumwirkende Institution

23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

vom 16. Jahrhundert bis 1803” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Würzburg, 1988), 59–65, 114. Fritz Mägerlein, “Weinbau in Tauberzell,” Die Linde 57 (1975): 17–40, esp. 18–19. On average, there are 50 foggy, 140 cloudy, 50 clear, and 20–30 hot days (250C or more) per year in the Tauber valley. At their steepest, the hills have an incline of about 40–50 degrees, which is an optimal direction of incidence for sunrays; Mägerlein, “Weinbau in Tauberzell,” 19. Helmut Weigel, “Beiträge zur Geschichte des Weinbaues an der Tauber im Mittelalter,” Die Linde 9 (1917): 4–8. “Tungen (düngen) mit 2 fuder mistes oder 4 fuder guter erden . . . entrumen (räumen) . . . zwir hacken (zweimal hacken) . . . oder falls nicht geräumt wird dristunt hacken (dreimal hacken) in iglichen morgen hundret reben inlegen (einlegen) oder fünfzehn gruben fezen (Gruben für Rebstöcke anlegen) . . . pfelen zu rechter zeit (sticken),” transcribed from Rothenburg Stadarchiv MS 1508 by Weigel, “Beiträge zur Geschichte des Weinbaues an der Tauber im Mittelalter,” 6–8. Bier, Die reifen Werke, 56–86; Holger Simon, Der Creglinger Marienaltar von Tilman Riemenschneider (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 2002); Kahsnitz, Carved Splendor, 238–53, 471. Bier, Die reifen Werke, appendices, 52–54; see also Karl Adelmann, “Til Riemenschneider,” Walhalla 6 (1910): 1–113, esp. 53; Eduard Tönnies, Leben und Werk des Würzburger Bildschnitzers Tilmann Riemenschneider, 1468– 1531 (Strasbourg: J. H. Ed. Heitz, 1900), 141n1; Simon, Der Creglinger Marienaltar, 182. Volker Schaible, “The Marian Retable by Tilman Riemenschneider in the Church of Our Lord in Creglingen: Results of a Technical Investigation,” in Boivin and Bryda, Riemenschneider in Situ, 73–115. Bier, Die reifen Werke, 11. Eike Oellermann, “Der Beitrag des Schreiners zum spätgotischen Schitzaltar,” Zeitschrift für Kunsttechnologie und Konservierung 9 (1995): 178. See Kahsnitz, Carved Splendor, 244; Simon, Der Creglinger Marienaltar, 59–65; and, more recently, Michele Marincola and Anna Serotta, “Riemenschneider’s Marien Altarpiece in the Church of Our Lord, Creglingen: A Review of Its Restoration History and the Application of a New Examination Method,” in Boivin and Bryda, Riemenschneider in Situ, 323–38. Petrus de Crescentiis, Petrus de Crescentijs zu teutsch mit guren, book 4, chap. 12, fol. 48: “es sei besser das dye stœcke stetiglich

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.



vernuwet werden. Man soo auch abeschneyden alle krome und swache und in unbeqwemen steten entsproßene reben unnd fesem. Auch die rebe die entsproßen ist zwischen zweyen armen sol man abeschnyden . . . Inn fueß wachê eckern . . . sollen sie nye beliebe.” The Berliner Weingartenpredigt is so named for the repository of its sole surviving copy, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, mgo 605, fols. 69r–72v. Drawing on the allegory of the vineyard from Matthew 20, it describes Christ bound “an den pfail des creuz unsers herzen,” fol. 70v. For more, see Dietrich Schmidtke, “Berliner Weingartenpredigt,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. Kurt Ruh, et al., vol. 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1978), 735; Bonaventure, “Chapter 4: On the Tying of the Vine,” in The Mystical Vine, 157–62. Berliner Weingartenpredigt, fol. 70v: “die reben an am pfäl [pfeil] binden / on po p lang wachssend wider unter sich biegen / also auch gaiplich zu ersten sol man abhauen / wo dem weingarten des selen alle uberussige zwöyen [zweigen] als onnutze gedenck miessig gende wort und onfruchtbere werk / ja man sol abhoben die werck den willen un ursach der sünden.” Throughout the second week of prayers, there are numerous references to “das Hepelein” (diminutive for die Hippe, or gardening knife) and “ein krumbs Hepelein oder Weinmesser” (curved garden knife or vine knife); Fridolin, Geistlicher Herbst, fol. C3. The shrine of Friedrich Herlin’s altarpiece for Rothenburg’s high altar measures 50 cm deep; Lautenbach, 55 cm; Lorch, 80 cm; Creglingen, 50 cm; see Kahsnitz, Carved Splendor, 228, 64, 110, 126, 244. Martine Paul, “Turf Seats in French Gardens of the Middle Ages (12th–16th Centuries),” Journal of Garden History 5 (1985): 3–14; Sylvia Landsbert, The Medieval Garden (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996). I thank Deirdre Larkin, former horticulturalist at the Met Cloisters, for these and other sources on the manicuring devices of the curated medieval pleasure garden. Martin Schar, “Kammertbau—Zur Geschichte einer Reberziehung unter Besonderer Berücksichtigung der Pfalz,” Weinproduktion und Weinkonsum im Mittelalter, ed. Michael Matheus (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004), 17–38. Karl Oettinger, “Laube, Garten und Wald: Zu einer Theorie der süddeutschen Sakralkunst, 1470–1520,” in Festschrift für Hans Sedlmayr (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1962), 201–28, 207–9. Oettinger, “Laube, Garten und Wald,” 208, 222–23.

Notes to Pages 00–000

197

42. Oettinger, “Laube, Garten und Wald,” 217. 43. Kristine Scherer, Martin Schwarz: Ein Maler in Rothenburg ob der Tauber um 1500 (Munich: Scaneg, 1992), 81. 44. The woodcuts are traditionally attributed to Hans Pleydenwur and Michael Wolgemut. Hartmut Krohm, Die Rothenburger Passion im Reichsstadtmuseum Rothenburg ob der Tauber (Rothenburg: Verlag des Vereins AltRothenburg, 1985), 32. 45. See Herbert Schindler, Der Schnitzaltar: Meisterwerke und Meister in Süddeutschland, Österreich und Südtirol (Regensburg: Pustet, 1978), 135–45, esp. 138, for a bibliography of which scholars have credited Riemenschneider versus Harschner for the altarpiece’s compositional program. 46. Eike Oellermann, “Die Bedeutung des Malers Martinus Schwarz im Früh­ werk Riemenschneiders,” in Tilman Riemenschneider: Frühe Werke (Regensburg: Pustet, 1981), 285–302. 47. Petrus de Crescentiis, Petrus de Crescentijs zu teutsch mit guren, book 4, chap. 14, fol. 50r: “zwische swen Stock machen ein gabel oder eine Stab der sol gebuden sein das die traube nit an die arde hagen.” 48. Fridolin also compares the Infant Christ’s sweet little cheeks (heilige wänglein) to grape bunches. For the allegory of the little grape berry (Weinperlein) as Christ’s tearful eye, see Fridolin, Geistlicher Herbst, fols. A2r–C3r. “Und im also haiß gemacht hat in seinem heyligen sterben und leiden das der suß balsamsat ann der sünnen seiner fewr ammenten lieb aus dem suesssen Cipertrewbel durch seine clare augen an den hochen pfal des froncreuz miltigklich getroen ist . . . Also erwitter in den ersten wochen des herbst deine augen in den wein­garten Engade das du schauest mit des gaists augen in wie manchen stetten diser kostlicher wein gewachsen.” 49. Von Bingen, “Vitis igneum,” in Physica, Liber tertius, III–54, 223; see Konrad von Megenburg, Das Buch der Natur, von Konrad von Megenberg: die erste Naturgeschichte in deutscher Sprache, ed. Franz Pfeier (Stuttgart: K. Aue, 1861), “von dem Weinreben,” book 4, chap. 54, 350–53, at 350: “der weinreben zäher, der dar auz tropfet wenn man si besneidet”; Leonhart Fuchs, New Kreüterbuch (Basel: Michael Isingrin, 1543), “Von Weinreben,” chap. 29. 50. “Ellringen’s Compendium,” Staatsarchiv Nürnberg, Reichsstadt Rothenburg 1947; see Ludwig Schnurrer, “Wunderheilungen zum Heiligen Blut in der Rothenburger St. Jakobskirche im ausgehenden Mittelalter,” Die Linde 67, no. 1, 2 (1985): 216, esp. 5.

198

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51. Ludwig Schnurrer, Weinbau und Weinkonsum im Spital der Reichsstadt Rothenburg ob der Tauber im späten Mittelalter, Schriften zur Weingeschichte 150 (Wiesbaden: Gesellschaft für Geschichte des Weines, 2005), 205; Schreiber, Deutsche Weingeschichte, 254. 52. Alois Thomas, Die Darstellung Christi in der Kelter: Eine theologische und kulturhistorische Studie, zugleich ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Volkskunde des Weinbaus (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1981); Achim Timmermann, “A View of the Eucharist on the Eve of the Protestant Reformation,” in Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation, ed. Lee Palmer Wander (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 365–98; Elina Gertsman, “Multiple Impressions: Christ in the Wine Press and the Semiotics of the Printed Image,” Art History 36 (2013): 310–37. For more on the mystical host mill, the analogous pulverizing technology employed on wheat grains, the raw material for the host, see Alois Thomas, “Die mystische Mühle,” Die christliche Kunst 31 (1934/35): 129–39; Harald Rye-Clausen, Die Hostienmühlenbilder im Lichte mittelalterlicher Frömmigkeit (Stein am Rhein: Christiana-Verlag, 1981); and Aden Kumler, “The ‘Genealogy of Jean le Blanc’: Accounting for the Materiality of the Medieval Eucharist,” in The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250–1750, ed. Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H. Smith (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2015), 119–40, 132–33. 53. A Preßbaum is also known as a Baumkelter; Fridolin, Geistlicher Herbst, fol. GIV: “An dem drittn tag ververck wie jungfraw. Misericordia / den preßpaum tritt und e e den sussen trubel zerknüscht zwischen der erkanntnus und lieb.” 54. Schreiber, Deutsche Weingeschichte, 253–54. See also Lukas Clemens and Michael Matheus, “Weinkeltern im Mittelalter,” in Europäische Technik im Mittelalter: 800 bis 1400, Tradition und Innovation (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1996), 133–36. 55. Herrad von Landsberk was abbess of the Augustinian cloister of Saint Odilienberg (also known as Hohenbourg) in Alsace from ca. 1178 to ca. 1196. The original manuscript was destroyed in Strasbourg during the Franco-Prussian War. For a modern edition of the copies of its images and text, which were made before it was lost, see Rosalie Green and Julian T. Brown, eds., Herrad of Hohenbourg: Hortus deliciarum, 2 vols., Studies of the Warburg Institute 36 (London: Warburg Institute, 1979), esp. 2:405.

56. See also the high relief of Christ in the Winepress in the Holy Cross Chapel in Ediger-Eller (early 1500s). 57. Jacobus de Voragine, “The Finding of the Holy Cross,” in The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 277–84, 277. 58. “Item libere liceat cuivis homini civitatis ipsius opus habendi in silvis ipsis secare tres arbores ad torcular,” as quoted in Helga Schweer, Weissenburg im Elsass: Eine Stadtgeographie, Veröentlichung (Speyer: Verl. d. Pfälz. Ges. zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, 1964), 37. 59. Philipp Wackernagel transcribed the lyrics of “Der Geistliche Weingarte” from the Meynz Cantual of 1605, no. 8, 133; see Wackernagel, Das deutsche Kirchenlied von der ältesten Zeit bis zu Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1865), 637–38, no. 827. Wackernagel notes that the hymn is also found in hymnals from Paderborn in 1209 and 1616, as well as in a number of other books. 60. “Der Geistliche Weingarte,” as in Wackernagel, Das deutsche Kirchenlied, 638: e “Die Juden kamen gegangen mit Waen und Gewer / sie wolten auch zerbrechen die edle Weinbeer. / Der Pressbaum war bereitet, al suns die Schrite sagt / da wollte gott der herre den Pressbaum selber tragen.” 61. Another example of Christ operating his own winepress can be seen in the votive panel of Matthias von Gupen (ca. 1511), now in the Ritterkapelle of Ansbach’s Gumber­tuskirche. 62. Scott, “Medieval Viticulture,” 104. 63. Timmermann, “View of the Eucharist,” 386. 64. Thomas, Die Darstellung Christi in der Kelter, 148; Schreiber, Deutsche Weingeschichte, 454–55. 65. Hartmut Boockmann, Die Stadt im Späten Mittelalter (Munich: Beck, 1994), no. 410, 270; Thomas, Die Darstellung Christi in der Kelter, 144–46. 66. Ferdinand Geldner, Die deutschen Inkuna­ beldrucker: Ein Handbuch der Deutschen Buchdrucker des XV. Jahrhunderts nach Druckorten, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Hierse­mann, 1968), 284–86; Holger Nickel, “Wenig Neues von Hermann Nitzschewitz,” Buchwesen in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit: Festschrift für Helmut Claus zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Ulmann Weiß (Epfendorf: Bibliotheca Academica, 2008), 55–72; Falk Eiserman, “Imperial Representation and the Printing Press in Fifteenth-Century Germany,” in Multimedia Compositions from the Middles Ages to the Early Modern Period, ed. Margriet Hoogvliet (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 72.

67. Thomas, Die Darstellung Christi in der Kelter, 148; Renate Laszlo, Das mystische Weinfass: Ein altenglisches Rätsel des Vercellibuches (Marburg: Tectum, 1996), 195. 68. Fridolin, Geistlicher Herbst, R3: “Als erscheint in der gur seines aufgespannten gecrezigten / zerdente leibs . . . ye vôller das feßlein deines willé wirt des Starcké weins.” 69. The edition printed by Matthias Hüpfu in Strasbourg in either 1510 or 1511 can be found in Albert Fidelis Butsch, ed., Strassburger Räthselbuch: Die erste zu Strassburg ums Jahr 1505 gedruckte deutsche Räthselsammlung (Strasbourg: K. J. Trübner, 1876), 1. For more information on the genre, see Martin H. Jones, “Rätselbücher,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. Kurt Ruh et al., vol. 7 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1989), 1039–44; and Heike Bismark, Rätselbücher: Entstehung und Entwicklung eines frühneuzeitlichen Buchtyps im deutschsprachigen Raum; Frühe Neuzeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2007). Analysis and text of the riddle about the Mystical Barrel is also published in Laszlo, Das mystische Weinfass, 174. 70. Butsch, Strassburger Räthselbuch, 1: “Es ist von oben herab kommen / hat vill leydens an sich genommen / von hitz keltd vnd beschneyden . . . xxxx pfennig was es wert. / Verkaut gefangen gebunden, ward es hart geschlagen . . . / Sein seit verwondt vnd ander glider. Nirgent geschont hoch oder nieder / darauss ossen heilsam bronnen.” 71. Saint John’s eagle is inscribed, “Verbum caro factum est” (John 1:14), and the other three symbols “in omnem terram exivit sonus eorum” (Ps. 18:5); Thomas, Die Darstellung Christi in der Kelter, 145. 72. Fridolin, Geistlicher Herbst, fol. L: “Das groß füderich faß / deines hertzn / vol des herzsussen most.” In the riddle, the mysterious cruciform onto which the mysterious object is locked and pulled is the construction of the wooden cart; see Butsch, Strassburger Räthselbuch, 1. 73. Kreutzer, “Herbstmost I,” fol. 149v: “Zwen lygeringe,” transcribed in Ganina, “Bräute Christi,” 300. 74. Kurt Wesoly, “Handwerke in Weinbauge­ bieten während des Mittelalters—unter Berücksichtigung des schwäbischen Unterlandes,” in Weinwirtschaft im Mittelalter, ed. Christhard Schrenk and Hubert Weckbach (Heilbronn: Stadtarchiv Heilbronn, 1997), esp. 131; Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors, 95–122, esp. 111–15. 75. Otto Volk, “Weinbau und Weinabsatz im späten Mittelalter: Forschungsstand und Forschungsprobleme,” in Weinbau,

76.

77.

78.

79. 80. 81.

Weinhandel und Weinkultur, ed. Alois Gerlich (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1993), 88; Helmuth Feigl, “Die Wirkungen der Weinbaukonjuntur des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts auf die Sozialstruktur Niederösterreichs,” in Probleme des niederösterreichischen Weinbaus, ed. Helmuth Feigl and Willibald Rosner (Vienna: Selbstverlag, 1990), 89. Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors, 112. Tools were a factor in guild demarcation, often a litigious aair. Georg Ludwig Kriegk, Deutsches Bürgerthum im Mittelalter, mit besondere Beziehung auf Frankfurt a.M. (Frankfurt: Sauer und Auvermann, 1969), 300–301. The so-called Weinkauf took place either concurrently or before the contracts were ocially drawn out—in both cases, before each artist was paid. With the naming of Harschner as the cabinetmaker on June 30, 1499, was the “1 ort” (a quarter pitcher) of wine gifted to him: “Item 1 ort zu weinkau dem schreiner von der trauel zu zu dem heyligen blut,” Bier, Die reifen Werke, 170, no. 58. For Riemenschneider’s transaction, “V lb.” (a half pitcher) of wine was purchased on April 10, 1501, ve days before his contract was ocially drawn up on April 15. “Item V lb. V d. zu weinkau, als man meister Til dy pild andingt,” Bier, Die reifen Werke, 171, no. 60. For more on the Weinkauf, see Schreiber, Deutsche Weingeschichte, 274–77. For the Windsheimer Altar (completed 1509; now in the Kurpfälzischen Museum, Heidelberg), there is no recorded gift of wine for Riemenschneider—though the cabinetmaker received one. “Anfertigung des Schreingehäuses, 1493–94: Item XLVI zu weinko, alß man die tael in dem choer hingelihen hat einem schreiner zu Nürenberck, 3 post Kiliany,” Bier, Die reifen Werke, 162, no. 27a. Another example comes from the high altar for the Memminger Frauenkirche (completed 1514): “Item 3ß ze winkauf, do man mit maister Hansen, bildhower, von der tafel wegen uß ist komen,” Hans Rott, Quellen und Forschungen zur sueddeutschen und schweizerischen Kunstgeschichte im XV. und XVI. Jahrhundert, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Strecker und Schröder Verlag, 1933–38), 2:108. See also B. Ann Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 103–14. Schreiber, Deutsche Weingeschichte, 257–65. Kreutzer, “Herbstmost II,” fol. 154r, transcribed in Ganina, “Bräute Christi,” 304. Fridolin, Geistlicher Herbst, fol. M2: “eyegenschafte der trüncken”; Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 139.

82. Fridolin, Geistlicher Herbst, fol. M2: “Wan der wein verandert et wann einem sein gemûet dz er nit entpndt was im wol oder wee thuet / also sind die lieben heilige marterer so truncken worden / des costlichn weins des unschuldigen plt vergiessens irs edln herzog e jesu / das sy nit oder wenig entpfunden.” 83. Fridolin, Geistlicher Herbst, fol. M2: “Genuß des edlen Getränkes.” 84. Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order, 48–69, esp. 58–60; Keith Moxey, Peasants, Warriors, and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 35–66. 85. “Hat dich von jeher Wassermangel schwer bedrückt / Daß heut noch beim gemeinen Mann die Rede geht / Hier sei das Wasser oftmals rarer als der Wein.” August Schnizlein translated the verse into German in Die Linde 4 (1912): 46. 86. Schnurrer, Weinbau und Weinkonsum, 213. 87. In 798, Alcuin emphasizes to his brethren in Lyon that the water must be pure. “The bread, which is consecrated into the Body of Christ, ought to be of the cleanest, without the leavening of any other infection, and the water [ought to be] the purest, without any lth, and the wine should be most puried and free from the admixture of any other liquid.” “Epistola 90,” in Alcuin, 30 Epistolae, vol. 100 of Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: Migne, 1863), cols. 289A–B: “panis, qui in corpus Christi consecratur, absque fermento ullius alterius infectionis, debet esse mundissimus; et aqua absque omni sorde purissima, et vinum absque omni commistione alterius liquoris [nisi aquae] purgatissimum . . . Ex aqua et farina panis t qui consecratur in corpus Christi: aqua et vinum in sanguinem consecrabitur Christi.” I thank Aden Kumler for this reference. 88. In the early Middle Ages, there is evidence that lay elites donated wheat elds and vineyards whose output was earmarked specically for the Mass; see Aden Kumler, “Manufacturing the Sacred in the Middle Ages: The Eucharist and Other Medieval Works of Ars,” English Language Notes 53 (2015): 9–44, at 19. From correspondence in July 2020, Rothenburg’s archivist, Ludwig Schnurrer, has never encountered any indication that sacramental wine was produced in special vineyards. Likewise, from correspondence in August 2014, Tom Scott claimed, “I have never read that (parts of) vineyards were cordoned o to supply superior wine to the clergy. Rather, monastic and ecclesiastical landholders reserved



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89.

90.

91. 92.

93. 94.

95.

96.

200

the best sites for themselves, e.g. Maximin Gruenhaeuser Abtsberg, Bruderberg, etc. as commercial producers. It is to my mind most unlikely that the church reserved better wine specically for Mass; what we do know, however, is that, for instance, some Bavarian convents imported superior wines from South Tirol for their own domestic consumption (including use at Mass).” See Aden Kumler, “The Multiplication of the Species: Eucharistic Morphology in the Middle Ages,” RES 59/60 (2011): 179–91. In addition to Kumler are the indispensible works from Peter Browe, Die Verehrung der Eucharistie im Mittelalter (Munich: Hüber, 1933); and Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 58, The Eucharistic Presence (3a. 73–78), ed. and trans. William Barden (New York: McGrawHill, 1965), 30–33. Kumler, “‘Genealogy of Jean le Blanc,’” 119–40. Pierre-Marie Gy, “Le vin rouge est-il préférable pour l’Eucharistie?,” in Liturgia et unitas: Liturgiewissenschaftliche und ökumenische Studien zur Eucharistie und zum gottesdienstlichen Leben in der Schweiz: In honorem Bruno Bürki, ed. Martin Klöckener and Arnaud Join-Lambert (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 2001), 178–84; Rubin, Corpus Christi, 49. Kumler, “Multiplication of the Species,” 124–25. “Perniciosus in tuis partibus inolevit abusus, videlicet, quod in majori quantitate de aqua ponitur in sacricio quam de vino: cum secundum rationabilem consuetudinem Ecclesiae generalis plus in ipso sit de vino quam de aqua ponendum,” Honorius III, Decretals of Gregory IX, book 3, title 41, chap. 13 (CIC II, col. 643), as cited in Rubin, Corpus Christi, 48–49. “Aqua pura mixta vino in qua nichilominus vinum remaneat in sua specie” (my emphasis). Robert Grosseteste, Templum dei, ed. Joseph Goering and F. A. C. Mantello, Toronto Mediaeval Latin Texts 14 (Toronto: Pontical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), 18.1, 63, as cited in Rubin, Corpus Christi, 49. “Tres guttae sanguinis perfusae super corporale et apparet vestigium,” from “Ellringen’s Compendium,” Staatsarchiv Nürnberg, Reichsstadt Rothenburg 1947, fol. 4r, as quoted in Paul Schattenmann, “Reliquien und Wunder in der Kapelle zum

Notes to Pages 00–000

97. 98.

99. 100.

101. 102.

103.

hl. Blut zu Rothenburg ob der Tauber,” Die Linde 28 (1938): 48n58. Although Caroline Walker Bynum has noted that the relic may be a conation of Christ’s blood and a bloody corporal miracle, by the fteenth century, it was understood and marketed exclusively as sacramental blood. Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), esp. 151. For more recent work on blood, see also Blood, Symbol, Liquid, ed. Catrien G. Santing and Jetze Touber (Leuven: Peeters, 2012). Boivin, Riemenschneider in Rothenburg, 47. There were numerous instances of cult interest in spilled wine in the Brabant, including the cities of Binderen, Boxmeer, Boxtel, Hoogstraten, and Meersen; Karl Kolb, Vom Heiligen Blut: Eine Bilddokumentation der Wallfahrt und Verehrung (Würzburg: Echter, 1980), esp. 154–66. Kolb, Vom Heiligen Blut, 156. The discoloration of the corporal from Saint Georg was not the result of an accidental spill. According to the legend, because the priest administering the Mass doubted the wine’s transubstantiation, it miraculously boiled over and subsequently stained the liturgical cloth. Thomas Naupp et al., Festschrift 850 Jahre Benediktinerabtei Saint Georgenberg-Fiecht (Saint Ottilien: EOS Klosterverlag, 1987), 15. Kolb, Vom Heiligen Blut, 156–57. The construction of the original Holy Blood chapel in 1266 suggests that there was cult interest in the town’s relic from the very beginning. Ludwig Schnurrer has also suggested that Rothenburg’s privileged location on the intersection of two pilgrimage roads to Rome and Santiago proved helpful in its eort to stimulate local and regional interest. See Schnurrer, “Wunderheilungen zum Heiligen Blut”; Schnurrer, Weinbau und Weinkonsum; and Anton Ress, Stadt Rothenburg o. d. T.: Kirchliche Bauten, Die Kunstdenkmäler von Mittelfranken, vol. 8 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1959), 76. Bynum, Wonderful Blood; Mitchell B. Merback, Pilgrimage and Pogrom: Violence, Memory, and Visual Culture at the HostMiracle Shrines of Germany and Austria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 7–9, 94. For more on the varieties of Holy Blood relics, see also Heuser, “‘HeiligBlut’ in Kult und Brauchtum des deutschen Kulturraumes: Ein Beitrag zur religiösen Volkskunde” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Bonn, 1948); and Mark Daniel Holtz, “Cults of the Precious Blood in the Medieval Latin West”

104. 105. 106.

107.

108.

109.

110.

111.

(Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1997). Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 92. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 70–72; Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 92–96. Of the pilgrimage churches listed by Ludwig Schnurrer, which are located in the immediate and general vicinity of Rothenburg, few, if any, promoted sacramental blood relics. Little scholarship exists on the relics of Komburg and Kloster Sulz by Dombühl, whose origins cannot be conclusively determined. The dearth of information indicates that they likely aroused insignicant pilgrimage activity. On the other hand, the blood relics in Burgwindheimm, Creglingen, Iphofen, Lauda, Saint Salvator in Nördlingen, Saint Salvator in Rauenzell by Feuchtwangen, Röttingen, Weikersheim, and a vicar of the Holy Blood at Würzburg all derive from miraculous hosts. Schnurrer, Weinbau und Weinkonsum, 73. On the common appellation of Saint Salvator for host shrines, see also Merback, Pilgrimage and Pogrom, 9, 136. Wolfgang Brückner, Die Verehrung des Heiligen Blutes in Walldürn: Volkskundlichsoziologische Untersuchungen zum Strukturwandel barocken Wallfahrtens, Veröentlichungen des Geschichtsund Kunstvereins Aschaenburg 3 (Aschaenburg: Pattloch, 1958); Karl Lohmeyer, Die Wallfahrtskirche zum heiligen Blut in Walldürn (Augsburg: Filser, 1929). In 1626 a retable was made by a local artist Zacharias Juncker in alabaster and sandstone. The cloth was tted into a silver shrine in 1683 and received a High Baroque mount by the plasterer George Hennicke in 1726/30. Jodokus Hous, De sacrae waltdurensis peregrinations ortu et progressu (Würzburg: Henrici Aquensis, 1589). For a diagram of Baroque woodcuts from throughout Europe designed in the spirit of Hous’s print, see Kolb, Vom Heilingen Blut, 166. On the Holy Face as a relic and Eucharistic image, see Jerey F. Hamburger, “Vision and the Veronica,” in The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone, 1998), 317–82. “Gutta sanguinis Christi / supra corporali,” Ress, Stadt Rothenburg, 184. The rock crystal itself was most likely added in May 1491, when the nancial records of the fabrica ecclesiae record two payments “for the beryl in the cross”: “Item 4 lb 25 d fur dy berrill in das creuß,” and “Item 4 lb 5 d Wolart goltschmid von der barril in das creuß.” The inscription, however, was added in 1502, the

same year the reliquary cross was gilded. 112. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St. Gregory in Fifteenth Century,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jerey F. Hamburger and AnneMarie Bouché (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 208–40, 214. 113. The technique of winding vines around one another, their wooden supports, or even trees is expounded on in book 12 of chapter 4 of Petrus de Crescentiis’s viticultural text. 114. For an overview of unpainted altarpieces from this period and geography, see Georg Habenicht, Das ungefasste Altarretabel: Programm oder Provisorium (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2016). Johannes Taubert was the rst to employ the term “monochrome” to describe Riemenschneider’s unpainted works—a term that received criticism and gave way to the awkward holzsichtig. Johannes Taubert, Farbige Skulpturen: Bedeutung, Fassung, Restaurierung (Munich: Callwey, 1978), 11–18, 73–88, published in English as Polychrome Sculpture: Meaning, Form, Conservation, ed. Michele Marincola and trans. Carola Kleinstück-Schulman (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2015), 79–96. On Holzsichtigkeit, see Barbara Rommé, “Holzsichtigkeit und Fassung: Zwei nebeneinander bestehende Phänomene in der Skulptur des ausgehenden Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Gegen den Strom: Meisterwerke niederrheinischer Skulptur in Zeiten der Reformation, 1500–1550, exh. cat. (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1997), 97–111; and Hans Westho, “Holzsichtige Skulpturen aus Ulm und Oberschwaben,” in Sculptures médiévales allemandes: Conservation et restauration, ed. Sophie Guillot de Suduiraut (Paris: La Documentation française, 1992), 393–418. 115. Eike Oellermann, “Die Restaurierung des Heilig-Blut-Altares von Tilman Riemenschneider,” Bericht des Bayerischen Landesamtes für Denkmalpege 24 (1965/66): 75–85. Michele Marincola and Anna Serotta advocate for “un-polychromed,” the direct English transation of ungefasst; see Marincola and Serotta, “Riemenschneider’s Assumption Altarpiece,” 323–25. 116. Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors, 189–90. 117. Bernhard Decker, “Reform Within the Cult Image: The German Winged Altarpiece Before the Reformation,” in The Altarpiece in the Renaissance, ed. Peter Humfrey and Martin Kemp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 90–105, esp. 98. 118. Metalwork was often melted down into money, particularly for the poor; stones

were reworked into cobblestones. See principally Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); John Dillenberger, Images and Relics: Theological Perceptions and Visual Images in SixteenthCentury Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Allison Stielau, “The Unmaking of Metalwork in Early Modern Europe” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2015). 119. Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Von abthieung der Bylder (Wittenberg: Schyrlentz, 1522), fol. C-IV-a: “Alßo sten ich in forcht, daz der ich keinen olgotzen dort verbrenen. Ich hette sorg, der teuelsnarr mocht mich beleydigen. Wie wol ich die schrit (an einem teyll) hab / und weiß, daz bilder nicht vermogen, haben auch weder leben, bluth, nach geist. Jedoch helt mich forcht am andern teyll und macht, das ich mich vor eynem gemalten teuell, vor eynem schatwen, vor eynem gereusch eines leychten bletlins forcht, und ihe das, das ich menlich solt suchen.” The English translation is quoted from Bryan D. Mangrum and Giuseppe Scavizzi, A Reformation Debate: Karlstadt, Emser and Eck on Sacred Images: Three Treatises in Translation (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1998), 21–44, 36, as cited in Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 102. My presumption is that Mangrum and Scavizzi translated Teufelsnarr as “Devil’s block of wood” given Karlstadt’s numerous references (including the one in the prior sentence) to burning idols specically carved in wood as well as wood’s association with Narren, specically the term Narrenholz, which was a synonym for a tree around which people danced. See “Narrenholz” in Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/ narrenholz. 120. Karlstadt, Von abtuung der Bilder, fol. D-a, as quoted in Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors, 31: “Ire altaren solt yr umkeren / und umbsturzen. Ire bilder solt yr tzebrechen. Ire linden solt ir abhauewen / und yre geschnizte bilder solt yr verbronnnen.” 121. Habenicht, Das ungefasste Altarretabel, 184– 203; Georg Habenicht, “Riemenschneider Uncolored,” in Boivin and Bryda, Riemen­ schneider in Situ, 299–321. See also Eike Oellermann, “Polychrome or Not? That Is the Question,” in Tilman Riemenschneider, c. 1460–1531, ed. Julien Chapuis, Studies in

the History of Art 65 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2004), 112–23. Besides the aforementioned Lorch altarpiece, the other prominent unpolychromed retable in the art historical literature produced before Riemenschneider’s works is Jörg Syrlin the Elder’s project for the high altar of Ulm’s Minster, commissioned in 1474, and painted in two stages in 1504 and 1522 before it was destroyed by iconoclasts in 1529; see Gerhard Weilandt, “Der wiedergefundene Vertrag Jörg Syrlins des Älteren über das Hochaltarretabel des Ulmer Münsters: Zum Erscheinungsbild des frühesten holzsichtigen Retabels,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 59 (1996): 437– 60; Gerhard Weilandt, “Ein archivalischer Neufund zur Fassung des Hochaltarretabels im Ulmer Münster,” Ulm und Oberschwaben 49 (1994): 51–60; and Kahsnitz, Carved Splendor, 38. 122. Marincola and Serotta, “Riemenschneider’s Assumption Altarpiece,” 327; Axel Treptau, “Two Groups from Riemenschneider’s Early Passion Altarpiece,” in Chapuis, Tilman Riemenschneider, c. 1460–1531, 149–66. 123. Although a decade passed before Stoss painted it, correspondence written within ve years of its commission hints that there was always intention to paint the Münnerstadt altarpiece. Hartmut Krohm and Eike Oellermann, on the other hand, see Münnerstadt as an example of a “change in taste”—its patrons rst sought unpolychromed, then changed their minds; see Krohm and Oellermann, “Der ehemalige Münnerstädter Magdalenenaltar von Tilman Riemenschneider und seine Geschichte—Forschungsergebnisse zur monochromen Oberächengestalt,” Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins für Kunst­ wissenschaft 34 (1980): 16–99, esp. 45 and 94, no. 13. On the presence of the mordant called morin on Münnerstadt’s wings, see Rudolf Göbel and Christian-Herbert Fischer, “New Findings on the Original Surface Treatment of the Münnerstadt Altarpiece,” in Chapuis, Tilman Riemen­ schneider, c. 1460–1531, 125–30; more recently, see Matthias Weniger, “Magdalena Monochrom: Das Münnerstädter Retabel und Tilman Riemenschneider,” in Kunst und Kapitalverbrechen: Veit Stoß, Tilman Riemenschneider und der Münnerstädter Altar, ed. Frank Matthias Kammel (Munich: Hirmer, 2020), 23–50. 124. Marincola and Serotta, “Riemenschneider’s Assumption Altarpiece”; Eike Oellermann, “Die Oberächengestalt der Schnitzwerke Riemenschneiders einst und heute, oder der



Notes to Pages 00–000

201

125.

126.

127.

128.

129.

130.

202

unvollendete Creglinger Altar,” in “Nicht die Bibliothek, sondern das Auge”: Westeuropäische Skulptur und Malerei an der Wende zur Neuzeit; Beiträge zu Ehren von Hartmut Krohm, ed. Tobias Kunz (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2008), 214–19; see the aforementioned discussion on Creglingen for more notes on its restoration history and condition. On this point I am indebted to extensive, on-site conversations with colleagues Katherine Boivin, Noam Elcott, and Holger Klein. Boivin has argued that the altarpieces in Detwang and Creglingen, in addition to that of the Holy Blood, all originally formed an axis of unpolychromed altarpieces by Riemenschneider for the Rothenburg parochial complex; see Boivin, Riemenschneider in Rothenburg, 151. Johannes Taubert, “Zur Oberächengestalt der sog. ungefaßten spätgotischen Holzplastik,” Städel-Jahrbuch, N.F., 1 (1967): 119–39, esp. 125. Oellerman, “Die Restaurierung des HeiligBlut-Altares,” 77. The glaze consists of egg white, ocher, gypsum, white lead, and biochar (Panzenkohle). Taubert, Farbige Skulpturen, 75, 77. Similar egg-based glazes have been identied on other works by Riemenschneider, such as the Eisingen Crucix and the Detwang crucixion. Ernst Metzl and Fritz Bucenrieder, “Der Eisinger Kruzixus von Tilman Riemenschneider,” Jahrbuch der Bayerischen Denkmalfpege 34 (1980): 89–110; Eike Oellermann and Karin Oellermann, “Das Detwanger Retabel und sein Detail,” in Der Detwanger Altar von Tilman Riemenschneider (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1996), 13–44. In his breathtakingly exhaustive survey of Laub- and Rankenwerk, Ethan Matt Kavaler makes note of the vines of the retable’s central shrine; see Kavaler, Renaissance Gothic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 200. See also Margot Braun Reichenbacher, Das Ast- und Laubwerk: Entwicklung, Merkmale und Bedeutung einer spätgotischen Ornamentform, Erlanger Beiträge zur Sprachund Kunstwissenschaft 24 (Nuremberg: Hans Carl, 1966), 68; and Eduard Tönnies, Leben und Werke des Würzburger Bildschnitzers Tilmann Riemenschneider, 1468–1531, Studien zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte 22 (Strasbourg: J. H. E. Heitz, 1900), 148. David Pye, The Nature of Art and Workmanship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). Britta Dümpelmann, “Farbreduktion und Fiktionalität in der Skulptur und den graphischen Künsten des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Chiaroscuro als ästhetisches

Notes to Pages 00–000

131. 132.

133.

134.

Prinzip: Kunst und Theorie des Helldunkels, 1300–1550, ed. Claudia Lehmann et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 311–22, esp. 312–13, and 324. For monochrome sculpture in early modern Italy, see Frank Fehrenbach, “Come Alive: Some Remarks on the Rise of ‘Monochrome’ Sculpture in the Renaissance,” Notes in the History of Art 30 (2011): 47–55; and Fehrenbach, “The Colors of Monochrome Sculpture,” in The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy, ed. Amy R. Bloch and Daniel M. Zolli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 64–82. Ress, Stadt Rothenburg, 77. For more on the celebration in Rothenburg’s Holy Blood Chapel of the High Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, or Corpus Christi, and the weekly Angelic Masses taking place on Thursdays, also known as Missa De Corpore et Sanguine Domini nostri Iesu Christi, see Ludwig Schnurrer, “Rothenburg als Wallfahrtsstadt des Spätmittelalters,” in Die oberdeutschen Reichsstädte und ihre Heiligenkulte, ed. Klaus Herbers (Tübingen: Narr, 2005), 69–99, esp. 78; and Schnurrer, “Das Fronleichnamsfest ‘Corpus Christi’ im Mittelalterlichen Rothenburg,” Die Linde 89 (2007): 41–43, 49–56. On the two feasts, more generally, see Peter Browe, Die Eucharistie im Mittelalter: Liturgiehistorische Forschungen in kulturwissenschaftlicher Absicht (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2003), 510; and Peter Browe, Die Verehrung der Eucharistie im Mittelalter (Munich: Herder, 1967), 141–42. Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors, 176. For more on the relationship between Harschner’s cabinet, metalwork from the Middle Rhine, and Franconian stone tabernacles designed by the Eselers, a middle Rhenish family of architects who led the construction of Rothenburg’s Holy Blood Chapel, see Gregory C. Bryda, “Der mittelfränkische Heilig-Blut-Altar in Rothenburg als mittelrheinische Goldschmiedekunst,” in Frankfurt als Zentrum unter Zentren? Kunsttransfer und Formgenese am Mittelrhein, 1400—1500, Neue Frankfurter Forschungen zur Kunst, ed. Martin Büchsel, Hilja Droste, and Berit Wagner (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2019), 173–88. Erik Soder von Güldenstubbe, Tilman Riemenschneider und sein Erbe im Taubertal: Gesichter der Spätgotik (Gerchsheim: Kunstschätzeverlag, 2004), 62–63. Although we cannot prove that he was more directly involved with the Bad Mergentheim monstrance, we do know that Riemenschneider was hired in Aschaenburg to carve the wooden core of a Marian statue, which was to be richly bedecked in silver leaf.

135.

136.

137.

138.

139.

140.

Paul Fraundorfer, “Ein unbekanntes Werk Tilmann Riemenschneiders für die Stiftskirche St. Peter und Alexander in Aschaenburg,” Würzburger Diözesangeschichtsblätter 26 (1964): 177–85. Barbara Welzel, “Tilman Riemenschneider und das Bildprogramm des HeiligblutAltars in Rothenburg o.T.,” in Krohm and Oellermann, Flügelaltäre des späten Mittelalters, 198–209. While unusual for a shrine, depictions of the Last Supper and the consecration of the Eucharist were coming into vogue for altarpiece predellas; see Mitchell Merback, “Jewish Carnality, Christian Guilt, and Eucharistic Peril in the Rotterdam-Berlin Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament,” in Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, ed. Herbert Kessler and David Nirenberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 203–32, esp. 204– 5; and Howard C. Collinson, “Sacerdotal Themes in a Predella Panel of ‘The Last Supper’ by Mathis Gothart-Neithart, Called Grünewald,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 49 (1986): 301–22. Katherine Boivin, “Holy Blood, Holy Cross: Dynamic Interactions in the Parochial Complex of Rothenburg,” Art Bulletin 99 (2017): 41–71, esp. 49–51; Boivin, Riemenschneider in Rothenburg, 54–69. Iris Kalden rst intimated the embodied viewing of the pilgrims in Rothenburg—a sentiment on which Katherine Boivin expounds signicantly. See Iris Kalden, Tilman Riemenschneider, Werkstattleiter in Würzburg: Beiträge zur Organisation einer Bildschnitzer- und Steinbildhauerwerkstatt im ausgehenden Mittelalter (Ammersbek: Verlag an der Lottbek, 1990), 52; and Boivin, Riemenschneider in Rothenburg, 43–86. The subtitle to “Ellringen’s Compendium” reads, “These are the indications [of the miracles] that occurred in the chapel of the Holy Blood in Rothenburg” (Diß synt dye czeychen, dye geschehen syn yn der cappeln des heyligen plut zu Rotenburg). See Schnurrer, “Wunderheilungen,” 6. “Ellringen’s Compendium,” fol. 8r: “Eyn frauwe hye auß der stat waz von siechthum worden zu eym stumen ein halp jar; dy tranck auß dem kilche vor dem altar und wart gesunt,” as in Schnurrer, “Wunderheilungen,” 6. “Ellringen’s Compendium,” fol. 8v: “Eyn magt was gar frolichin an sandt Mertins abend, und do sye ob dem eßen saß, do verloße sye ir gesprechde dry tag; dy tranck auß dem kilche yn der selben cappellen und wart reden,” as in Schnurrer, “Wunderheilungen,” 7.

141. “Ellringen’s Compendium,” fol. 7v: “Des Jars, do man zalte nach christi geburt MCC und LXVI Jar ward geweihet die capelle in der ere des heiligen lichnams unsers hern Jesu Christi und seines heligen blutes,” as in Schnurrer, “Wunderheilungen,” 6. 142. The viticultural excising of Judas would comport with Thierry Greub’s theory that the standalone carving of Judas was portable and removed and replaced according to the Holy Week liturgy; see Thierry Greub, “Placement and Replacement: Tilman Riemenschneider’s Holy Blood Altarpiece in Rothenburg ob der Tauber and Its Function in Liturgical Context,” in Boivin and Bryda, Riemenschneider in Situ, 161–95. 143. Paul Sartori, “Gründonnerstag,” in Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, vol. 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000), 1186–95. Sartori discusses how green might have also sartorially designated penitence in liturgical attire. 144. Welzel, “Tilman Riemenschneider,” 206–8.

6.

7. 8.

Epilogue 1. Phillip Melanchton, Die Augsburger Konfession (1530), as transcribed in Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelischlutherischen Kirche: Herausgegeben im Gedenkjahr der Augsburgischen Konfession 1930 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1986), cited in Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 21: “nach reinem Verstand das Evangelium gepredigt, und die Sakramente dem göttlichen Worte gemäß gereicht warden.” 2. E. Jane Dempsey Douglass, Justication in Late Medieval Preaching: A Study of John Geiler of Keisersberg (Leiden: Brill, 1966), 2–3; Robert Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon, 1987), 123–44; Léon Dachaux, Un réformateur catholique à la n du XVe siècle: Jean Geiler de Kaysersberg, prédicateur à la cathédrale de Strasbourg, 1478– 1510 (Strasbourg: Derivaux, 1876); Friedrich Wilhelm Philipp von Ammon, Geiler von Kaysersbergs: Leben, Lehren und Predigen (Erlangen: J. J. Palm und Ernst Enke, 1826). 3. Johannes Geiler von Kaysersberg, Die Emeis oder Quadragesimale (Strasbourg, 1516), fol. 52b. 4. Hieronymus Bock, Kreutterbuch (Strasbourg: Duch Wendel Rihel, 1539), chap. 112, “Von Dreidistel,” fol. 81a. 5. Friedrich Beyschlag, “Volkskundliches in der Leininger Polizeiordnung von 1566,” Pfälzisches Museum—Pfälzische Heimatkunde

9.

10.

11.

12.

18 (1922): 146–49, esp. 148. For more on the Leininger Polizeiordnung and other Protestant rule books, see Johann Adam, Evangelische Kirchengeschichte der elsässischen Territorien bis zur Revolution (Strasbourg: Heitz, 1928), 163. Otto Brunfels, Kreüterbuch contrafayt (Strasbourg: Johann Schott, 1534), 183–84: “Unsere Barbari nennens Cardum Marie. Also haben die Heyligen nammen, die alten erb und up nammen der kreüter umbgestossen.” Brunfels is referring indirectly to Pliny’s Natural History in his reference to Barbari or Ermolao Barbaro, a Venetian scholar who edited and translated Pliny’s volume in 1534 (Basel). Brunfels, Kreüterbuch contrafayt, “Vorred,” 3–4. Martin Luther, Eyn Sermou von dem newen Testament. das ist von der heyligen Messe Doct. Mar. L. Aug. (Leipzig: Schumann, 1520), p. B4, sec. 11; in reference to the Real Presence of the Eucharist, Luther also uses the term “physical sign” (leyplich tzeychen) to describe the sacrament, p. D, sec. 33. For the English translation, see J. J. Schindel, “Treatise on the New Testament,” in Works of Martin Luther: Translated with Introductions and Notes, vol. 1, ed. Henry Eyster Jacobs and Adolph Spaeth (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1930), 230–54. Luther, Eyn Sermou, p. B2r, sec. 18, trans. Schindel, “Treatise on the New Testament,” 240. Hartmut Kühne, “‘die do lauen hyn und her, zum heiligen Creutz zu Dorgaw und tzu Dresen . . .’: Luthers Kritik an Heiligenkult und Wallfahrten im historischen Kontext Mitteldeutschlands,” in “Ich armer sundiger mensch”: Heiligen- und Reliquienkult am Übergang zum konfessionellen Zeitalter, ed. Andreas Tacke (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 499–522, esp. 504–10. Although Luther had a complicated relationship with the cult of saints and did not formally reject the veneration of saints until 1522, at the time that he wrote his sermon on the Mass he was opposed to the exteriorized veneration of saints—such as superstitions around their relics—and preferred an “inner” (innerliche) devotion to them. Luther, Eyn Sermou, p. C2, sec. 27, trans. Schindel, “Treatise on the New Testament,” 246. Johann Schuler, “10. Predigt: Von Münch vnd Nonnen Orden,” in Etliche Christliche Predigen (Stuttgardt: Rößlin, 1612), 140, as quoted in Martin Scharfe, Evangelische Andachtsbilder: Studien zu Intention und Funktion des Bildes in der Frömmigkeitsgeschichte vornehmlich des

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.



schwäbischen Raumes (Stuttgart: Verlag Müller und Grä, 1968), 127–30. For a semiotic reading of Protestant logophilia and the centrality of deixis therein, see Koerner, Reformation of the Image, 212–52, esp. 228–30. Jan Harasimowicz, “Die Arbeiter im Weinberg des Herrn: Epitaph für Paul Eber (†1569) und seine Familie,” in Cranachs Kirche: Begleitbuch zur Landesausstellung Sachsen-Anhalt, Cranach der Jüngere 2015 (Beucha: Sax Verlag, 2015), 101–12; Ingrid Schulze, Lucas Cranach d.J. und die Protestantische Bildkunst in Sachsen und Thüringen: Frömmigkeit, Theologie, Fürstenreformation (Bucha bei Jena: QuartusVerlag, 2004), 191–202; Albrecht Steinwachs, Der Weinberg des Herrn: Epitaph für Paul Eber von Lucas Cranach d.J., 1569 (Wittenberg: Akanthus, 2001). Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of SelfPortraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 363–410, esp. 401–2; Robert Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 196–206. Pope Leo X translated by Hans Joachim Hillerbrand in The Reformation in Its Own Words (London: SCM, 1964), 80–84. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, 190–93; Harasimowicz, “Die Arbeiter im Weinberg des Herrn,” 104–5; Schulze, Lucas Cranach d.J., 194. Jutta Strehle, Lucas Cranch d.Ä. in Wittenberg (Spröda: Pietsch, Ed. Akanthus, 2001), 58. The inscription above the preacher reads, “Selig synnd die das Wort gottis hören / unnd es behalten Auch danach handeln.” Adalbertus Monacensis, “Ein Maybaum wird gesteckt: Das H. Creutz,” in Thesaurus Absconditus oder Verborgener Schatz, das ist: Sittliche Predigen au alle Fest- und Fayrtäg, part 2 (Munich: Rauchischen, 1703), 113–26, esp. 116. Douglass, Justication in Late Medieval Preaching, 210. Johannes Geiler von Kaysersberg, “De excellentiis arboris crucixi,” in Sermones prestantissimi sacrarum literarum Doctoris Joannis Geileri Keyserspergii . . . (Strasbourg: Grüninger, 1514), xxxi–li; for a rough modern German translation, see “Der Baum des heiligen Kreuzes,” in Geilers von Kaisersberg ausgewählte Schriften, trans. Philipp de Lorenzi, vol. 2 (Trier: Groppe, 1881), 378–429.

Notes to Pages 00–000

203

Illustration Credits

The photographers and the sources of visual material other than the owners indicated in the captions are as follows. Every effort has been made to supply complete and correct credits; if there are errors or omissions, please contact Yale University Press so that corrections can be made in any subsequent edition. Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, München (gs. 0.1, 4.28) Gregory C. Bryda (gs. 0.2, 1.6, 1.9, 1.12, 1.14, 1.17, 1.19, 1.21, 1.29–1.32, 2.11, 2.12, 2.18, 2.23, 3.15, 4.3, 4.19, 4.20, 4.24, 4.29, 4.35–4.37) Bildarchiv Monheim (gs. 0.3, 0.9, 0.10, 0.11) © Andreas Lechtape (gs. 0.4, 1.3) Kristian Adolfsson (gs. 0.5, 0.7, 0.8) Uoaei1 (gs. 0.6, 0.9) IMAGO / Ulmer (g. 0.12) Hermann Schoch (g. 0.13) Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München (gs. 0.14, 1.25, 2.6, 2.16, 2.17, 2.20, 3.13, 3.18, 3.20, 3.26, 3.35, 4.6, 4.9, 4.17, 4.27, 4.30, 4.33, 5.1, 5.5) LVR-Amt für Denkmalpege im Rheinland, Michael Thuns (gs. 1.1, 1.2) © Dommuseum Hildesheim, Foto: Florian Monheim (g. 1.4) Gallerie degli Ufzi (g. 1.5) Kirchgemeinde Wiesendangen (gs. 1.7, 1.11, 1.13, 1.15, 1.27) The Morgan Library, New York (gs. 1.8, 4.7, 4.8, 4.18) © KIK-IRPA, Brussels (g. 1.16) Museum Katharinenhof, Kranenburg (g. 1.18) © Johannes Müller, misiones (g. 1.20) Hermann Haarmann (g. 1.22) Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Dietmar Katz (gs. 1.23, 2.19, 2.27, 2.28, 3.8) Museum Ulm (gs. 1.24, 2.24–2.26) Katholische Kirchpege Stuppach (g. 1.26) Michael Leukel (g. 1.28) Kleuske (g. 2.1)

Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library, Karolinska Institutet (g. 2.2) Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (gs. 2.3, 2.4, 3.11, 4.21 Stadtbibliothek im Bildungscampus, Nürnberg (gs. 2.5, 2.14) The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY (gs 2.7, 2.8, 4.31) Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (g. 2.9) Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire, Strasbourg (g. 2.10) Eigentum Korporation Luzern, ZHB Luzern, Sondersammlung (g. 2.13) Universitätsbibliothek, Heidelberg (gs. 2.15, 3.32) © Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (g. 2.21) Thomas Liebner (g. 2.12) Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe (gs. 3.1, 3.2, 3.9, 3.27, 3.34, 3.37, 3.42) Sammlung Würth, Kunzeslau (g. 3.3) Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten BerlinBrandenburg (g. 3.4) Unterlinden Museum, Colmar (gs. 3.5–3.7, 3.10, 3.13, 3.16, 3.17, 3.23, 3.24) Stadtmuseum, Nördlingen (g. 3.11) Heimatmuseum Blaubeuren, Stephan Buck (g. 3.22) Städel Museum, Frankfurt (gs. 3.25, 3.27, 3.42) Historisches Museum, Frankfurt (g. 3.27, 3.28, 3.35, 3.41) Kürpfälzisches Museum, Heidelberg (g. 3.31) RoHa-Fotothek Fürmann (g. 3.33) Madrid, Thyssen-Bornemisza (gs. 3.38, 3.40) Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg (gs. 3.39, 3.41, 4.10, 4.23) Achim Bunz, Munich (gs. 4.1, 4.4, 4.5, 4.16) Dombibliothek, Hildesheim (g. 4.13) Katherine Boivin (g. 4.14) Matthias Weniger (g. 4.15) © Stift Melk, Peter Böttcher (g. 4.22) dieNikolai Bio-Traubenkosmetik, Stefan Fürtbauer (g. 4.25)

Archiv St. Lorenz, Nürnberg (g. 4.29) Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg (g. 4.32) Münsterschatz Bad Mergentheim / Foto Besserer (g. 4.34) Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek SachsenAnhalt in Halle (Salle) (g. 5.2) © jmp-bildagentur, J. M. Pietsch, Spröda, mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Stadtkirchengemeinde Wittenberg (g. 5.3) British Museum, London (g. 5.4)