Dorothea of Montau and Johannes Marienwerder Almut Suerbaum
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CHAPTER EIGHT AN URBAN HOUSEWIFE AS A SAINT FOR PRUSSIA: DOROTHEA OF MONTAU AND JOHANNES MARIENWERDER Almut Suerbaum Unlike southern Germany, where accounts of the lives of saintly women survive in a variety of forms and appear to have been widely read and transmitted, northern Germany has few examples of such spiritual biog- raphies. Of these, Dorothea of Montau is perhaps the most colourful—we know of her life and spiritual practices in great detail through a series of interrelated Latin and vernacular texts. The vernacular Vita of Dorothea of Montau has mostly been read as a straightforward biography, yet it is important to recognize its status as a complex literary construction.1 We are in the unusual position of being able to see stages, at least, of this process of writing and rewriting, because we have a range of extant texts attesting to aspects of Dorothea’s life. Johannes Marienwerder drafted and redrafted different versions of her Vita, from a first concise letter to a series of full length accounts of her life and visions.2 There is a Latin collection of her visions arranged according to the saint’s day on which they occurred, the so-called Liber de Festis3 and a longer tract, the Septili lium, which contains most of Dorothea’s recorded visions, some of which had been incorporated into the Vita, but reorders them into seven books arranged according to various aspects of her devotional life and appends a 1 Johannes Marienwerder, “Das Leben der heiligen Dorothea”, ed. Töppen; for details of the transmission, see Hörner, Dorothea von Montau. Überlieferung—Interpretation: Doro thea und die osteuropäische Mystik, 44–48; Heß, Heilige machen im spätmittelalterlichen Ostseeraum. Die Kanonisationsprozesse von Birgitta von Schweden, Nikolaus von Linköping und Dorothea von Montau; a new fragment containing II. 20–21 has recently been identified by Stephen Mossman, cf. http://www.handschriftencensus.de/23975. 2 Vita Dorotheae Montoviensis magistri Johannis Marienwerder, ed. Westpfahl (1964) [Vita Latina]; “Epistula prima” in Die Akten des Kanonisierungsprozesses, ed. Stachnik (1978); this, together with the “Epistula secunda,” in turn is the basis for the so-called “Vita prima,” completed ca. 1395. Heß, Heilige machen, 252–254, offers the most useful summary of the textual history of the Latin versions. 3 Liber de Festis magistri Johannis Marienwerder. Offenbarungen der Dorothea von Montau, ed. Triller. 180 almut suerbaum collection of model confessions in German attributed to Dorothea.4 All of these accounts were collected, arranged and written by Johannes Marien- werder, but we also have an extensive collection of witness accounts tes- tifying to Dorothea’s saintly life and spirituality, although the surviving versions are copies of the files which were sent to Rome in 1512 in an attempt to revive the canonization process.5 Two things are notable: first, the language of the texts is at several removes from anything that may have been spoken—Dorothea came from an area on the border between Low and High (more precisely, East Central) German and probably spoke a form of Low German common in Gdańsk, yet the writing language of her confessor was Latin, though he later transposed the account of her life into East Central German, the most common vernacular written language of the Teutonic Order.6 Second, the stated aim of all surviving texts is to demonstrate Dorothea’s claim to sanctity, so the vernacular Vita marks the final stage in a process of writing and rewriting which has its origins in conversations between the visionary and her confessor, but which is at several removes from a straightforward account of “authentic” experi- ence. Dorothea’s accounts of her visions are mediated through the autho- rial activity of Johannes Marienwerder; Johannes in turn is able to draw on firsthand experience but only for the last two years of Dorothea’s life, when, after her enclosure into a cell at the cathedral of Marienwerder (Kwidzyn), he acted as her confessor and spiritual guide. As a result, the Vita, although it plots the life of Dorothea from birth to death like a con- ventional biography, is of necessity based on Dorothea’s narrative told in hindsight.7 When reading accounts of her life, we therefore need to bear in mind that their prime aim is to highlight an exemplary spiritual life and, in the case of the vernacular Vita, perhaps more specifically to offer a model of spiritual living for lay people. Nevertheless, the structure of the Vita allows us to see stages in a life which is representative of circumstances 4 Johannes Marienwerder: Septililium beatae Dorotheae Montovensis, ed. Hipler. 5 Dorothea von Montau: Eine preußische Heilige des 14. Jahrhunderts, eds. Stachnik and Triller; Heß, Heilige machen; Mossman, “Dorothea von Montau and the Masters of Prague” (2010). 6 Küenzlen, “Sprechen und Sprecher in Das Leben der heiligen Dorothea des Johannes Marienwerder” (2010). 7 Elliott, “Authorizing a Life: The Collaboration of Dorothea of Montau and John Marienwerder” (1999), 168–191; Suerbaum, “‘O wie gar wundirbar ist dis wibes sterke!’ Discourses of Sex, Gender, and Desire in Johannes Marienwerder’s Life of Dorothea von Montau” (2010)..