Religious Meanings of Emotion in Sixteenth-Century German Literature Georgia Anna Leeper Washington University in St

Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations Arts & Sciences Winter 12-15-2014 Feeling Doctrine: Religious Meanings of Emotion in Sixteenth-Century German Literature Georgia Anna Leeper Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds Part of the German Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Leeper, Georgia Anna, "Feeling Doctrine: Religious Meanings of Emotion in Sixteenth-Century German Literature" (2014). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 365. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/365 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts & Sciences at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures Dissertation Examination Committee: Gerhild Scholz Williams, Chair Matt Erlin Christine Johnson Lynne Tatlock Abram Van Engen Feeling Doctrine: Religious Meanings of Emotion in Sixteenth-Century German Literature by Georgia Anna Leeper A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2014 St. Louis, Missouri © 2014, Georgia Anna Leeper Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Abstract iv Introduction 1 Chapter One: Scaring the Devil out of You: Fear, Comfort and Salvation in Sixteenth- Century Faustus Narratives 26 Chapter Two: “Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing”: Women, Love, and Salvation in Das Buch der Liebe 83 Chapter Three: The Patience of Judith: Recovering Feeling’s Lack in Lutheran Judith Plays 145 Conclusion 216 Bibliography 222 C.V. 233 ii Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor and the chair of my committee, Gerhild Scholz Williams, for her unflagging support, guidance, and assistance with this dissertation and also for introducing me to the joys and challenges of sixteenth-century Germany. Additionally, I would like to thank Lynne Tatlock for her careful readings and excellent suggestions, and Matt Erlin for being willing to join the committee mid-project. For the early development of this project, I am indebted to Steven Zwicker and the Mellon Foundation, as well as Thomas Kaufmann and the American Friends of the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, in whose summer seminars I was able to map out the broad contours of early modern studies. Many thanks also to Barbara Rosenwein and the Newberry Library’s Emotions in History Seminar for helping me to embed my project in the larger field of emotion studies. Additionally, I am deeply grateful to the Washington University and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures for their financial and institutional support throughout my graduate school career. The research that forms the foundation of this dissertation was made possible by the generosity of the DAAD and the collections and community of the Herzog August Bibliothek. This project would have also been impossible without Jill Bepler’s early guidance, ideas, and suggestions regarding pastoral care literature. I thank her for them. My thanks also go to Washington University subject librarian, Brian Vetruba, for his help in finding and procuring the texts I have needed. ii I thank my colleagues and students at Beloit College, whose perspectives and comments on my work enlivened the last stages of this project. I am also grateful to Megan Allen and Amanda Barton for thinking with me through gender, emotion theory, and phenomenology in early texts. Special thanks go to my dear friends and family, who have kept me in good spirits and writing music, and whose hospitality has made the transitions of the last few years much easier. Here I think especially of Gabe Harper, Brian and Anne Romine, Lindsey McIntyre and Jonathan Wold, and Colleen Lux. I would have probably quit without their care and encouragement. One lesson that I have learned from pastoral care writing is that we can damn ourselves quite well on our own, but we are only saved in community. To that end, I would like to state that, while anything worthwhile in this project is a result of the support and help of many, all mistakes are my own. This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Georgia Booth Leeper, who read to me endlessly, then taught me to read myself, and to Susan Berry, my high school language arts teacher, who introduced me to some wonderful books and told me to take German. ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Feeling Doctrine: Religious Meanings of Emotion in Sixteenth-Century German Literature by Georgia Anna Leeper Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Languages and Literatures Washington University in St. Louis, 2014 Professor Gerhild Scholz Williams, Chair This dissertation explores the intersections of emotion and Protestant theology in late-16th- century German literature. The project demonstrates the availability of even secular texts to confessional readings through the analysis of representations of emotions. Post-Reformation texts practice an emotional exemplarity that highlights the effects - including the spiritual effects - which emotional experiences have on the individual. I argue that narrative representations of emotions at this moment reflect anxieties about the nebulous nature of faith, and its central role in Protestant salvation. Close readings of widely-read texts such as the 1587 Faustbuch, Melusine, and Hans Sach's Judith: ein Comedi, among others support this claim. Introduction Dieweil es an ein merklich und schrecklich Exempel ist/darin man nicht allein des Teufels neit/Betrug und Grausamkeit gegen dem menschlichen Geschlecht/sehen/ sondern auch augenscheinlich spüren kann/wohin die Sicherheit/Vermessenheit und Fürwitz letztlich einen Menschen treibe. (Die Historia von D. Johann Fausten 3-4) Human audacity and diabolical tricks are the targets of Frankfurt publisher Johann Spies’s (1540-1623) warnings in the front matter of the famous 1587 Faustbuch. Life writing was not the obvious vehicle for such warnings: many sixteenth-century authors preferred the treatise, the anecdote, or the report to spread the word about the dangers presented by diabolical pacts. Yet the tales of Faustus’s picaresque and episodic travels consistently convey two important themes: salvation and damnation. In his conversations with Mephistopheles, the sorcerer repeatedly returns to the following questions: what is the experience of blessedness? Of damnation? These questions are not asked for the sake of being doctrinaire, or establishing information. They are invested questions, posed in fear. Spies’s focus on the value of specifically Faustus’s story and the fear that it can induce also indicates that he is promoting a way of reading that does not follow the model of past Faustus versions – entertainment and news. Nor does he talk about the demonic in terms of catalogs, or even instructionally, as Luther did. Rather, he wants his reader to behold human hardheartedness and satanic deceit, and be moved. Based on Spies’s emphasis on emotional response in the front matter, as well as the narration in the text itself, we can see that perseverance in the faith, at least here, involves a certain kind of affectivity in response to reading. For this reason, fear is highlighted in the Historia: fear that leads to faith, fear that obstructs faith; fear in the text, fear of the text, and fear 1 induced by the text. Moreover, fear highlights the important issues in the text. The mechanism by which Faustus’s story does its spiritual work is that of feeling. The reader is to not only see the terribleness of what happens to Faustus, Spies invites an “augenscheinlich spuren” as well. Thus, Faustus’s and the reader’s salvation is, to some extent, a matter of feeling and affective response. If Faustus’s damnation is difficult to place theologically, the fourteenth-century prose romance Melusine offers a kind of salvation as fantastic as the serpentine spirit at its center. The water spirit, Melusine, appears in human form in order to marry a Christian and gain a blessed soul. However, her plan goes awry when her husband rejects her. She eventually gains a soul by exercising exemplary maternal love, even after being cast from court. Part of another 1587 Frankfurt publication, Melusine appears alongside several other prose romances in a folio-sized volume entitled Das Buch der Liebe. Sigismund Feyerabend (1528-1590), its publisher, was, like Spies, a committed Lutheran. While he had published significantly more secular material than did Spies, his religious publications were staunchly confessional in nature.1 Feyerabend’s lengthy dedication, which followed the fourteen romances, also dealt with the spiritual well- being of Christians, especially young Christians, and the problems that lust and lovesickness posed to faith. At the same time, however, resistance to romantic love is, for Feyerabend, of equal danger to faith, especially for women. Melusine offers an example of the importance of maternal love for salvation, but the significance of romantic, marital, and maternal love for a woman’s spiritual health is highlighted throughout the collection. In both of these cases, publishers frame texts that had not been confessional, or even very religious, in terms of Lutheran salvation. As they thematize salvation, they are not only talking 1 See Frank Baron’s Faustus on Trial (1988), pages 16-19 for Spies’s confessional commitments and his publishing record. Thomas Veitschegger notes the wide range of publications that Feyerabend produced, with a majority consisting of Latin juridical texts (4). However, a search of the V16 also shows that he published several editions by the entire Wittenberg Circle, as well as Hans Sachs. 2 about the moment of conversion (though that is often present), they focus on perseverance in the faith, and spiritual health.

Load more