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Frauenlob's Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet And His Masterpiece

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Barbara Newman has given us a rich treasure of a book: the Middle High German text and her verse translation of this mysterious, beautiful poem take up only the first forty-one pages. The remaining 200 are, in effect, a thoroughly-researched and illuminating monograph offering both a detailed contextualization and a fine-tuned close-reading of Frauenlob's magnum opus, the Marienleich (Lay of Our Lady) or Canticum Canticorum (Song of Songs). In addition, a CD is attached to the back cover, offering the reader a chance to hear a performance of the Lay by the eminent early-music ensemble Sequentia. This tremendous volume has much to offer a rich variety of readers and listeners, and to my mind undoubtedly deserves a correspondingly wide audience.

The poem itself is an astonishingly intricate account of a celestial woman, first introduced in the third-person (in the first third of the poem) and later speaking directly to us in the first-person. Although the poem is often called the Marienleich, Newman stresses that this is description of the celestial woman is too narrow by far: "although she is the earthly mother of Christ, she is also the eternal partner of the Trinity and the life-giving principle of Nature" (xi). The facing-page translation is a bravura accomplishment, demonstrating a keen appreciation of the original and a poetic voice that allows Frauenlob's brilliance and audacity to be appreciated by a contemporary Anglophone readership (she wisely counsels those "who desire a keener sense of Frauenlob's metrical virtuosity, his exotic coinages, his wild chiming music, and his fervent baroque piety" [xvii] to learn Middle High German or, failing that, read the poetry of nineteenth-century Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins).

Frauenlob's ecstatic, gloriously hyperbolic praise of the "sublime Feminine" finds a warm reception in Newman's text. In dealing with the misogynistic tradition and the consequent lack of women among Frauenlob's patrons and poet-peers, she is generous enough to state simply "this is not Frauenlob's fault; he did not create the culture in which he sang" (62). This strikes me as a refreshingly direct way to dismiss those who would judge the past by contemporary standards, only to find the past inevitably wanting. Newman is also entirely frank about the tremendous amount of sexual and erotic imaginative energy generated by the reception of the Song of Songs (here applied to Mary's conception of Christ -- the Celestial Lady boldly declares "I slept with three" in elucidating the Trinitarian nature of the event) an approach that moves beyond the stale century-old Freudian schema of sublimation without gingerly ignoring the central role that allegories of intercourse played in shaping many aspects of devotional discourse.

This accomplished, learned volume also aims to serve as something of an ambassador: Newman seems -- like me -- to be baffled, even somewhat frustrated, by the relative lack of Anglophone interest in medieval German texts. For a host of reasons, German texts have received far less attention in British and American medieval studies than their French or Italian counterparts. With this book, she makes an impassioned case for the inclusion of Frauenlob's masterpiece in a broader European canon of medieval poetry, Marian devotion, and mysticism. Newman's exuberance and enthusiasm, both in writing and teaching, have inspired many; I earnestly hope this volume will inspire still more.