Emmaus game

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The Emmausspiele are part of the Easter Passion Play and go back to the Gospel of Luke . The Emmaus scene was incorporated into the Easter Games in two different ways: either as a standalone game or as part of a detailed game. The Emmaus scene in Tyrol was realized as an independent play that was performed on Easter Monday .

content

The basis of the Emmaus plays is a passage from the Bible in Luke's Gospel ( Luke 24 : 13-35  EU ) in which Jesus appears after his resurrection in front of two of his disciples who are on the way to Emmaus. Further testimonies about the appearance of Jesus before his disciples can be found in ( Matthew 28  EU ), ( Mark 16  EU ), and ( John 20, 21  EU ). Luke describes the recognition of Jesus in the most detailed way, which forms the core of the piece. In the Middle Ages, recognizing other people was an important issue, as one had to make sure that the other person was a 'friend' or an 'enemy'. This topic is often dealt with in medieval epics, for example in Parzival . The job of a herald included recognizing the rank and name of people. In connection with the Bible it is about the non-recognition of Jesus, about the "blindness" of the disciples. Knowing that Jesus had died on the cross, the disciples could not imagine that he would be standing here in person.

origin

Emmaus plays developed from the Latin appearance plays (perigrini plays) of the 11th century. Initially, the Perigrini were closely related to the passage from the Bible from the Gospel of Luke and to the Liturgy of the Hours , so, like the Easter Games , they were closely related to the liturgy . The development of the Emmausspiele is conditioned on the one hand by the further development of the Perigrini Games and on the other hand by their translation into the vernacular. Only a few manuscripts of these games have survived to this day:

  • Admonter Passion Play
  • Kaufbeurer Passionsschrift, handwriting B
  • Berlin Rhenish Easter Game
  • Villinger Passion Play
  • Brixner Emmaus game
  • Lucerne Passion Play from 1545
  • Frankfurt conducting role
  • Lucerne Passion Play directing material from 1571
  • Lucerne Passion Play from 1616
  • Munich Easter game
  • Osnabrück Easter game
  • Bolzano Emmaus Game I
  • Bolzano Emmaus Game II
  • Sterzing Passion Play from 1486
  • Sebastian Wild's Passion Play

In most of the surviving manuscripts, the Emmaus scene is only a small part of the Easter play. Only four manuscripts, the Brixner Emmausspiele, the Bolzano Emmausspiele I and II and the Sterzing Passion Play of 1486 (StP) contain further developed scenes. These four games are part of the Tyrolean gaming tradition. With the exception of the “Frankfurt Conducting Role”, all the games were written between the mid-15th century and the end of the 16th century.

Tyrolean tradition

The Tyrolean Games were performed on four days, but they could also be shortened to two days. The origin of this game tradition is set by Martin Fischer in the Neustift monastery near Brixen in the 15th century, Hans-Gert Roloff puts the beginning of this tradition in 1476.

The Tyrolean Easter Games must be viewed as a conglomerate of various influences, the core of which is the liturgy, which was supplemented with apocryphal material , legends and the piety of the passion that emerged in the late Middle Ages. The texts of the Tyrolean game tradition hardly differ in content, which is probably due to the work of Vigil Raber and Benedikt Deb. Before that, the bearers and authors of the Passion Play were mostly clerics .

The Tyrolean play group has the richest tradition of playing Easter or Passion plays. In addition to Bozen, games were also played in Brixen, Sterzing , Meran , Hall , Schwaz , Cavalese and Trento . To this day, the game tradition has only survived in the towns of Thiersee and Erl .

A special feature of the Tyrolean tradition is the mixture of pagan and Christian elements. The excessive eating and drinking in the games represents a deviation from Christian norms. This excess corresponds to the customs of the Tyrolean funeral meal , which was celebrated in an extravagant manner and combined with an offering to the poor. According to Gugitz, the funeral feast was an “honor of the deceased, which the soul consumes in order to make the survivors inclined”.

Like the sprawling eating and drinking scenes, the popular and widely played arguments and beatings refer to the carnival games of the time. Beating scenes also take place in different variations in the Bolzano Emmausspiele I and II. The struggle and the resulting fighting games are a part of the Dead traditions. In pagan traditions have unlimited spring joy in the reawakening of nature is celebrated after the long winter.

The Emmaus disciples themselves are represented as normal, fallible people, which makes it easier for the audience to identify them. Their wrongdoing is corrected in the course of their recognition, whereby the situation can seemingly dissolve in a synthesis.

Bolzano Emmaus Games

The Bozen Emmausspiele I and II are handed down in the Debs Codex, which is named after Benedikt Debs, a Bozen school scribe and game director from Ingolstadt . The codex must have changed hands between 1510 and 1515, as Vigil Raber , the owner after Benedikt Debs, first attested in Bozen from 1510 and Benedikt Debs died in 1515. The codex itself cannot be dated, however, as the individual layers come from different years and the texts themselves can be assigned to different scribes. For this reason it can be said with some certainty that the Codex was not written by Benedikt Debs, but rather was only bound by him. In the course of his job as the organizer and main player of the Bolzano Passion, he is likely to have taken over the handwriting from his predecessors, as the many short plays and the content are more of a testimony to the time when Bolzano did not hold any major Easter and Passion plays lasting several days .

The “Debs Codex” ( Sterzing , Stadtarchiv, Hs. IV) is a paper manuscript, enclosed in a parchment cover, which unfortunately is no longer completely preserved. The shell consists of a parchment sheet with notes of part of the Corpus Christi - sequence on four red staves. The codex contains a paper flyleaf with the entry of the register by Vigil Raber's hand. Due to the different watermarks in the individual sheets, it can also be concluded that they came from Venice or Milan between the years 1428 and 1494. However, the chronology of the watermarks does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about the order in which they were written. The order of the layers does not always coincide with the games, which results in seven fascicle units with eleven layers . The format of the handwriting is narrow folio . 118 leaves are divided into eleven fascicles measuring 29.7 × 11 cm on average. A total of six scribes' hands can be assigned to the 118 sheets, each of which, with one exception, wrote at least two songs. When the songs are divided into different scribes' hands, the following picture emerges:

  • Scribe A: Game 1-5
  • Writer B: Game 6-7
  • Scribe C: Game 8-9
  • Writer D: Game 10-11
  • Scribe E: Game 12
  • Scribe F: Game 13–15

In contrast to Emmausspiel II, Emmausspiel I contains a restaurant scene, which makes the game more detailed. In this restaurant scene, special references to South Tyrol are processed, such as the naming of South Tyrolean wines, such as the “raifall vnd malmasier ” and “Rumanier”. The "hengl wine", the so-called "hill wine", is also related to South Tyrol, as it is a quality level for wines from South Tyrol. The bread that the disciples eat is the " flat " typical of Bolzano . The question of whether the bread is “softened” and the invitation to eat an egg before it are references to a South Tyrolean Easter Monday custom, in which every guest in the inn was offered an Easter egg and a consecrated sacrificial bread.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Monika Schulz: The Easter and Emmaus Games and the Ascension Game in the Debs Codex , p. 176, quoted from: G. Gugitz: Das Jahr und seine Feste im Volksrauch Österreichs , p. 184.
  2. ^ Entry in the manuscript census