This collection of seventeen essays reveals the beginnings and longue durée of the German-language reception of the Griselda narrative from the fourteenth through the early twentieth century. The publication is based on a bi-national conference that took place at the German-Italian Center, Villa Vigoni, Italy, in April of 2008. Several of the Italian essays were translated into German, and short Italian abstracts for all contributions are included at the end of the volume.
The contributions by Raffaele Morabito, Lucia Battaglia Ricci, and Mario Zanucchi in the first section of the collection focus on the "Italian" sources for the German reception, specifically the complexity and intrinsic ambiguity of the figure of Griselda in Boccaccio's novella in the Decameron, the first example of the tale in its written form, on the one hand, and the semantically narrowed figure of Griseldis in Petrarch's Latin redaction of Boccaccio's story on the other. Petrarch, who admits in his Epistolae seniles that this specific novella fascinated him, creates in his De insigni obedientia et fide uxoris not a simple translation, but something like a second original, an exemplum suis verbis, of Boccaccio's Urtext. Ironically, it is Petrarch's disambiguated Griseldis, a woman full of obedientia and fides, who would become foundational for much of the European and German reception.
The five essays in the second section all discuss examples of the late medieval reception of the narrative. Thomas Klinkert demonstrates how certain gaps of indeterminacy and missing motivations in Boccaccio's text--often mediated through Petrarch's version--inspire relatively original fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian retellings, for example Giovanni Sercambi's De muliere constante. Del Conte Artù, che prese donna a suo modo and the anonymous Cantari di Griselda. Christa Bertelsmeier-Kierst situates the most popular late medieval German version, Heinrich Steinhöwel's Griseldis (1471), within the context of fifteenth-century court culture in southern Germany. Steinhöwel, whose audience was mostly interested in the themes of courtly love and marriage, abandons Petrarch's humanist proemium and moralizing epilogue for his German version. In a later printing probably influenced by French and Burgundian versions, Steinhöwel positions his own narrative of Griseldis after a German translation of Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus so that readers would encounter Griseldis as the new Mary in the hundredth exemplum erlúchter frowen. Ricarda Bauschke deepens our understanding of the late medieval Franco-German intertextualities in the reception of the Griselda figure. In the French reception, which precedes the German reception by about fifty years, the motif is more quickly and organically adapted to existing high medieval narratives centering on love and patience. Nina Allweier discusses Erhart Groß's 1432 Grisardis, the first German adaptation of the motif. Groß, a Carthusian monk, makes emotion, empathy, motherhood, and respectful and mutual marital love the center of his version. His heroine, unlike those in any of his sources or contemporary versions, has psychological depth, is given narrative space to express herself, and grows in her understanding of the religious role of marriage. In the final essay in this section, Ursula Kocher explains how the illustrations accompanying the various versions proved to be just as influential in shaping the reception of the motif as the texts themselves. The illustrations of Heinrich Steinhöwel's popular transformation of Petrarch's version, for example, elevate the figure of Griseldis to that of an exemplary married woman. While illustrators focus on her and the lofty moral ideal she represents, her husband Walter receives considerably less attention.
The short section on the early modern reception contains three essays: Michael Dallapiazza reveals various ways in which Hans Sachs' voracious entrepreneurial spirit transforms Arigo's German Decameron and Steinhöwel's Griseldis into a rather mediocre play, Ein comedi mit 13 personen, die gedultig und gehorsam marggräfin Griselda, hat 5 actus. Achim Aurnhammer discusses another comedy, Georg Mauritius' Comœdia von Graff Walther von Salutz vnd Grisolden, printed in 1606, but performed as one of the annual performances in the renowned Latin school in Steyr, Upper Austria, as early as 1582. Although an expert Latinist, Mauritius probably decided on writing his Comœdia in German to prove that German was expressive enough to serve as a language on the stage. Using Sachs' play as well as the anonymous Augsburg Grysel, Mauritius renders the actions in his sources more psychologically plausible, emphasizes the social difference between courtly and non-courtly characters, and inserts a prologue that infuses the old narrative with historical relevance. Both main characters, Griselda and the Duke, gain in individual definition, and their didactic or moral significance is diminished. Klaus Grubmüller provides an overview of the entire sixteenth-century German reception, including the texts already discussed by several other contributors to the volume, as well as a prose version by Georg Wachter (c. 1530), three additional plays, and two versions in collections of prose anecdotes (Schwankbücher). The various rewritings can usually be understood on the basis of the tensions between Boccaccio's version (via Arigo's German Decameron) on the one hand, and Petrarch's (via Steinhöwel's translation of Petrarch) on the other.
The longest section in the essay collection centers on the reception of the Griselda narrative from Romanticism through Modernity. As with so many medieval narratives on their way to modernity, the ballad genre contributes to the survival of motif and story in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Dieter Martin explains how Ludwig Heinrich von Nicolay (1737-1820), Achim von Arnim (1781-1831), and Gottfried August Bürger (1747-1794) all write poems geared toward bourgeois and popular audiences. However, unlike Nicolay and Bürger, whose versions translate their sources into the realm of literary sensibility and playful humor, respectively, Arnim refuses to gloss over the significant ups and downs of the narrative and writes two different endings, one of which can be read as a provocative palinode based on the discomfort eighteenth-century readers felt about the late medieval and early modern figurations of Griselda. Mario Zanucchi investigates one of the less well-known reinventions of the motif, Otto Heinrich von Loeben's 1819 novella, Markgraf Walther und Griseldis. Loeben chooses to use the popular genre of the legend for his retelling, in which a humble Griseldis corrects Walther's knightly ethos, thus underlining the intimate connection between medieval Christianity and chivalry. Zanucchi sees in Loeben's figuration of Griseldis an attempt to reinvigorate political absolutism through a Christian foundation. Luigi Reitani detects a challenge to the nineteenth-century codes of manly honor and womanly patience in his short reading of Friedrich Halm's Griseldis: Ein dramatisches Gedicht, a tragedy first performed at the Vienna Burgtheater in 1835. Such social and psychological criticism is absent, according to Leonard Keidel, from Gustav Schwab's and Karl Simrock's attempts at historicizing Boccaccio's novella. Under the influence of a mélange of romantic, nationalistic, and philological paradigms, both authors strain to remind the German youth of their Germanic roots in modernized translations (Schwab terms them Volksgeschichten), which are accompanied by explicit didactic commentary. These stories break with the increasing psychological realism in the postmedieval reception and revert back to a more typological Griselda, an aesthetic that also corresponds with the authors' closeness to late Baroque Catholic and Protestant concepts of piety. The final two essays by Peter Sprengel and Rudolf Denk follow the German Griselda reception into the early twentieth century. Sprengel provides a detailed reading of Gerhart Hauptmann's 1909 comedy, Griselda. While unsuccessful with the contemporary theater audiences in Vienna and (especially) Berlin, the play is the most radical rereading of the motif in its long history. Although Hauptmann's Griselda is given astonishing strength and independence, she has to acquire these qualities by submitting to the sexual discretionary power of a man, an antimodernist correction of evolving twentieth-century gender roles perhaps related to Hauptmann's own marital experience. Rudolf Denk finalizes the volume with his essay on Ludwig Berger's 1921 play Griseldis. Ein Volksstück in vier Akten. Denk demonstrates that Berger, who was influenced by his experience with film production and expressionist writing, wants to go beyond Hauptmann's dramatic experiment. Berger's play includes fast- paced changes of scene, features utopian, archetypal, and fairy tale elements, and punctuates the dialogue with bombastic neologisms and radical variations in style. Berger resolves the marital issues between both protagonists by superelevating Griselda to the status of an iconic Virgin of Mercy (Schutzmantelmadonna).
All things considered, I think this expertly edited volume is a valuable addition to examining the longue durée of the postmedieval reception of a widely known late medieval narrative. There is, however, considerable variation in the quality and depth of the contributions (Luigi Reitani's essay disregards all published criticism on Friedrich Halm and is only six pages long; Peter Sprengel's essay on Gerhard Hauptmann is a meticulously researched reading and twenty-nine pages long), perhaps because some scholars extended their original conference presentations while others did not. And not all authors are terminologically fully on board with the editors' theoretical foundation for the volume, i.e., to discuss the various creative metamorphoses of the Griselda narrative based on Norbert Elias' sociological paradigm of "figuration." I would also like to question the self-imposed limitations of the essay collection: its focus on the German-language reception of Boccaccio's and Petrarch's versions and its almost exclusive preference for Italian and German scholarship. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with centering a research project on a national or linguistic tradition, such a concentration should be shown as meaningful. The reception of Griselda and her story, however, is a European (and even a global) phenomenon as the history of scholarship on the topic (von Westenholz, Laserstein, Dawkins, Morabito, Nardone/Lamarque) confirms. While the essays in the volume betray numerous fascinating intertextualities among the various German-language versions and their sources, the focus on one linguistic tradition occludes at least as many fascinating interconnections with other linguistic and cultural lines of reception. (Bauschke's essay is the only one that openly acknowledges, for example, the intimate relationship between the French and German Griselda reception.) These latter interconnections would, in turn, have opened the volume to the kind of comparative transnational observations Stephanie Wodianka recently achieved in her monograph on the reception of Jeanne d'Arc and the Matière de Bretagne (Zwischen Mythos und Geschichte. Ästhetik, Medialität und Kulturspezifik der Mittelalterkonjunktur, 2009), observations a transnational figure like Griselda undoubtedly deserves.
Of course, the editors did achieve a transnational perspective by inviting Italian and German scholars to participate in the project, but this specific transnational perspective had palpably negative consequences on the inclusiveness of the scholarship consulted by the contributors. Of about 320 titles of criticism listed by the authors, only thirty are not in Italian or German, and I can easily think of a number of publications that would have deepened the perspectives of some essays regarding prevalent questions about incest (Louise O. Vasvári, "The Story of Griselda as Silenced Incest Narrative," La Corónica [2007]), domestic violence (Helen Fulton, "The Performance of Social Class: Domestic Violence in the Griselda Story," AUMLA [2006]), or polity (Carolyn P. Colette, Performing Polity: Women and Agency in the Anglo-French Tradition, 1385-1620 [2006], especially, but not exclusively, the chapter on "Political Griselda"). Finally, I wonder why Hedwig Courts-Mahler, although mentioned in the introduction, did not find inclusion. I realize, of course, that her 1916 novel, Griseldis, is an example of corny Trivialliteratur. However, the novel's original popular reception, a 1974 film version (produced by Süddeutscher Rundfunk), an audio book version read by renowned actress Christiane Hörbiger, and various recent dramatic readings by Leipzig author Henner Kotte are evidence of the continuing productive power of late medieval Griselda on contemporary readers, listeners, and viewers. Without an essay on Courts-Mahler, the volume limits itself to the same list of works already mentioned many years ago in Elisabeth Frenzel's encyclopedic Stoff- und Motivgeschichte.