Colmar Dominican chronicler

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Sheet from the “Annales Basileenses”; Fol. 16 of the so-called "Stuttgart Manuscript" (around 1540)

The Colmar Dominican chronicler (* 1221 ; † around 1305 in Colmar ) was a Dominican in the convents of Basel and Colmar in the 13th century and is considered the author of an important historiographical-chronistic work.

Life

The few known life dates of the annalist are without exception self-testimony, which he suddenly inserts into the chronological work in two text passages. He was born in 1221, entered the Dominican Order in 1238, belonged to the convent of the Order of Preachers in Basel from 1260 and to the founding convent of the Dominican monastery in Colmar (today Bibliothèque de la ville at the Dominican Church ). Independent source texts that could confirm this do not exist or have not survived. The year of death is also unknown, but it can be deduced from the chronological breakdown of both the so-called Great Colmar Annals (Annales Colmarienses maiores) and the Colmar Chronicle ( Chronicon Colmariense 1305).

Work tradition

In the edition history of the Colmar Dominican historiography of the 13th century, which was characterized by an overall unfavorable tradition, it is regrettable that the extensive corpus , written in Middle Latin , has only survived in copies from the 16th century. The original manuscript (s) from the 13th century must have been lost since the 18th century. The history of the copies and printing, which is characterized by changing editorial principles, cannot be regarded as a clear work picture. A first print version by the late humanist Christian Wurstisen (1544–1588) from Basel appeared as early as 1585 , but numerous changes were made to the manuscript text, both carelessly and arbitrarily: Wurstisen shortened the copy of the original manuscript text that was available to him not just by about a third, but also made other unauthorized stylistic and structural changes. Even the print edition, which is still relevant today, that by Philipp Jaffé as part of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica , Script. Volume XVII, edition of the Colmar corpus published in 1861, shows structural changes compared to the original. Like the Wurstisen edition, it is based on the copy, which was made around 1540 and was largely handed down in the hand of the Basel humanist Nikolaus Briefer († 1548), which after its later storage in the Württemberg State Library, the so-called Stuttgart manuscript (signature: WLB Stuttgart, cod. Hist. 4 °, 145). The original of the 13th century from the monastery library in Colmar must obviously have served Briefer as a basis. Jaffé editorially divided the confusing overall picture of Briefer's copy into the following work parts, which he provided with his own titles:

  • Annales Colmarienses minores , the “little Kolmar Annals” 1211–1298 (the original manuscript was written probably around 1298).
  • Annales Basileenses and Annales Colmarienses maiores , the two great annals covering the years 1266–1305, initially synchronized in Basel and from 1278 in Colmar.
  • Non-annualistic texts from around 1300, which Jaffé divides into a text on “Alsatian conditions at the beginning of the 13th century” and two topographical “descriptions of Alsace and Germany”.
  • Chronicon Colmariense , the "Kolmar Chronicle" of the years 1242–1304, deals with the history of Rudolf I and Albrecht von Habsburg and Adolf von Nassau up to 1304 (beginning of writing in the 90s of the 13th century) and is considered the main work of Colmar historiography in general .

The only complete translation of the Stuttgart cod. Hist. 4 °, 145 into German was obtained on the basis of the MGH edition by Hermann Pabst and appeared in 1867 (subsequent editions in 1897 and 1940).

More recently, the authorship of Colmar chronicler is also the date the otherwise unoccupied Dominican Abbot Rudolf the Convention in Schlettstadt attributed memorabiles Historiae - a total of 56 (to 54 more in a Sigmaringer manuscript, the Codex 64 of Sigmaringer court library ) Marvel, Ghost, devil and prophecy stories of the 13th century - discussed or proven, the tradition of which only exists in copies from the 16th century.

Work meaning

Since the beginning of their edition history, the works of the Colmar chronicler have not only been regarded as records of local historical significance, but are also counted among the essential historical source texts from the second half of the 13th century, especially with regard to their sections on the person and reign of Rudolf I of Habsburg.

They exemplarily represent the "different" historiography that has been emerging since the 12th century in the fundamental turning away from the conventionally bound historiography of the large, imperial historical contexts towards a more locally limited, episodic one based on indirect sources of information (monks, warmen, traveling minstrels) History of events that has aspects of the epic, anecdotal, and edifying. The chronic writings of Colmarer are characterized by a lively abundance of incidents and news that, in the sense of an everyday story , is able to convey the immediate environment, world of experience and the understanding of reality of the people of that time and region more vividly than the empire stories that were previously considered to be "literary".

In particular, the annalistic works of Colmarer, the Annales Colmarienses maiores and Annales Basileenses , offer in this respect a colorful, even confusing juxtaposition and succession of things that they have personally experienced or, according to rumors, only heard. Apparently indiscriminately and without any weighting, the chronicler collects all the news that he can only get hold of. What seems to him somehow strange and interesting, he records without any obvious attempt at factual or substantive order: imperial coronations , the founding of conventions, incidents of war, catastrophic fires, sieges, deaths in the ranks of the clergy, homicides, iniquities and thefts among knights, citizens and peasants , Natural phenomena and catastrophes, devastation, observations from the local flora and fauna, weather and climatic conditions, warm winters and cold summers, harvest times and crops, wine and grain prices, news about monsters and diseases, diabolical stories and all kinds of curiosities. The additive method of Colmarer reports a new event or a new observation in almost every new sentence and delivers a mutually contradicting sequence of everyday "unimportant" with imperial history "significant":

"1288. The abbot von Murbach drove all the nobles out of Gebweiler because they had wounded each other in a cunning way. A son of King Rudolf, the Landgrave of Alsace and Duke of Bavaria, rested with a hundred horses in the yard of the sisters under the linden tree in Kolmar. On January 22nd, large flocks of birds clashed near Mümpelgard and fought a battle in which, according to several people, over three hundred perished. In the same way, flocks of tame pigs came together at the same place and killed each other by biting one another. On the day before Agathen, lightning flashed. The Jews gave King Rudolf twenty thousand marks so that he could get them right against those of Oberwesel and Boppard. In the city of Bern, a woman defeated a man in a duel. A storm came to the cleaning of the Jungfrau, which devastated a large forest near Hohenack from the ground up. King Rudolf gathered an army to relieve a castle besieged by the Archbishop of Mainz. "

The resulting restless, even erratic character of the notes seems to be due to the nature of this work and was with some certainty already peculiar to the original. The fact that the Colmarer often allows central and peripheral historical events of the 13th century to follow one another with equal weight, treats the apparently insignificant sometimes with epic breadth, but not infrequently just mentions or completely ignores the supraregional importance in laconic brevity, can only be seen in his historiography at first glance are accused of having failed to deal with formal and content-related material; on closer inspection, a literary style - albeit unconscious - is formative here, the suggestive power of which is able to impress readers then and now. The impartiality of narrative collecting makes the Colmarer's records a literary document of everyday history like hardly any other historiography of their century: Medieval realities of life and thought, patterns of perception, regional and general understanding of history of the people around 1300 and in this region are exemplarily discussed.

Lore

  • Stuttgart manuscript (= S): Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, Cod.hist. 4 ° 145, around 1540.
  • Colmar manuscript (= C) (excerpt from fol. 183v – fol. 188r): Colmar City Library, cod. 248, around 1462/1463.
  • Donaueschingen manuscript , (olim) cod. 704 (= D) (excerpt from the edited Colmar Chronicle on fol. 174r - fol. 193v): Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, Cod. Don. 704, digitized around 1545 .

Printed sources

  • Erich Kleinschmidt (Ed.): Rudolf von Schlettstadt. Historiae Memorabiles. On Dominican literature and cultural history of the 13th century . Böhlau, Cologne and Vienna 1974.
  • Hermann Pabst: Annals and Chronicle of Kolmar. According to the edition of Mon. Germ. translated . The historians of prehistoric Germany, XIII. Century, Volume 7. Duncker, Leipzig 1867 ( full text digitized in the Google book search).
  • Annales Colmarienses minores et maiores, Annales Basileenses, Chronicon Colmariense , in: Georg Heinrich Pertz u. a. (Ed.): Scriptores (in Folio) 17: Annales aevi Suevici. Hanover 1861, pp. 183–270 ( Monumenta Germaniae Historica , digitized version )

literature

  • Erich Kleinschmidt: Art. Colmar Dominican chronicler. In: Wolfgang Stammler / Karl Langosch / Kurt Ruh (Hrsg.): The German literature of the Middle Ages. Author Lexicon . Volume 1, Berlin 1978, Col. 1295-1296.
  • Erich Kleinschmidt: The Colmar Dominican historiography in the 13th and 14th centuries. New manuscript finds and research on the history of transmission . In: German Archives for Research into the Middle Ages 28 (1972), pp. 371–496.
  • Karl Köster: The historiography of the Kolmar Dominicans of the 13th century . In: Elsaß-Lothringisches Jahrbuch 22 (1952), pp. 1–100.
  • Ottokar Lorenz: Germany's historical sources in the Middle Ages. From the middle of the thirteenth to the end of the fourteenth century . Hertz, Berlin 1870, here: pp. 1–16.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Klaus Graf: Manuscript Research on the Internet. March 18, 2003, archived from the original on May 30, 2012 ; accessed on April 30, 2018 .
  2. Annales Colmarienses maiores , cit. after: Hermann Pabst: Annals and Chronicle of Kolmar. According to the edition of Mon. Germ. translated. In: The historians of the German prehistoric times , XIII. Century, Volume 7. Duncker, Leipzig 1867, p. 59.