Author: Henrike Lähnemann

Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Fellow at St Edmund Hall, and Co-Director of Oxford Medieval Studies.

Being a Woman Byzantinist

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08/02/2016

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By Adele Curness

19th January 2016, Ertegun House

Taking place at Ertegun House with the support of the Oxford University Byzantine Society, the event ‘Being a Woman Byzantinist’ was the brainchild of current DPhil student Anya Rai-Sharma. Rai-Sharma introduced the event with personal reflections on how female role models, real and fictional, had helped her navigate the sexism she encountered growing up and how she aimed to celebrate the female academic role models she had found in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies by inviting celebrated female academics from all areas of the field to discuss their careers and research.

The speakers accepting Rai-Sharma’s invitation were Professor Averil Cameron (Emeritus Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History & former Warden, Keble College, Oxford), Professor Elizabeth Jeffreys (Former Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature, Exeter College, Oxford), Professor Judith Herrin (Former Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, King’s College London & Constantine Leventis Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London), and Dr Catherine Holmes (Associate Professor of Medieval History & A.D.M. Cox Old Members’ Tutorial Fellow in Medieval History, University College, Oxford). Dr Marlia Mango (Emeritus Research Fellow, St John’s College, Oxford) had sent a few words to be read out in her absence and the event closed with a presentation by Professor Charlotte Roueché (Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, Kings College London) on women Byzantinists of the late 19th and early 20th century, whose contribution outside of the Academy paved the way for many current scholars of the Byzantine Empire.

Gold Solidus of the Empress Irene (797-802). Notice her bust is struck on both the obverse and reverse sides of the coin. (Accession Number: BZC.1948.17.2543)

Averil Cameron noted in her speech that there were two distinct conversations to be had, that of being a woman and that of being a Byzantinist, and no speaker chose to focus exclusively on her gender, preferring to talk about her career and research. Useful advice to graduate students of any gender, from how to break through the thesis-writing wall to how to cope with dubious Black Sea ferries was woven into each talk, alongside each woman’s passion for her research and pride in her achievements.

A prominent piece of advice that ran through all six speeches was the importance of finding friendship and exchange within a mutually supportive academic community; a subject of particular relevance in a field such as Byzantine Studies, composed as it is of numerous, wide-ranging sub-disciplines. Each woman spoke about the positive impact made on her life by teachers, undergraduate and graduate tutors (particularly female tutors); and, particularly, academic peers. In an academic world where young graduate students are acutely aware of the pressure to secure limited jobs and even more limited funding, this exhortation to recognise the talent of your peers and to use them to advise and shape your own research was important and refreshing. As a woman, it was also uplifting to see such an admiration by the speakers for their female peers. Young women are so frequently socialised to begrudge other women’s success that the resoundingly positive attitude towards fellow female academics was something that I hope many who attended the talk will have noted.

However, in spite of the efforts made to keep the focus on careers rather than gender, the sexist attitudes that all the speakers had encountered were a consistent refrain. With the exception of Catherine Holmes, all had begun their academic careers prior to the integration of Oxbridge colleges and Ivy League universities, and numerous references were made to being the only or one of the only women in the faculty at the beginning of their careers. Cameron’s distaste at being told by a senior academic at KCL that women shouldn’t take academic jobs as it kept their husbands out of the sector was obvious, as was Herrin’s disbelief at being told she was forbidden from taking up graduate study at Harvard due to her gender. One was acutely aware how visible and exposed the speakers must have seemed in the overwhelmingly male academia of their early careers, as a photograph of Cameron at the 1970 Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Studies Symposium starkly illustrates.

http://www.doaks.org/research/byzantine/scholarly-activities/past/byzantium-and-sasanian-iran/1970Photo.jpg/@@images/b0b8e9ae-81eb-4100-80aa-64ff69ddb0a5.jpeg

This feeling of exposure seemed far more distant to current female graduate students; as did Holmes’ recollection that there was an undercurrent of unease towards female undergraduates at her Cambridge college, which had gone mixed only a few years before her matriculation. However, points the speakers made about sexism in their early careers still, to the shame of British universities, resonated today. Cameron’s statement that when she became head of house at Keble in 1994 there was only one female fellow on Governing Body is hardly an example of a past problem – no Oxford college has gender parity among its tutorial fellows, and many colleges only have one or two women fellows at all. Similarly, Herrin’s point that her career was made enormously easier by the sympathetic and liberal attitude of Princeton University towards her young family and the demands placed upon her by childcare will have struck a chord with anyone familiar with evidence that female academics take significantly less maternity leave than counterparts in other sectors (http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/nov/18/academia-for-women-shor…) and that female academics face such pressure to publish in the competition for a permanent job that maternity leave is spent working (https://lizgloyn.wordpress.com/2015/09/21/on-being-an-ecr-academia-and-m…).

This aside, I was struck by how casually the effects of other sexist practices were brushed aside by the speakers. Each one mentioned how she had spent much or all of her education in all-female institutions, with four of the six educated at all-female Oxbridge colleges. The positive aspects of single-sex education are not to be rejected outright, and the impact of inspiring female teachers and tutors has been discussed, but I felt it odd to present this aspect of education as a freely made choice when, in fact, women were forced into all-female colleges by the refusal of male colleges to admit them. The impact this would have had on female academics working before the integration of colleges, forbidden from applying for fellowships at the more prestigious men’s colleges, was only briefly touched upon by Cameron.

Perhaps, however, my unease at this represents how far the current generation of graduate Byzantinists has come and how differently my peers and I have encountered sexism in academia. Female students are now admitted to Oxford to mixed-sex colleges at equal rates with men, and achievement gender gaps at undergraduate level are narrowing. Furthermore, state-educated undergraduates are now in the majority and this number is increasing, and impressive access initiatives are prevalent across Oxford University to encourage applications from those from non-traditional backgrounds. When listening to Roueché talk about women Byzantinists of the 19th and 20th century, I was struck by her comment that these women’s promotion of Byzantine Studies through popular culture, such as novels, will have reached many more people than the male scholars of the age, and I hope such figures will inspire graduate Byzantinists to engage with outreach events like the East Oxford Community Classics Centre.

The final word must be given to Jeffreys’ statement that her mother, who had been denied the chance of a university education by the social diktat that it was not ‘proper’ for women, had insisted that her daughter study to undo the wrongs of the previous generation. The next generation of women Byzantinists could do worse than remember that mantra. 

Image 1: The Theotokos with Christ, Chora Church, Istanbul
Image 2: Solidus of the Empress Irene (797-802), with her bust struck on both the obverse and reverse of the coin.
Image 3: The 1970 Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Studies Symposium
Image 4: Maria of Alania marries Nikephoros III Botaniates, who she will eventually try to have overthrown.

Adele Curness

Byzantium and Italian Renaissance Art

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26/01/2016

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By Adrastos Omissi

Byzantium is, for most, a rather dirty word, connoting something faintly alien and somehow obscene. To classicists, the Rome that did not fall is an embarrassing pantomime horse, cavorting about in the ill-fitting clothing of the once great Roman Empire. To medievalists, it is an outsider, a distinctly foreign looking entity lingering on the edges of a Europe to which it does not belong. It is Greek, it is lurid, it is decadent. Above all, it is irrelevant.

Historians of Byzantium recognise these viewpoints as erroneous, but I fear they still have much work to do in getting the word out. The prejudices of our own disciplines (note that those who study the medieval world are medievalists, unless they happen to study Byzantium, in which case they become byzantinists) have a tendency to lock us away from recognising the enormous influence that this supposedly alien power had upon many of the social and intellectual stories that we consider to be so distinctly Western. No more so is this true than of the so-called renaissance in Italian art that took place in the period roughly bounded by the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Golden and glorious: Christ Pantocrator from Hagia Sophia, Constantinople (late 13th century)

It may seem that the art of the Byzantine East – static, golden, otherworldly – has little indeed to do with the vitality, the realism, and the sheer ambition of Italy – and Europe’s – renaissance, that explosion of creative energy that seemed to blossom, unbidden, in the Latin speaking West after the thirteenth century. Cursory familiarity with Byzantine art confirms this and indeed confirms the opinion of Giorgio Vasari, the Italian painter turned historian, whose 1550 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times essentially defined the renaissance – the rinascita – as a rejection of ‘that clumsy Greek style’ (quella greca goffa maniera) and the creation of a new naturalism that captured the human form in ways not known before. But it may be that the art historian doth protest too much; Vasari’s very emphasis on the ways in which the artists of his own day had surpassed the Greek models indicates just how deep was Byzantine influence on Italy’s artistic culture.

One of the bright lights of Vasari’s renaissance, the man he saw as truly kick-starting the turn towards naturalism, towards capturing authentic human emotion, and towards tricks of composition like perspective, was Giotto. Giotto, a Florentine artist who lived between 1267 and 1337, was an archetype of true artistic genius, a former shepherd whose prodigious talent was unlocked when the artist Cimabue discovered him sketching his sheep with a pointed rock. The sheer life and expression of Giotto’s paintings instantly strike the observer and – unlike his teacher Cimabue – seem to have nothing at all in common with the frozen, abstract forms of the East.

Giotto’s Pietà in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, one of the artist’s great masterpieces (completed 1305)
The Lamentation of Christ as depicted in the St Panteleimon fresco cycle (mid-12th century)

But uniquely gifted though Giotto surely was, his art and the movement it inspired owed more to Byzantine influence than we might at first believe. At times, these debts can be seen almost directly. In the tiny mountain village of Gorno Nerezi in modern day Macedonia lies the externally unremarkable late Byzantine church of St Panteleimon, patronised by the imperial family and decorated inside with a fresco cycle completed by artists from Constantinople. These frescoes, completed at some time in the twelfth century, burst with energy and an emotional intensity that might surprise viewers accustomed to think of Byzantine art as frozen and lifeless. The frescoes are crowded with varied figures and with a sense of movement and action. Each face tells a story in its expression, no more so than the tortured, wailing face of Mary, the Mother of God, who holds the body of her dead son, taken down from the cross. The artist has made this divine moment painfully human. Though Giotto himself surely never saw this image, the comparison with his own Pietà is so striking as challenge any notion of coincidence and, indeed, to challenge the notion that Giotto and his like had done something unprecedented in seeking to capture the intensity of human experience in the look of a face or the shape of a body. Giotto’s models, like those of St Panteleimon, were firmly Byzantine, and it was by working and experimenting with techniques from the Greek East that Giotto’s own remarkable paintings were produced. Without Byzantine art, Giotto might have remained on his hillside, drawing sheep in the dirt.

That the Italian masters whose work began the renaissance should have been inspired and indeed trained by Byzantine artists and models is hardly surprising. Byzantine art had long exercised enormous influence in the Italian peninsula, not least because it was not until 1071 that the Byzantines finally lost their last territories in Italy. Throughout the period of late antiquity and the middle ages, evidence – both direct and indirect – of Byzantine artists at work within Italy can be found and Byzantines were clearly often seen as masters to be copied.

The Annunciation from Castelseprio (late eighth / early ninth century)

Direct evidence of their work can take the most striking forms. Within the tiny church of Santa Maria foris portas in Castelseprio in northern Italy, long hidden under plaster, is a cycle of late eighth or early ninth century Byzantine frescoes, which, like those at Panteleimon, defy the stereotypes of Byzantine composition and are among some of the most remarkable early medieval frescoes ever to be discovered in the Latin West. The depicted image shows the Annunciation, in whose frame the movement of the archangel Gabriel, swooping down to announce the Good News to the supine and unsuspecting Mary, is boldly evoked and the folds and contours of the clothing that covers the two figures betray the living bodies beneath the cloth. The composition eschews the linearity and the stasis that we are told to expect from eastern art. Now a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Castelseprio frescoes demonstrate both the vitality of the Byzantine artistic tradition and its deep influence within Italy.

Castelseprio is merely one of dozens if not hundreds of specific examples that may be adduced to show the activities of Byzantine artists at work in Italy. Another spectacular example of such – and at the opposite end of the spectrum from Caselsprio in terms of its sheer monumental grandeur – is the great church of San Marco in Venice. Built at the end of the eleventh century to a Greek cross plan and with Byzantine expertise, the church is surmounted by five enormous domes that float upon pendentives above the Venetian lagoon and was constructed as a conscious model of Constantinople’s now lost Church of the Holy Apostles. Its interior still gleams with a cascade of Byzantine-inspired gold mosaic work. Even the ardently anti-Byzantine Vasari admitted that the first great master of his Lives, Cimabue (c. 1240-1302), learnt to paint by bunking off from his studies to watch at work the Byzantine painters who had been summoned to Florence ‘for no other reason than to restore the art of painting, which had long since been lost in Tuscany.’

The genius of Byzantine relief sculpture: the Harbaville Triptych, an example of the vibrant and flourishing artistic culture under the Macedonian dynasty, 867-1057

A certain sense of superiority in comparing Italian art to that of the (fallen) Byzantine Empire was easy for renaissance Italians to project back into the past, standing upon the self-confident vantage point of centuries of innovation, but to do so today ignores the enormous influence of outsiders upon Italy, Byzantium at their forefront. The adaptations of Byzantine models produced some of Italy’s most spectacular art and architecture. The commissioning of the so-called Gates of Paradise by Lorenzo Ghiberti in 1401, a masterpiece of bronze relief sculpture still to be seen on Florence’s Battistero di San Giovanni, has sometimes been taken to mark the starting point of Italy’s renaissance, but in the centuries that preceded Ghiberti it was the foundries of Constantinople that produced Italy’s finest bronze doors, as at Sant’Andrea in Amalfi, at the abbey church of Monte Cassino, at San Paolo fuori le Mura in Rome, at San Sebastiano in Atrani, at the Cathedral of Salerno, and more besides. Like Giotto and his suffering Mary, these influences ran deep and ‘renaissance’ amounted to a reinvention of inherited models, not a rejection of them.

None of this, of course, is an attempt to deny the brilliance of the Italian renaissance, an explosion of creativity that brought into being some of the greatest works of art the world had ever seen. Yet seen from a western perspective, it is important to recognise that these are not merely rungs on the ladder of Western genius but part of the story of an interconnected world, a world in which, for many centuries until its fall, Byzantium (not to mention the Arab world) set the pace of cultural change. Medieval scholars need to train themselves to look for these interconnectivities and to remember that Western authors have always, since the days of Charlemagne, sought so hard to paint the Byzantine Empire as the irrelevant vestige of a once great power precisely because Byzantium’s influence stretched so far and reached so deep.

Picture captions:

  • Picture 1: Golden and glorious: Christ Pantocrator from Hagia Sophia, Constantinople (late 13th century).
  • Picture 2: Giotto’s Pietà in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, one of the artist’s great masterpieces (completed 1305).
  • Picture 3: The Lamentation of Christ as depicted in the St Panteleimon fresco cycle (mid-12th century).
  • Picture 4: The Annunciation from Castelseprio (late eighth / early ninth century).
  • Picture 5: The genius of Byzantine relief sculpture: the Harbaville Triptych, an example of the vibrant and flourishing artistic culture under the Macedonian dynasty, 867-1057.

– Adrastos Omissi, British Academy PDF

Crossing Boundaries: The Oxford Medieval Studies Launch Event

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16/01/2016

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By Robin Whelan

Click here to view the podcast of the event.

Interdisciplinarity, like breaking up, is hard to do. It’s even harder when you only have 10 minutes. Four professors of diverse medieval disciplines took up the challenge at the Main Hall of the Taylor Institution for the Oxford Medieval Studies launch event.

The brief was to show us how medievalists can ‘cross boundaries’ by tackling a text or artifact from outside their own comfort zone. Their responses were intriguingly varied. Henrike Lähnemann (Medieval German) was particularly transgressive, tracing the story and iconography of Tristan and Iseult—perhaps best known to moderns from the Wagner opera—across all sorts of boundaries, disciplinary and otherwise: political borders; languages; text and object; secular and sacred. David Wallace (English Literature) drew on his experience editing a history of medieval European literature(s) to evoke the interconnectedness of late medieval western Eurasia. His account broke down the (modern) political boundaries of Europe to remodel medieval literary history as a series of ‘itineraries’. Emma Dillon (Music) set out the need for a new conception of the medieval ‘song’ which integrates the performable lyric and notation beloved of musicologists with the depictions of music-making which punctuate romance literature. Using the work of R. Murray Schafer on ‘soundscapes’, she suggested that we should listen more carefully to the joyful noise conjured by medieval authors. Finally, Chris Wickham (History) delivered a characteristically pointed reappraisal of the historical value of Icelandic sagas. Focusing on a single, difficult-to-translate word (virðing: ‘credit/honour’) in the saga of Hrafnkell, he convincingly argued that the (obviously fictional) sagas, when carefully handled by historians and philologists, allow us to capture something of the distinctive nature of medieval Icelandic society.

Questions from the floor ranged from the need for collaborative teaching of medieval Latin (a suggestion strongly applauded in the room) to the big philosophical question at the heart of the evening: is it really possible to be truly interdisciplinary, or will medievalists (and others) always remain poachers sneaking onto the territory of their colleagues? It is a much debated question and there are good arguments either way.

What this evening suggested (to me, at least) was that there are two different sorts of ‘interdisciplinarity’ which can be distinguished—and which are worth pursuing in Oxford. One is decidedly pragmatic: collaboration across the boundaries of faculties and disciplines which often no longer make sense as the sole institutional settings for what we do. This is the creative reforming of disciplines to gather together like-minded scholars who share particular approaches to particular forms of evidence: something already begun in the many dedicated ‘centres’ dotting the landscape of Oxford. In my own field, I would mention the Centres for Late Antiquity (OCLA) and Byzantine Studies (LABS), which bring together historians, theologians, archaeologists, classical and medieval linguists and litterateurs—among many others.

In some senses, though, this is not *really* interdisciplinarity—certainly not by the terms of the persuasively iconoclastic argument presented by Guy Halsall in the link above—but simply the creation of a new discipline with its own scholarly culture. For someone to embody interdisciplinarity in their own scholarly person would require them, instead, to excel—and, just as important, be accepted as a practitioner—in multiple fields of inquiry at once. (That is—for example—to write books and papers on material evidence which speak to archaeological problems, while simultaneously winning acclaim as an exegete of medieval Italian poetry). Halsall sets out the very real constraints on what any one individual might achieve (who has the time to learn all of those skills, languages and subtle codes of academic practice?). Setting this unworkable ideal to one side, all four presentations nevertheless showed just how important familiarity with (and indeed proficiency in) a wide range of methods and a variety of evidence is for medievalists.

This is where I think it is best to envisage the crossing of disciplines as a process. The evening provided numerous examples of how the meetings of very different medieval minds might be achieved and the results it might provide, from the chance coincidence (literary scholars stumbling across an archaeological dig and using their knowledge of liturgy to correct the plans of a medieval abbey), to something more sustained and—dare I say it—institutional. Here, pragmatism and aspiration need not be mutually exclusive. As Chris Wickham noted, as a historian, he asks different questions of material evidence to those of archaeologists—anyone interested in medieval stone supply may have felt short-changed here!—but there is a common core of problems where he and they can collaborate. Each of us could delineate our own intellectual interests along similar lines.

As decades of revisionist scholarship have drummed into us, medieval frontiers were not lines on a map, but zones of interaction. The same goes for our disciplinary boundaries. It is perhaps too much to expect scholars to maintain estates in multiple lands—that is, expertise in more than one discipline—although these four speakers come about as close as anyone to doing so. Nevertheless, creative exchanges across these borderlands—and occasional invitations to take up residence in the core territories of other sovereign disciplines—remain not just useful, but vital for the study of the middle ages.

Medieval Spain, Statecraft, and the So-Called IS

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02/12/2015

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By Florence Curtis

As a Hispanist I’m always aware of Spain as a ‘special case’ when it comes to European history and culture. An art historian friend of mine once told me that if she came across a piece of medieval European art that didn’t fit any of the recognizable paradigms, she immediately thought it must be Spanish. You might be tempted to approach medieval Iberian literature in a similar way. The region boasts important works in Hebrew, Arabic, Castilian, Catalan, and other local languages that were hugely influential on each other as well as texts and cultures further afield, creating a unique and often baffling textual tradition. Even the briefest foray into Iberian architecture or gastronomy shows the legacy of the hundreds of years of cohabitation of people of all three of the Abrahamic faiths, known as convivencia, before that all came to an end with the Catholic King and Queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, in the fifteenth century.

Medieval Iberia represented the cultural—and geographic—margins of Europe. Yet for those after intellectual or spiritual kicks, the region was, paradoxically, not so much the periphery as the beating heart of Europe and the medieval European experience. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Iberia was, to cite the late, great Alan Deyermond, an intellectual powerhouse. In schools such as those of Toledo in northern Castile, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars worked together to translate classical philosophy and literature, including the works of Aristotle, for the first time since Antiquity. Well before Aristotle brought controversy to Paris in the late thirteenth century, his work was challenging beliefs in Iberia. Progressive intellectuals flocked to the Iberian Peninsula as the centre for philosophic and scientific study at a time when northern Europe was focused on law and theology.

With the scholars came pilgrims and soldiers, however. From the ninth century, Iberia boasted its very own pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in the north west of the Peninsula, a destination of equal standing with Rome, Jerusalem, and Constantinople for the pious. The Way of Saint James, Camino de Santiago, took on increased significance in relation to the Reconquest, which began to gather serious momentum in the thirteenth century. For Christians all over Europe, Iberia was a land of miracles and transformation where the holy war against the Muslims was a kind of pilgrimage in itself, and closely connected with the activity of Saint James, who was also known as matamoros, ‘the Moor-slayer’. As such Iberia was a fundamental place for the defining of medieval European identity in relation to the East and Islam; still relevant for our understanding of the Europe of today.

The earliest European history of a nation in the vernacular was Iberian. This relatively little-known Castilian document was completed under the direction of Alfonso X (1221-1284), a great patron of culture and son of the champion of the Reconquest, Ferdinand III. Alfonso envisioned the Iberian territories he held as a nation, which he called Espanna, and had designs on empire in North Africa and beyond. Known for his great respect for Arabic and Jewish scholars who, certainly in the case of the latter, fomented the use of Castilian as a language of culture as opposed to Latin, Alfonso’s focus was the promotion of Christian Castilian hegemony. It is Alfonso’s incipient nation-building in the aftermath of centuries of religious and civil warfare that, not without some irony, paved the way for the rise of the rigidly Catholic Spain of Ferdinand and

Isabella with its Inquisition, and, in the twentieth century, the reinterpretation of their legacy under the fascist dictator Franco.

Europe, now broadly secular, is still struggling to define its relationship with Islam. The recent and horrifying onslaught of the so-called Islamic State is, in some corners, fuelling anti-Muslim and anti-immigration sentiment. Hindering, rather than helping discussion is the common assertion that IS are “medieval” in their destructive and brutal approach to State-building, the most recent of which came from the Prime Minister at the Commons debate on whether or not to bomb Syria.

As writers such as Kevin McDonald and John Terry have argued, IS’s strategy is not medieval. On the contrary, it is largely the product of modern approaches to the State that seek to eradicate the cultural and religious differences and fragmented centres of power that were the general medieval norm—and are so well illustrated by the paradoxes of Spanish convivencia. To refer to IS as “medieval” is a misguided battlecry, serving above all to divert attention from the group’s ideology, which so urgently needs countering. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that medieval Islamic society was incredibly advanced intellectually and culturally when compared to Christian Europe. Europe’s progress is the result of a shared cultural and linguistic heritage that we can draw on to unite, rather than divide, us.

The Wittenberg Nightingale: trigger of Hans Sachs’ success as voice of the Reformation in Nuremberg

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30/11/2015

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wittenberg nightingale

By Charlotte Hartmann

Charlotte Hartmann (MPhil Student, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford) examines the representation of Luther in Hans Sachs’ poem. Please visit her blog for more articles on Hans Sachs.

“Hier steh ich nun. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir. Amen!“ (Here I stand. I have no other choice. God help me. Amen!). Luther’s famous words at the Diet of Worms in 1521 ultimately sealed his breach with the Catholic Church. In Nuremberg his ideas were quickly absorbed and the Sodalitas Martiniana, an association of influential citizens (including, amongst others, the famous painter Albrecht Dürer) successfully spread Luther’s body of thought. Furthermore, the City Council appointed pro-Lutheran preachers to vacant clerical positions – one of whom was Andreas Osiander.

But following the decrees of the Diet of Worms in May 1521, Nuremberg was forced to perform a dangerous balancing act between demands for reforms and its own political status as a free imperial city, depending on the protection and benevolence of emperor and pope. In 1525 the Reformation was officially established and Nuremberg ‘Protestantized’. Although both government and town population equally acclaimed this shift, the years before 1525 were extremely unpredictable and the production and distribution of reformatory writings and ideas went hand in hand with risks and danger.

In this time especially one citizen of Nuremberg raised his voice: After a literary silence of three years the shoemaker Hans Sachs became the poetic voice of Luther’s reformatory case. His poem ‘The Wittenberg Nightingale’ (1523) immediately became an enormous success and earned Luther an everlasting sobriquet.

Hans Sachs‘ silent years and the enormous success of the “Wittenberg Nightingale”

Scholarship often reacts with perplexity to the fact that Hans Sachs (an exceptionally productive writer) evidently composed nothing between the summers of 1520 and 1523. But we do know that Sachs bound together forty tractates and sermons by Luther in 1522. Therefore, he must undoubtedly have been familiar with Luther’s basic works. Moreover, it can be assumed that he followed public discussions, listened to Osiander’s sermons and read reformatory pamphlets, which flooded the market, especially in the early years of the Reformation. Apparently, Sachs had need of this period of intense involvement with the ideas of the Reformation, before he finally decided upon supporting Luther’s case.

He made this decision known by publishing the “Wittenberg Nightingale” (WN) on the 8th of July in 1523. In this poem he proceeded against the Catholic Church by strongly polemicizing against it. In 1523 alone, the WN was published in seven editions and Sachs achieved nationwide fame as the poet and writer of the Reformation.

Wacht auf, es nahet gen den Tag! (Wake up, the day is nigh!)

Richard Wagner adopted Sachs’ famous opening lines to the WN in his opera ”The Mastersingers of Nuremberg” (article on Hans Sachs in Wagner’s opera) (1868) (Act 3 Scene 5):

Wacht auf, es nahet gen den Tag,
ich hör’ singen im grünen Hag
ein’ wonnigliche Nachtigal,
ihr’ Stimm’ durchdringet Berg und Tal;
die Nacht neigt sich zum Okzident,
der Tag geht auf von Orient,
die rotbrünstige Morgenröt’
her durch die trüben Wolken geht.

(Watch this scene on youtube)

These verses evocatively introduce the antithesis of day and night, to which Sachs repeatedly returns during the course of the poem in order to illustrate the contrast between Lutheran and Catholic doctrine.

1. Elaboration of the allegory
Blinded by treacherous moonlight, the sheep left their shepherd and pasture to follow the lion into wilderness. But he sets traps for them, killing the ones he caught. Furthermore, they are tormented by wolves and snakes. As the nightingale starts to sing the sheep awake from their blindness and enrage the lion. However, even with the help of his many allies (waltesel (donkey), schwein (pig), pöck (goat), katz (cat), schnecken (snail), frösch (frog) and wiltgens (wild geese)) he does not succeed in silencing the songbird. The nightingale continues to pronounce the daybreak and finally the remaining sheep return auß dyser wilde / Zuo irer weyd und hirten milde (from this wilderness / to the mildness of their pasture and shepherd).

2. Resolution of the allegory
In the second part of the WN Sachs deciphers the allegory, starting with the following verses:

Nun das ir klerer mugt verstan So that you may understand clearly
Wer die lieplich nachtigall sey Who the sweet nightingale is
Die uns den hellen tag auß schrey Pronouncing us the new bright day
Ist doctor Martinus Lutther It is Doctor Martin Luther
Zuo Wittenberg Augustiner Augustinian from Wittenberg
Der uns auffweckt von der nacht Who awakens us from the night
Darein der monschein uns hat bracht In which moonlight has led us

Sachs then continues to solve every element of the allegory further. The monschein (moonlight) is the menschen lere der Sophisten (doctrine of the sophists [no link to the philosophers of ancient Greece, but a term of abuse meaning ‘equivocator’]), the lion is Pope Leo X, the mortstrick (traps) are des Babstes netz (the Pope’s webs), the wolves are the Pope’s supporters (bishops, provosts, priests, prelates and all chaplains). Sachs’ anger quickly inflames when reflecting on existing abuses in the Church. He lists them in the form of short catchphrases, pointing at the falsehood of Catholic practices.

The nightingale is Luther and the lion is the Pope – and the lion’s allies also resemble existing actors of religious dispute.

Das wilde schwein (pig):          Johannes Eck
Der bock (goat):                         Hieronymus Emser
Die katz (cat):                             Thomas Murner
Der waltesel (donkey):             Augustin von Alveldt
Der schneck (snail):                 Johann Cochlaeus

Masking ones enemies as animals not only dehumanises them, but also assigns them their animal’s associated negative character traits. This was hardly new, but Sachs was the first to connect Luther with the nightingale, using popular conceptions of the bird as a superior singer and a mediator of wisdom.

3. Luther’s doctrine, including the appeal to the reformatted Christian to remain steadfast and faithful at the face of hazard
In opposition to his negative remarks on Catholic doctrine, Sachs gives ein kurtzer anzeig der leere doctor Martini Luthers (a short description of Doctor Martin Luther’s teaching).

Luther states that es sey keyn sundt / Dann was uns hab verboten got (nothing is sin / except what God alone has forbidden). By referring to this quotation, Sachs puts special emphasis on stilling the fear of eternal agony in hell. He seeks to reveal the Church’s deceptions in the sale of indulgence letters. Following Luther’s accusations, Pope Leo X ordered his persecution, fearing loss of power and revenues. But Luther blyb bestendig in sein sachen / Unnd gar keyn wort nit wyderryfft (remained steadfast in his convictions / And did not revoke a single word). The poem closes with Sachs’ plea to the reader to remain steadfast at the threat of expulsion, hatred, captivity and violence.

The Bodleian’s Wittenberg Nightingale. Images left to right: Preface 1 Tr.Luth. 31 (195) Pre-1701 Weston Photo: Charlotte Hartmann; Preface 2 Tr.Luth. 31 (195) Pre-1701 Weston Photo: Charlotte Hartmann; Preface 3 Tr.Luth. 31 (195) Pre-1701 Weston Photo: Charlotte Hartmann

The Bodleian Library has one edition of the WN – a well-preserved print from about 1525. It does not feature the distinct woodcut on the title page, which can be found in various other editions. The print is transmitted in a miscellany, which is part of the rare book collection Tractatus Lutherani. Hence, its signature is Tr. Luth. 31 (195). Other works in this volume include pamphlets by Heinrich von Kettenbach, Martin Luther and Andreas Osiander.

The WN’s preface claims that for a long time the true faith in God had been overshadowed by laws, regulations and commandments, which were solely imposed by the Church. Sachs states that Martin Luther alone freed the Gospel from these bonds to proclaim it in its true meaning once again and he, Hans Sachs, would seek to relay it in this spirit. In the WN, Sachs demonstrates his distinct style, which unfolds in the combination of Christian doctrine and anti-Roman critique of the pope and enables the gemeinen man (ordinary man) to engage in the theological discourse of the time. This style also becomes apparent in later works of his early Reformation literature.

Based on the strong polemic of the text, it can be assumed that proselyting Christians from Catholic to Lutheran faith was not the primary function of the text, but that its main intention was to encourage already reformed Protestants in their belief and to make it possible for them to get involved in controversial contemporary debates over the Reformation.

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