Drinking songs. The religious Lied. parting, "Tagelieder" and "Tanzlieder." Intimately associated with the songs of the seasons were drinking songs and social songs. Hans Rosenplüt, the Nürnberg Schwankdichter, wrote a book of "Weingrüsse" and "Weinsegen.” A song like "1 reappears in several forms, and echoes through the crude anacreontic poetry of this period. "Landsknechte" sing of a free, careless life, and students glory in their "Burschenleben": "Du freies bursenleben! The religious lyric naturally shared in the revival of popular song. Oswald von Wolkenstein and Michael Beheim left many hymns and religious poems, and biblical themes were favoured by the Meistersingers. But the "geistliche Lied" or hymn had, from the earliest times, been a recognised form of the German Volkslied. The crusaders had their marching songs full of devout trust in God; sailors as well as soldiers had always expressed their faith in the Higher Power that guarded them, in terse vernacular verse which borrowed little from the Church hymn-book. At an early date, parts of the liturgy had been translated into the vernacular, or German verses had been substituted for the original text from such versions of the Kyrie eleison arose, for instance, the so-called "Leisen." In the fourteenth cen 1 Ed. M. Haupt in Altdeutsche Blatter, 1, Leipzig, 1836, 401 ff. 2 L. Uhland, l.c., 2, 15 f. (bass, "besser ; funk, "Schluck"). 3 L. Uhland, .c., 2, 78 (gral, "Gral," i.e., "der Ehre Höchstes "). P. Wackernagel, Das deutsche Kirchenlied (5 vols., Leipzig, 1863-77), 2, 478 ff., 666 ff. tury a monk, Herman or Johannes of Salzburg, had by this means helped to popularise the old Church poetry; and in the monasteries, the mystic trend in theology expressed itself now, as at the beginning of the Middle High German period, in a revival of "Marienlieder." Another favourite form of spiritual song consisted of religious parodies of familiar Volkslieder. "Der liebste bule, den ich han," became a devout expression of the soul's love for Jesus; "Es stet ein lind in jenem Tal" became "Es stet ein lind in himelrich." The most fertile composer of such hymns was Heinrich von Laufenberg, a monk of Freiburg in the Heinrich Breisgau, who died in 1460: besides these religious Lieder von he has also left two long allegorical poems, Der Spiegel des berg. menschlichen Heils (1437) and Das Buch von den Figuren (1441), in which the mystic tendencies of the fifteenth century find characteristic expression. The majority of the Volkslieder in the centuries preceding the Reformation were handed down by oral tradition. Only rarely—as when in 1471 Klara Hätzlerin,1 a nun of Augsburg, made a collection of them-were they committed to writing. The Volkslied of these centuries was thus not confined to any particular class; all classes and professions had a share in modelling the verses or the melodies of the songs: they were, as Herder first set forth centuries later in his Von deutscher Art und Kunst, the voice of the whole nation. As one generation of poets after another has felt, the Volkslied is the spring to which the German lyric must turn, to cleanse itself from the dust of a purely literary or bookish tradition. 1 Ed. C. Haltaus, Quedlinburg, 1840. Laufen 166 CHAPTER III. MYSTICISM AND HUMANISM; THE REFORMATION. THE fourteenth and fifteenth centuries present certain points of resemblance to the tenth and eleventh, in so far as they were both periods of depression and of unconscious preparation for the future. The wave of religious fervour which swept across Europe, as a result of the monastic reforms of the tenth century, may be compared with the deepening of religious life due to the Dominicans and Franciscans of the pre-Reformation centuries. And like the earlier movement, this later religious revival, which took the form of mysticism, spread from Western Germany. Traces of mysticism are to be found, as we have already seen, in the sermons of the thirteenth century, in those of David of Augsburg and Berthold of Regensburg, but the line of German mystics proper commences with the Dominican Eckhart (ca. 1260-1327),1 who, in the early years of the fourteenth century, preached in Strassburg-where he was probably born --and in Cologne; in Eckhart's footsteps followed Heinrich Seuse or Suso (1295-1366) and Johannes Tauler (ca. 130061).2 Meister Eckhart, the most gifted and original of all the German mystics, established once and for all the philosophical basis for mysticism: in his writings is to be found that anxious searching into the relations of the soul with God, that conception of God's oneness with the uni verse, which runs through the whole later development of the movement in Germany. Heinrich Seuse, who was a Swiss, 1295-1366. represented the fervid and poetic side of mysticism: he ap Meister Eckhart, ca. 12601327. Heinrich Seuse, 1 F. Pfeiffer, Deutsche Mystiker des 14. Jahrhunderts, 2, Leipzig, 1857. Cp. F. Preger, Geschichte der deutschen Mystik im Mittelalter, Leipzig, 1874-93, I, 309 ff. 2 For Seuse and Tauler, cp. F. Preger, l.c., 2, 309 ff. and 3, 3 ff. 1300-61. pealed to the imagination rather than to the purely religious sentiments of his hearers. The Strassburg preacher Tauler, on the other hand, was a mystic of a manlier type. He, too, Johannes preached the complete union of the soul with God, but he Tauler, ca. avoided Eckhart's pantheism. He was essentially of a practical nature and had little faith in outward ceremonies; he believed that the path to the higher religious life led only through personal conversion and the communion of the soul with God. For centuries, Tauler's sermons were favourite religious books with the German people. Mysticism, in so far as it was a revival of religious individualism, was thus a forerunner of the Reformation. The history of literature is, however, more intimately concerned with another aspect of the movement, an aspect in which the aims of Protestantism were no less distinctly foreshadowed. To the mystics we owe the first complete German Bible, a The first translation of the Vulgate, which was printed at Strassburg German Bible, in 1466. Until this translation was superseded, a generation 1466. later, by Luther's work, it was reprinted no less than thirteen times. And, in addition to the printed version, there existed several manuscript translations of the whole Bible, or part of it, the majority of which are also to be ascribed to the influence of this religious movement. Johann Geiler of Kaisersberg, 1445 In the fifteenth century mysticism had lost something of its unworldly enthusiasm, and in its place had appeared a practical religious spirit, but a spirit that was even less tolerant of abuses and superficial thinking. The representative preacher of this century-as Tauler had been of the preceding one-was Johann Geiler of Kaisersberg (1445-1510). The scene of Geiler's activity was again Strassburg. Like his contemporary and friend, Sebastian Brant, Geiler had received the best part of his education from the humanists, 1510. and this to some extent explains the difference between him and his predecessors. Geiler was more of a satirist ; there is less mysticism in his sermons and more practical common-sense. He, too, like Tauler, preached the necessity of an essentially personal relationship between the soul and God, but his eyes were more open to ecclesiastical abuses. 1 L. Dacheux, Jean Geiler de Kaisersberg, un réformateur catholique à la fin du XVe siècle, Paris, 1876. Selections from his writings, ed. by P. de Lorenzi, 4 vols., Trèves, 1881-83. Humanism. Transla Latin and Italian. The most famous collection of his sermons, Das Narrenschiff (1511, in Latin; translated nine years later by J. Pauli), takes the form of a spiritual exegesis of Brant's poem. On the religious life of his time Geiler's influence was hardly less widespread than that of Tauler. But mysticism was not the only sign of the times. Another factor in the life of these centuries had an equally important share in preparing the ground for the Reformation—namely, humanism, which began, as far as Germany was concerned, with the foundation of the University of Prague in 1347. The chief importance of humanism for Germany lay in the fact that it gave the national life a cosmopolitan character. The use of the Latin tongue, the intercourse between German scholars and the leading Italian humanists, rapidly widened the intellectual horizon of Northern Europe. The translation of Latin and Italian literature received a fresh impetus. Between 1461 and 1478 Niklas von Wyl, Chancellor of Würtemberg, produced Translationen of Enea Silvio, Poggio, Petrarch, and tions from other humanists; and shortly after the middle of the century a certain Arigo, who, with considerable probability, has been identified as Heinrich Leubing of Nürnberg (ca. 1400-72),2 translated Boccaccio's Decamerone and another Italian book, Fiore di Virtù (Blumen der Tugend). Albrecht von Eyb (1420-75), a native of Franconia, who had studied in Italy, wrote in good popular German a still readable Ehestandsbuch (1472)3 on the theme, "ob eim manne sei zu nemen ein elich weibe oder nit," and a Spiegel der Sitten (1474; printed 1511), which is inspired by the liberal ideas of the Italian Renaissance. The same writer also translated the Menaechmi and Bacchides of Plautus, which he appended to the Sittenspiegel. But, with the humanists as with the monks of earlier centuries, Terence was the more popular of the Roman dramatists; the first complete German Terence appeared in 1499, and translations of other Latin and Greek classics were not long in following. The literature of humanism. The original humanistic literature of the fourteenth and 1 Ed. A. von Keller (Stuttg. Litt. Ver., 57), 1861. 2 Cp. K. Drescher, Arigo, eine Untersuchung (Quellen und Forschungen, 86), Strassburg, 1900. The Decameron, ed. A. von Keller (Stuttg. Litt. Ver., 51), 1860. 3 Ed. M. Herrmann, Berlin, 1890. Cp. M. Herrmann, A. von Eyb und die Frühzeit des deutschen Humanismus, Berlin, 1893. |