Thesis Christoph Pretzer

Historical Distance and Difference in the Twelfth-Century Middle High German Kaiserchronik Christoph Joseph Pretzer Corpus Christi College October 2017 This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy To my families 2! Table of Contents Acknowledgements 5 I. Introduction 7 II. The Measure of History in the Kaiserchronik 21 II.1 Serial Form and Contingent Content 21 II.1.1. The Episodic Framework – a Reappraisal 21 II.1.2 Modified Episode Framework 31 II.1.3 Atomised Antiquity as the Quantitative Continuum of History 34 II.1.4 Dimensions of Qualitative Change: Political and Religious Identity of the Empire 39 II.2 Functions of Quantity: Exemplarity, Aetiology, and Continuity in the Kaiserchronik 48 II.2.1 Continuity 54 II.2.2 Exemplarity: Heraclius 59 II.2.3 Aetiology: Etymology, Toponyms, and the Pantheon 65 II.2.4 Aetiological Exemplarity: Titus & Trajan 70 III. The poeticity and historicity of the Kaiserchronik 75 III.1 The Kaiserchronik and the Historia Magistra Vitae Tradition 75 III.2 The Prologue of the Kaiserchronik 81 III.2.1 The Historical Programme of Medieval Prologues 81 III.2.2 The Rhetorical Structure of the Prologue 86 III.2.3 Antagonising Texts 94 IV. The First Dimension of Qualitative Change: the Religious Identity of the Empire 109 IV.1 The Problem of Salvation History 109 IV.1.1 A Short Account of the Development of Salvation Historical Historiography 3! Between the First and the Fifth Century CE 111 IV.1.2 Comparing the Kaiserchronik to Orosius and Otto 117 IV.1.3 Contingent and Contained Salvation History: the Sack of Jerusalem 133 IV.2. From Pagan to Christian Rome 140 IV.2.1 Christian Conversion 140 IV.2.2 Roman Christian Fragility 155 V. The Second Dimension of Qualitative Change: the Political Axis 159 V.1 Romans and Germans 159 V.1.1 Kings, Emperors, and Rulers in the Kaiserchronik 160 V.1.2 Rome’s Historical Introduction 162 V.1.3 Of Kings and Emperors 165 V.1.4 The Romans and the German Kings 167 V.2 Shifting Perspectives on the Empire 171 V.2.1 Daniel, Caesar, and the Germans 171 V.2.2 Charlemagne and the Romans: Clash of Cultures 181 VI. Conclusion 187 Bibliography 190 4! Acknowledgements I am greatly indebted to my supervisor Dr Mark Chinca, whose sage advise, circumspect counsel, and constructive criticism was indispensable for finishing this thesis. I am forever grateful that he tolerated my idiosyncratic work style and patiently taught me how to write on a German text in English. I also wish to express my gratitude to Prof. Christopher Young who was a great help with setting up my position in Cambridge at the Kaiserchronik-project and whose input during my first year of research proved very valuable. This thanks also extents to Dr Nora Behrend for her feedback after my first year and to Prof. Sarah Colvin for revising my work at the end my second and third year. Special thanks go to the Cambridge German & Dutch Department’s secretary Ulrike Balser, to Corpus Christi College’s Graduate Secretary Tessa Milne, and to Leckhampton’s site manager Michael Martin and Aldona Maliszewska-Tomlin who heroically put up with me. I am grateful to the AHRC, the Tiarks Fund, and Corpus Christi College who provided me with the funds necessary for postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge. Additional thanks go to Dr Helen Hunter, Dr Johanna Dale, and Dr Thomas Förster, from the Kaiserchronik-project without whom working on the Kaiserchronik in Cambridge would have been a much lonelier experience. My way would have never led me to Cambridge in the first place, had it not been for my academic teachers at the University of Bamberg. Far too many to mention them all, I would like to especially thank Prof. Ingrid Bennewitz and Prof. Klaus van Eickels for their long- standing and continuing support, and Dr Andrea Grafetstätter and Dr Detlef Goller who taught me everything. Many conversations with friends and colleagues have over the years helped to shape and develop this thesis, often without them being aware and to all of them I wish to extend my gratitude, but I am especially grateful to Prof. Michael Stolz, Ciaran McDonough, Atlanta Rae Neudorf, and Ayla Lepine for proofreading my draft chapters at different stages of production. None of this would have been possible without the unconditional love, support, and trust of my family. My parents Edith and Raimund enabled me to pursue Medieval Studies in the first place. My brothers Benedikt and Valentin dutifully fulfilled their fraternal obligations to keep me grounded with their reliably relentless mocking. Finally, my wife Bernadette’s part in this thesis cannot be overstated. Never would it have occurred to me to apply for a position at Cambridge to begin with and never would I have brought this to a conclusion without her in my life. 5! Do not compare me unfavourably with the pyramids of stone I surpass the other pyramids […] for I was made out of bricks, which were formed of mud, which was collected from a pole it had stuck to, when the pole was plunged down into a lake. Inscription of the pyramid of Asychis, Herodotus's Histories, Book II, Chapter 136 6! I. Introduction In April 1825 the English art connoisseur and critic Andrew Marbot finally arrived in Rome. Unlike most of his contemporaries he maintained a somewhat reserved distance from the ancient ruins, as his biographer Wolfgang Hildesheimer reported. Subsequently, when writing about his impressions, Marbot summarises them in the most sober manner: Everyone I meet here builds themselves their own city from the ruins and lives in the era of their own choosing. I too like to look at ruins, but I see them for what they really are: elements which do cast doubt on the past and thus the present, but do not elevate the past towards the absolute let alone the ideal. For me the present is not prolonged past but a state of mind, which one would sometimes wish to leave behind, if it were possible. […] Rome lives from the past, as it attracts droves of foreigners, who wish to enjoy this past and turn everything into the present.1 The Romantic gentleman who so succinctly captures the fascination, which Rome’s ancient heritage exerted over the European imagination, is uniquely qualified to make this statement as he has the advantage of being entirely fictional. Andrew Marbot is the creation of his alleged biographer Wolfgang Hildesheimer.2 His own fictionality mirrors the artifice of the image the Roman ruins conjure up. Nevertheless his concise analysis of Rome as a ruined repository for contemporary desires and a quarry from which to construct an era of one’s own choosing resonates powerfully within Western cultural history. As Hildesheimer creates Marbot he climbs on the shoulders of generations of authors who turned to the Roman past to create meaning for their own times. The first time this happened in German writing was nearly seven hundred years before Marbot’s fictitious arrival in Rome, in the middle decades of the twelfth century, in a rather peculiar text, known to twenty-first-century Medieval German Studies as the Kaiserchronik.3 Probably written by one or more anonymous ecclesiastics, somewhere in the southeast of the Empire – scholarship 1 Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Marbot (Frankfurt aM 1981), pp. 243-44. Translation is my own. 2 A creation so convincing that it fooled J.P. Stern who reviewed Hildesheimer’s book for the London Review of Books without realising Malbot’s non-existence. See Stern, J.P., ‘Sweet Sin’, London Review of Book, 4, 14, (1982), pp. 3-6 <https://www.lrb.co.uk/v04/n14/jp-stern/sweet-sin> [accessed 25.10.17]. 3 See Kaiserchronik eines Regensburger Geistlichen, MGH S Dt. Chron. 1,1 ed. by Edward Schröder (Hannover 1895), pp. 1-441. Throughout this thesis when quoting from the Kaiserchronik I will refer to Schröder’s edition using the abbreviation KC. When referring to Schröder’s comments I will use the short title Schröder 1895. 7! habitually points to Regensburg – the text is the first chronicle in the German vernacular.4 Starting with the Roman Empire’s foundation, the Kaiserchronik quickly establishes an episodic structure, with each episode dedicated to the name and rule of an emperor. Beginning with Caesar, this sequence traces the history of the Empire from its beginnings all the way through Constantine and Charlemagne and down to Conrad III and the events of the year 1147, where it stops. As the first German vernacular text to devote itself explicitly to the task of writing history the Kaiserchronik for a long time fell in between the disciplinary demarcation lines of history and literary studies. The apparent clash between the chronicle’s vociferous claim to veracity, formulated in its prologue and elsewhere in the text, and its content, which mostly covers legendary, apocryphal, hagiographical, and mythological material, has led to a certain puzzlement and perplexity amongst scholars who have tackled the text. Compared to the established historiography, both modern and medieval, of the events that the chronicle covers, much of the Kaiserchronik’s historical account is confused, muddled, and downright wrong. This also gave rise to the notion that there must be some meta-structure hidden inside the text and some hermeneutical magical key, which only would have to be applied correctly to unlock the Kaiserchronik’s historiographical programme. Hence the problem of the Kaiserchronik’s historiography has been the object of a rich, long, and often complex scholarly discussion. Before I develop my approach it will be helpful first of all to retrace the scholarly discourse that has shaped the state of the art on this topic.

Load more