Grief

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wilgefortis, depiction of the 16th century in St-Étienne, Beauvais
Wilgefortis (left) on a closed triptych by Hans Memling, 1480
Worry legend with minstrel motif, woodcut by Hans Burgkmair , approx. 1507
Holy Sorrows with minstrel in Maria Eich's Chapel of Grace

Wilgefortis (derived from Latin "virgo fortis", strong virgin?), Also: Ontkommer (Dutch), then also iconographically changed in the early modern times and referred to as sorrow , was a fictional popular saint whose legend originated in the late Middle Ages. She is depicted as crucified in a long robe, bearded and crowned. She was neither canonized nor officially recognized as a saint by the Church. As Wilgefortis she was included in the Martyrologium Romanum in 1583/86 , but has since been deleted. Her feast day is July 20th.

Depiction of St. Wilgefortis in Wambierzyce , Lower Silesia

Wilgefortis and Ontkommer

The veneration of the saints goes back to the 14th century. In the Netherlands at that time, the oldest textual traditions of copies written in the vernacular date from the middle of the 15th century. They tell of the converted daughter of a pagan king to Christianity who resisted a marriage forced by her father. Her pleading prayers to be defaced in order to avoid this marriage to a pagan were answered: you grew a beard. The angry father then had the virgin executed "in the manner of her crucified God" by crucifixion . The earliest depictions from the first decades of the 14th century show her as a young woman, bearded and crowned, with clearly feminine features and body shapes, in a long skirt and tied to the cross with ropes. Mainly under the name Ontkommer the cult was conveyed from 1400 - attested by these Rhenish and Dutch illuminated manuscripts - to the Lower Rhine, Cologne, the Middle Rhine and as far as the Baltic Sea coast. In the regions of the north that had become Protestant, the worship of Wilgefortis / Ontkommer disappeared, but remained alive in the Catholic regions of Belgium and northern France until the 20th century.

Grief

The Ontkommerkult came from the Middle Rhine to southern Germany and the Alpine region. Here the figure took on the High German name Kümmernis from around 1470. It was not the sparsely available Wilgefortis / Ontkommer models from Flemish-Rhenish provenance that were used for their representation, but the schemes of the Volto Santo murals already widespread in the region . These go back to the example of a crucifix in Lucca , that Christ is on the cross bearded, crowned and clad in the belted Colobium , the late antique tunic , as corresponds to the traditional representations of the crucifix from the early Christian period to the Ottoman art. Since the miraculous image was one of the most popular medieval pilgrimage destinations, the Luccheser image type spread sustainably in northern Europe. The adoption of these models in the design of the care took place only after the import of the cult into the landscapes of the south, so it did not justify it, but was a purely iconographic process.

This is also confirmed by the Wilgefortis miniature with minstrel "from 1415" in the manuscript of the Ghent University Library (UB Gent nl. BHSL.HS.2750), which for a long time was regarded as the earliest evidence of a depiction of sorrow. The Ghent manuscript shows fol. 112r next to a prayer to Sinte Ontkommer a miniature with Wilgefortis, d. H. tied to the cross, the dress tied at the bottom, and placed in a landscape with trees. The minstrel kneels at the bottom left. The original dating to 1415 was made by comparing the prayer text with the almost identical text in a Dutch manuscript, then in Oxford, today in the Utrecht University Library with the title (here in German) The Book of Hours of Kunera van Leefdael , which can actually be classified around 1415 . The fol. 191 attached miniature shows a Wilgefortis in a rocky landscape with a square pattern to close the picture without a minstrel. The purely philological comparison (regardless of the contradicting illustrations) by Jan Gessler in 1937 was accepted uncritically by Schweizer-Vüllers. More recent studies from 1970 onwards specified the general dating of the Ghent manuscript to the 15th century, now in the 2nd half of the 15th century, most recently Oosterman 1997 "probably around 1475". After that, the early approach of handwriting and thus of miniature is no longer applicable. The new philological result is complemented by the numerous iconographic elements of the Ghent miniature, most of which are stylistically from the 2nd half of the 15th century, such as the fez-like high cap of the minstrel or the landscape open to the rear (without Completion with pattern as background). Gorissen had already dated the figure of Wilgefortis on the cross in 1968 "according to the costume from the third quarter of the 15th century". The Ghent miniature therefore shows a combination in which iconographic Wilgefortis and Kümmernis elements could only be brought together after the cult of sorrow, i.e. after 1470.

The text transmission was enriched by further miracle reports and legends, of which the minstrel legend, also taken over from Lucca , is of particular importance: In front of the picture a minstrel in need once played the violin, for whom the saint rewarded with her discarded, precious shoe. The violinist, accused of theft, proved his innocence by asking the saint to throw the second shoe in front of the picture. The woodcut by Hans Burkmair (ill.) From 1507 contains all of these elements and is accompanied by the first German-language text of the legend of Kümmernis. In the case of the undated and unmarked pictures of this type from the decades after 1470, it is not always certain whether they are for the veneration of the crucified Christ or a representation of sorrow because of the iconographic similarities. The respective function cannot be derived from iconography. For this, archival, social and piety-historical testimonies of the respective church and the place must be used. Misunderstandings of the time of origin and even deliberate reinterpretations of later epochs cannot be ruled out. In southern Germany and the Alpine countries, veneration of the saints continued beyond the baroque period. Only since the Enlightenment did the cult largely disappear from the officially prescribed church framework. Recently, however, the St. Wilgefortis in Neufahrn near Freising has put its patronage back in the foreground. There is also a chapel dedicated to the Holy Sorrows in the Allgäu hamlet of Obergammenried near Bad Wörishofen .

The legend inspired u. a. Justinus Kerner started his ballad Der Geiger zu Gmünd in 1816 , but it was also reflected in Grimm's fairy tales as The Holy Woman Kummeris .

Patronage

See also :

Places with representations of the Holy Sorrows

  • Schwalbach am Taunus (near Frankfurt) in the cath. Church of St. Pankratius (no longer in the church since 1937)
  • Worry without a beard in station 57 of the Kalvarie (pilgrimage staircase) below the pilgrimage church and basilica of the Visitation in Wambierzyce (Albendorf), Poland. Originally intended for the worship of sorrow, today officially renamed Święty (Saints) Wilgefortis.

See also

  • Sankt Hulpe , a comparable, often confused type of image.

literature

  • Gustav Schnürer, Joseph M. Ritz: Sankt Kümmernis and Volto Santo. ( Research on Folklore 13/15). Düsseldorf 1934 (fundamental, rich in material, but no longer relevant in important core statements).
  • Josef Lechner: The St. Walburg Monastery and the early history of the veneration of St. Sorrow in southern Germany. In: On the 900th anniversary of the St. Walburg Abbey in Eichstätt. Historical contributions by Karl Ried u. A. Paderborn 1935, pp. 40-60.
  • Jan Gessler: De Vlaamsche Baardheilige Wilgefortis of Ontkommer. Antwerp 1937.
  • Karl von Spieß: The Holy Sorrows. In: Marksteine ​​der Volkskunst, Part 2 ( Yearbook for Historical Folklore VIII., IX. Volume) Berlin 1942, pp. 191–249.
  • Leopold Kretzenbacher: St. Kümmernis in Inner Austria. Pictures, legends and songs. In: Journal of the Historical Association for Styria. XLIV. Jg./1953. Graz 1953, pp. 128-159.
  • Friedrich Gorissen: The Cross of Lucca and the H. Wilgefortis / Ontkommer on the Lower Rhine. A contribution to hagiography and iconography. In: Numaga, Vol. XV (1968), Nijmegen 1968, pp. 122-148.
  • Lexicon of Christian Iconography, Vol. 7, ("Iconography of the Saints"). Freiburg 1974, Sp. 353–355 ( Wilgefortis article , with list of works, sources and literature references).
  • Peter Spranger : The violinist von Gmünd: Justinus Kerner and the story of a legend . 2nd Edition. Schwäbisch Gmünd 1991, ISBN 3-926043-08-3 Heidelberg University Library ; ( Review ).
  • Peter Spranger: Sorrow. In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales . Volume 8 (1996), Col. 604-607.
  • Anton Dörrer : Sorrow . In: Walter Kasper (Ed.): Lexicon for Theology and Church . 3. Edition. tape 6 . Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1997, Sp. 525 f .
  • Regine Schweizer-Vüllers: The saint on the cross: Studies on the female image of God in the late Middle Ages and in the Baroque period. Lang, Bern a. a. 1997, ISBN 3-906757-98-6 . (For this review by Lutz Röhrich in: Fabula 39, 1998, pp. 158–160 and the critical remarks by Reinhard Bodner, see Ref. Below.)
  • Jürgen Zänker: Cruzifixae. Women on the cross. Berlin 1998.
  • Konrad Kunze : Wilgefortis. In: Author lexicon , . 2nd Edition, Vol. 10 (1999), Col. 1081-1083.
  • Ilse E. Friesen: The Female Crucifix: Images of St. Wilgefortis since the Middle Ages. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2001.
  • Sigrid Glockzin-Bever, Martin Kraatz (ed.): At the cross - a woman: beginnings - dependencies - updates. Münster 2003 ISBN 3-8258-6589-4 .
  • David A. King : The Cult of St. Wilgefortis in Flanders, Holland, England and France. In: Sigrid Glockzin-Bever, Martin Kraatz (Hrsg.): Am Kreuz - a woman: Beginnings - Dependencies - Updates. Münster 2003, pp. 55-97.
  • Reinhard Bodner: Worry Research. On the historicizing and updating interest in an "invented" saint. In: Augsburger volkskundliche Nachrichten, 10th year, issue 2, no. 20, December 2004 (University of Augsburg - Subject Folklore), pp. 40–61, urn : nbn: de: bvb: 384-opus4-21375 .
  • Katharina Boll: The legend of the woman on the cross. Theological considerations on the Upper German text tradition . In: art and saelde. Festschrift for Trude Ehlert. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8260-4605-6 , pp. 161–177 ( full text ).
  • Gabriele Raab: St. Kümmernis and the poor little violinist and their representations in the Wittelsbacher Land . In: Aichach-Friedberg district (ed.): Altbayern in Schwaben 2016 . Yearbook of history and culture. 2016, ISBN 978-3-9813801-4-9 , ISSN  0178-2878 , pp. 69-78 .
  • Arndt Müller: The two wall paintings with the depiction of the crucifix in the tunic in the Evangelical Parish Church in Pilgramsreuth . In: Miscellanea curiensia Volume XII. 70th report of the North Upper Franconian Association for Nature, History and Regional Studies eV Hof. Hof 2019, pp. 19–33.

Web links

Commons : Saint Wilgefortis  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Kümmernis  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ also St. Uncumber (English), Ontcommer, Unkommer, Unkumer, that is, “those who are freed from grief”, discouraged.
  2. ↑ Also "kumini", "kumeria", "kammernus", cf. Schweizer-Vüllers, p. 62
  3. ↑ Schweizer-Vüllers, p. 78
  4. ↑ heiligenlexikon.de
  5. ↑ Schweizer, p. 82.
  6. ↑ Referred to in the Acta Sanctorum, Julii tomus V., Antwerp 1727, p. 69 f. - see also Schweizer-Vüllers, p. 40 ff.
  7. ↑ Schweizer-Vüllers, pp. 67–77
  8. ^ Andreas Röpcke: Twice St. Hulpe. Investigations into a Low German cult figure of the late Middle Ages. In: Mecklenburgische Jahrbücher 128, 2013, pp. 17–24.
  9. ↑ Schweizer-Vüllers, p. 72
  10. ↑ So the well-founded argumentation of Schweizer-Vüllers (1997), compared to the until then consistently adopted representation by Schnürer-Ritz from 1934, which a common ancestry also of the earlier Ontcommer representations of representations of the clothed Christ, especially the Volto-Santo- Type postulated.
  11. ↑ Universiteit Gent: Latijns en Nederlands getijdenboek voor Gent , accessed on August 2, 2020.
  12. ↑ Universiteit Utrecht: Getijdenboek UBU Hs. 5 J 26 , accessed on August 2, 2020.
  13. ^ Jan Gessler: De Vlaamse Baardheilige Wilgefortis of Ontkommer. Antwerp 1937, p. 71.
  14. ↑ Jan B. Oosterman: Pronkzucht en Devotie. In: Frank Willaert ea: Een zoet chord. Amsterdam 1997, pp. 187-206 (200 and 205)
  15. ^ Friedrich Gorissen: The cross of Lucca and the H. Wilgefortis / Ontkommer on the lower Rhine. A contribution to hagiography and iconography. In: Numaga, Jg. XV (1968), Nijmegen 1968, pp. 122-148 (p. 137).
  16. ↑ Donat de Chapeaurouge: The violin legend of the Volto Santo , in: Music and history: Festschrift Leo Schrade for the 60th birthday. Cologne 1963, pp. 126-133. - In the early Dutch depictions, the Geiger motif, as can be seen in the illustration above from Ghent, is still an exception, which, however, with the core thesis of Schweizer-Vüllers, Volto Santo and Ontkommer had no contact with each other, not in Is to be brought into line.
  17. ↑ Schweizer-Vüllers, pp. 17-19
  18. ↑ The preceding passages incorporate information from the December 2011 discussion page of this article.
  19. ^ Küper, Wolfgang: The parish church Sankt Pankratius in Schwalbach am Taunus - history and stories. In: Between Maint and Taunus. MTK-Jahrbuch 28 (2020), p. 107–116, here p. 113f.
  20. ^ Hermann Dittrich: Schlesische Kümmernisbilder, in: Annual report of the Neisser Kunst- und Altertumsverein 7th year (1903). Neisse 1904, pp. 35–38 (35–36, No. 1), ill. After p. 36. NKAV | https://obc.opole.pl/dlibra/publication/8368/edition/7355