How can a visionary author, a supporter, or an institutional patron show that a revelation or vision of the afterlife is authentic? As the editors of this volume explain in their concise introductory essay, reports of visionary experiences were always subject to skepticism during the high and late Middle Ages, but these texts were also constantly recopied, revised, collected, excerpted in other genres, represented in other media, and translated into other languages, with the question of their validity being raised anew each time. The central research question the authors address is as follows: What textual, narrative, and media strategies were used to codify, authenticate, and support the authority of visions and other records of transcendental experience?
This volume is not simply the published proceedings of a single conference, but the result of multiple years of research supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft. To the credit of the editors and contributing authors, the result is a cohesive, substantial body of work whose individual chapters each contribute a unique perspective on an overarching research agenda.
The authors have with few exceptions striven for clarity in style, organization, and method. While the authentication strategies of medieval visions may seem to be an inherently other-worldly topic detached from reality, the authors consistently open their essays by contextualizing the particular object of study and demonstrating its significance to larger fields and broader areas of inquiry. Rike Szill’s essay on the twelfth-century Byzantine satire Timarion, for example, shows how its vision of the afterlife and purgatory offers a unique window into relations between Eastern and Western Christianity at a crucial moment in their relations. The essays are also strengthened by their embrace of philology, supporting their interpretive arguments with concrete evidence in the form of specific manuscripts or other artifacts or acts of reception. The essay from Maximilian Benz, for example, pairs discussion of the psychology of religion and religious history, from the devotio moderna to the Reformation, with a study of one late fifteenth-century manuscript (Innsbruck ULB Cod. 979) containing Heinrich Haller’s translations of religious texts, including the Visio Tnugdali and a vision of purgatory attributed to St. Patrick.
The chapters are divided into four sections, beginning with travels to and visions of the afterlife. Hedwig Röckelein’s chapter provides a systematic discussion of the philological complexities of medieval visions and the textual, narrative, and media strategies employed to codify and support their authority. Bernd Roling’s essay on the Protestant visionary Johann Engelbrecht (1599–1642), the latest subject treated in this volume, underscores how the medieval visionary tradition remained influential into the early modern period.
The second set of essays treats the codification of visions in manuscript compendia and early print. This particularly strong section includes the contribution of Patrick Nehr-Baseler on the Visio Tnugdali. Building on the 40 years of research since Nigel Palmer’s study was published, Nehr-Baseler uses print history to investigate the varied fortunes in print of two different translations, showing how one emphasized devotion while the other emphasized social critique.
The third set of essays deals with the authentication of revelations in the context of hagiography. Among this group, Tanja Mattern’s essay addresses Elisabeth of Schönau’s visionary authentication of the relics of St. Ursula and her companions, an event that in turn helped solidify Elisabeth’s similarly contested position as a visionary. The incident illustrates how urgent the question of authentication could be: One risked either honoring false relics or failing to honor true saints (329). Mattern’s essay is one of several that re-examine well-known texts or historical incidents (Uta Kleine’s chapter on English king Henry I’s dream of the tripartite order of society is another), building on the strengths of existing scholarship and adding to it from a fresh perspective.
The final set of essays, including Kleine’s chapter on dreams, focuses on transcendental authorization in political visions. Cornelia Linde, for example, examines the Dominican tertiary Lucia Brocadelli (1476–1544), who offers a particularly interesting case of unauthorized visions. Evidence for the authenticity of Brocadelli’s visions included her display of stigmata, further affirming the status of Catherine of Siena, also a Dominican, canonized in 1461. However, Brocadelli’s fortunes radically declined in 1505 after she outlived her patron, her stigmata became invisible, and the content of her visions proved inconvenient for her order in its rivalry with the Franciscans. While Brocadelli continued to be honored locally and was beatified in the eighteenth century, her autobiography (found only in a manuscript preserved in a Franciscan context) and her autograph revelations (which failed to mention Dominican saints) remained unpublished.
Visionen und ihre Kontexte concludes with a retrospective review by Felicitas Schmieder that highlights commonalities and draws connections between the essays while also pointing to questions left open and unexplored connections to other fields or problem areas still awaiting investigation. Given the solid foundation created by this volume, hopefully, these possibilities for future research will receive serious investigation.
