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Forschungen zur' . - ~. ~. Reichs-, Papst- und Landesgeschichte " . PETER HERDE ZUM 65. GEBURTSTAG'i i von Freunden, Schülern und Kollegen dargebracht . Herausgegeben von Karl Borchardt und Enno Bünz Teil1 ( Anton Hiersemarm . Stuttgart 1998 :,:,;~.',{),:,II, I' 1,"'" Vlj 6·'1:(f·'/:~.":L .... " h,'" • r --- ··r-· .....!' . • ",_.... I , ... i ~~..l f C. ~:Ai . :::; ;-~!o il~; f .: KARL F. MORRISON Widukind's Mirror for a Princess - An Exercise in Self-Knowledge 1. History as a Medium of Self-Knowing From time out of sight, narrators have told history to shape, or re-shape, minds and hearts. Whether narration were oral or written, raconteurs intended to imprint the future with the image of a remembered past. Scholars of historical writing and literary critics now recognize all narration as an exercise in consciousness'. Their interest generally is in the consciousness of the author, the unspoken and declared choices by which the raconteur unfolded a story. The identity of the intended audience and its expected response has also to be taken into account. Evidently, it is not always clear whether a narrator in some distant age told a history with the deliberate intent of imprinting a mind with the character of a past. But this is the declared intention of some genres, including the category of works written for the instruction of rulers and known as Fürstenspiegel. In these works, narrators held up the mirror of the past as a kind of portrait in which rulers could recognize their true selves, exemplars for imitation. Monastic discipline was nothing if not an exercise in using history - above all, Biblical narratives - as a tool of self-knowing for the purpose of mimetic reform. Not unexpectedly, the Fürstenspiegel as a machine of spiritual reform by recognizing oneself in a historical model was a monastic invention. Widukind's Res Gestae Saxonicae is a book written by a monk for an abbess, and designed to serve as a kind of mirror of self-knowledge for the recipient delivered by a man fully aware of serving both his monastic profession and his ethnic devotion. Composed in stages and completed shortly after 973, it supplies a historical topo- graphy of the reigns of Henry I and Otto I. By contrast, without any counterpart to Widu- kind, the reigns of the last Ottonians seem quite indistinct patches on the map. The historical nature of Widukind's work is exactly what makes it an anomaly among early medieval Fürstenspiegel and by no means a continuation of the genre as practiced by Carolingians. It is , not, as they were, an exercise in philosophical or theological abstractions, made up of excerpts from Scripture, patristic writings, and canon law. Indeed, there is no thought that action should be tailored to any abstract reasoning or to the authorities of a distant age of grace. In the medium of history, Widukind was free, as his predecessors in philosophy and theology were not, from the problem of evil. Certainly, Widukind's history is incomparable with Carolingian Fürstenspiegel in content. But there is no reason to conclude that he did not follow where they had led', 1 Timothy REUTER, Germany in the Middle Ages, c. 800-1056(London 1991)p. IS, identifies Helmut BEU- MANN's Widukind von Korvei: Untersuchungen zur Geschichtsschreibung und Ideengeschichte des 10. Jahrhunderts (Weimar 1950) as the debut of historiography as the history of consciousness in Germany. 2 Bemd SCHULTE, Untersuchungen zu den Lebensbeschreibungen der Königin Mathilde (Hannover 1994) pp. 15-16. On the cluster of historical writings to which Widukind's belongs, see Ernst KARPF, Van 50 Morrison Between the beginning and the third quarter of the tenth century, Saxony was trans- formed from a nebulous border province to the political nucleus of northern Europe. Widu- kind's history belonged to a little cluster of historical writings which took shape as intellec- tual reflexes to, and monuments of, that astonishingly sudden transformation). In other epochs of sudden transition, tribal peoples have assimilated alien cultures by improvision, rather than by mechanical duplication. The ingenuity of Widukind's book is exactly in how he improvised on the themes and objectives of the Fürstenspiegel in a novel medium, the medium of historical self-consciousness to which he and other Saxons turned at the decisive moment when their people, passing from servitude to freedom, was transformed from a payer of tribute into the mistress of many nations", The ingenuity of Widukind's improvisation on a philosophical, or theological, theme in the medium of history was all the more distinct because, while the models for emulation were men, the intended emulator was a woman. In later centuries, men commonly wrote works of spiritual guidance for women to read. Drawing on metaphysics, Scripture, and traditions of biblical interpretation, male authors attempted to edify their intended female disciples with themes and variations on misogyny, insisting that to advance in virtue, women should east off their womanly nature and put on the virtues of manliness', But Widukind evaded the con- ventions of misogyny. Without condescension, he presented to the young Abbess Mathilda of Quedlinburg the deeds of her grandfather, Henry I, and her father, Otto I, he wrote, so that she might be made better and more glorious, supremely good and glorious as she already was6• Though she was only in her thirteenth year, Mahilda appears to have had the chance to give Widukind the benefit of her responses at some stage, or stages, in the composition. For he invited her to act in some senses as an editor, or co-author, of the book', Widukind's dedication of his book to Mathilda testifies to the political power her father intended for her to wield, and which, in fact, she did exercise until her death (999). But, like the cultivation of historical conscious- ness in tenth-century Saxony, the chance for a woman's partnership in dynastic power and, consequently, for a book designed, without misogyny, to educate a woman to govern, were artefacts of a fleeting epoch, «an exceptional moment in the history of women in the Middle Ages»l. Widukinds Sachsengeschichte bis zu Thietmars Chronicon: Zu den literarischen Folgen des politischen Aufschwungs im ottonischen Sachsen, in: Angli e sassoni al di qua e al di la del mare (Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo 32, 1984) p. 548. 3 KARPF (note 2) p. 548. 4 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.34; MGH SSrG (1935) p. 48. 5 For the general context, see Anne Cl ark BARTLETT,Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature (lthaca/N.Y. 1995) especially pp. 1-55. 6 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae l.pref. (p. 1). 7 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.pref. (p. 61). 8 Patrick CORBET, Les saints ottoniens: Saintete dynastique, Saintete royale et saintete feminine autour de l'an Mil, Francia Beiheft 15 (Sigmaringen 1986) p. 267. Karl J. LEYSER,Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (London 1979) pp. 49-73. Widukind's Mirror 51 2. Widukind's Version of «Harmonious Discords For philosophers and theologians, self-knowledgebegan with the problem of knowledge itself. What was the nature of any knowledge? Was there ever any greater correlation between the world as it was and perceptions of the world - between reality and appearance - than there was in a dreamer's nightmares or a madman's delusions? For philosophers and theologians, epistemology was generally the door to self-knowledge, and epistemology presupposed developed theories about the mind and its functions. Widukind's narrative gives no hint of general doctrines about human psychology or the truthfulness of perceptions to reality. However, by its very character, the narrative is evidence of a way of thinking. It is composed in episodes. While the episodes follow a chronological (or annalistic) progression, there are frequent discontinuities', The work is divided into three books. Yet, in the process of revision, whatever organizing principles of substance or style this division was originally intended to serve have become obscured. The episodes in the third book are, on balance, shorter, sketchier, and more numerous than those in the first two books, and, as an annalist would, Widukind updated the third book once or twice after 973 in a patchwork way. Occasionally, but by no means regularly, in the third book, he dates events according to great Church festivals, such as Easter and Pentecost. Whatever else style can establish, Widukind's episodic narrative and bricolage revisions indicate a way of thinking which tolerated discontinuities alien to syllogistic reasoning, and which did not require either author or reader to comprehend a text as a closed, self-explanatory whole. How people thought about the beauty in works of art often elucidates how they thought about the creative process of thinking. Analogies were commonly drawn between the visual arts and pictures in the mind, and between music and harmonies in the soul. A clue to Widukind's way of thinking lies in his apparent indifference to esthetics. To judge from the Res Gestae Saxonicae, the word «beauty» hardly existed in Widukind's vocabulary. His referen- ces to works of art uniformly accent the costliness of their materials. And while, as we shall see, concord was one of his main principles, he refered to music only as one item in an inventory of cult practices10. For Widukind, the word an meant «talents, «cleverness»,or, most often, «trickery», The Greeks, and the Lotharingians, deceived by what he called their «ancestral,. or «accustomed» arts!', But he appears to have assumed no underlying esthetic 9 There are discontinuities of interpretation as well as of sequence, as when Widukind wrote how Conrad I designated Henry I as his successor, because the Franconian line was deficient in the fortuna and mores which kingship required, and later stated that Henry owed the kingdom to himself and to God.