Dichtung und Musik im frühneuzeitlichen Aschkenas is an edition, with a detailed commentary, of the “Wallich Manuscript,” a sixteenth-century manuscript that is one of the most important manuscripts of early Yiddish. The manuscript contains more than sixty folksongs, parodies, and Purim plays. It is an important witness to the breadth of the Yiddish folksong tradition of the time, as well as an important source for variants of well-known German and Dutch folksongs.
Volume 1 of the edition has an introduction to the manuscripts that focuses on the manuscripts themselves--their date, paleography, etc.--and the edition itself. Diana Matut gives the text in facing-page Roman transcription and Hebrew-letter text. The decision to present the edition this way makes sense given its importance to several folksong traditions, as it makes the texts easily accessible to anyone who can read Early New High German and Early Modern Dutch, but who is unlikely to have worked with Yiddish texts before. The first volume also contains indices for the personal names, geographical locations, and Hebrew and Aramaic elements found in the songs.
The second volume consists of a set of further introductory remarks on the collection and its genesis (9-38), the manuscript in the context of the musical culture of the seventeenth century (39-62), reconstructing the musical notation for the songs (63-76), and the language of the manuscript (77-98). These introductory chapters are followed by a detailed commentary on the folksongs and plays. The commentaries on the texts range from brief one-or-two-paragraph comments to twenty-five-and-thirty-page commentaries that are like small monographs on the texts. The second volume also has indices for people, places, and subjects mentioned in the commentary.
The subjects encountered in the texts are in many cases the expected Jewish ones, such as the Purim plays, but also a much broader range of topical and traditional German and Dutch songs recast in Yiddish: text 6, for instance, is a version of a German song about the siege of the Protestant city of Magdeburg from 1550-51; text 54 is a version of the “Younger Hildebrandslied,” which is part of a well-known German heroic cycle; and text 55 is about the Dutch leader William of Nassau.
Matut’s Dichtung und Musik im frühneuzeitlichen Aschkenas is an excellent edition that is of importance to scholars working on Yiddish folksong and folk drama, but also to scholars working on German and Dutch folksong traditions as well. My only complaint about the books is that they are not up to Brill’s usual high standards of bookmaking, and have instead the look of book-on-demand books. But that, clearly, is not the author’s fault. She has given us a first-rate work of scholarship, and that, ultimately is the most important thing.
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[Review length: 450 words • Review posted on March 5, 2012]