Philology: Europe's Latin Heritage

“Europe’s cultural heritage is a Latin heritage,” says Professor Katja Weidner. At the same time, she regrets that this heritage – with its vast wealth of sources and texts – has so far received relatively little attention from researchers. “The Classical Latin that we tend to encounter at school accounts for roughly 0.1 percent of all surviving Latin texts produced; everything else dates from the post-Classical period,” explains Weidner, Professor of Medieval Latin Philology, who has been conducting research and teaching at LMU since April of this year.

“Munich is a hub for Medieval Studies”

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Weidner is delighted to have returned to her alma mater, where she studied and earned her doctorate. LMU, she notes, is where Medieval Latin Philology was first established as an academic subject. Munich is also home to the Bavarian State Library, which boasts a vast collection of medieval Latin parchment and paper codices covering a wide array of subjects, ranging from the natural sciences to highly sophisticated literary works.

“And then there’s the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, which is compiling the Dictionary of Medieval Latin,” says Weidner, who has taken on the role of deputy project lead. “Munich really is a hub for Medieval Studies!”

Against this backdrop, she sees her field of research in a key position because this is where texts are studied and critically analyzed – not just from a lexicographical perspective, but also with scholarly editing and specialized philological research.

Medieval visions of the afterlife

Given the sheer volume of surviving sources, Weidner does of course have to establish research priorities. One of these was previously the subject of her doctoral dissertation at LMU, in which she examined medieval texts exploring visions of the afterlife. The works she studied included an account of the sea voyage of Saint Brendan, an Irish abbot who sets out in search of paradise and encounters numerous perils along the way, including monsters and angels on various islands, as well as Judas the betrayer, who is temporarily granted respite from the torments of hell. “This is literature with serious theological aspirations that was passed down, as it were, as a bestseller and was known throughout Europe.”

Latin – the “English” of medieval Europe

Another subject that Katja Weidner explored in her postdoctoral research is the collection known as the Cambridge Songs. This anthology of lyric poetry is comparable to the famous Carmina Burana. However, the Cambridge Songs are around 200 years older, dating back to the 11th century.

Although the collection contains both Latin and bilingual Latin-German poems, including works with theological and historical themes, some parts of the Cambridge Songs appear to have been censored because of their erotic content. Nevertheless, as the philologist explains, “Even poems of this rather bawdy nature were widespread throughout Europe and were read and received accordingly.”

This widespread circulation also reflects the role of Latin as a kind of lingua franca in medieval Europe. “You could say that Latin played a role similar to the role that English plays today. There was a large community of people whose native language was not Latin, but who nevertheless used it in their daily lives – in the liturgy, at court, and at university.” For a long time, Weidner notes, this practice was of course largely confined to educated and privileged groups. This primarily included clerics, but also a considerable number of women.

Women as authors and exegetes

Female authorship is one of the areas of research that Weidner and her team are currently exploring at LMU. Their work focuses on biblical exegesis, which is the interpretation and explanation of the Holy Scripture. “I’m currently working on the Book of Ruth. In this case, I’ve already been able to demonstrate that a nun did not just produce copies of the text but actually wrote parts of the commentary herself.”

Weidner explains that one difficulty she generally encounters is that the names of authors have frequently not been preserved. “We can only ever draw conclusions about this from the evidence that is presented to us.” As a result, when neither the name nor the author’s gender is known, scholars have often simply assumed that the author was male.

“We want to develop methods that will allow us to attribute texts to specific individuals.” To increase the level of research into female authorship, Weidner has already submitted a research proposal for a mixed-methods approach that will combine paleographic, stylistic, and stylometric analyses in an effort to identify the distinctive literary fingerprint of female authors.

Women’s participation in the intellectual discourse of their time

Successfully establishing such authorship would mean nothing less, Weidner argues, than proving that women were systematically engaged in the dominant intellectual discourse of the Middle Ages. After all, the Bible provided the fundamental framework that shaped the way people understood the world around them.

Weidner is convinced that studying these texts could lead to a better understanding of historical developments. “We want to demonstrate the contribution that women made within the corpus of anonymous medieval textual production,” she says, and “so qualify the traditional notion of male intellectual dominance. We would then know that a woman like Hildegard of Bingen did not simply emerge out of nowhere,” Weidner emphasizes. This research could help revise our understanding of the Middle Ages, which would also make it more difficult for the period to be appropriated for ideological purposes. The Middle Ages have acquired growing significance in far-right circles, in particular.

Alexander novel(s)

Before she joined LMU, Weidner was an Associate Professor of Late and Medieval Latin Philology at the University of Vienna.

She has brought the fourth major area of her research with her from Vienna to Munich: the study of the novel known as the “Alexander Romance”. “‘Novel’ is of course a modern term and so is not entirely appropriate. But what we have here is an entertaining text chronicling the life of Alexander the Great – his conquests in the East, his encounters with monsters, and even a journey deep into the sea sitting in a glass diving bell,” Weidner explains.

She and her team are examining the various versions of the novel and studying, among other things, how the recombination of textual passages repeatedly gave rise to new narratives. “We want to understand how monks (and nuns) in monasteries worked with the texts, which elements they chose to emphasize and which they did not, and ultimately what the novel actually is: a theological work, or simply one imaginative story among many.”

A pluralistic Middle Ages

In any case, Weidner argues, it is an open work rather than a book in the modern sense. Copies were therefore regularly updated or amended in some way. One thing that is particularly clear is that the novels were intended to entertain, but at the same time could provide guidance on how to lead a virtuous life and respond to the widely varying interests of their audiences. “Sources show us that medieval Europe was highly pluralistic.” In other words, the Middle Ages were about far more than the familiar gloomy image of monks copying down texts without any imagination.

Great opportunities for collaboration in Medieval Studies

Weidner, who recently also became editor of the Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch, a renowned journal of Medieval Studies, also places considerable emphasis on collaboration in her research. She says that Medieval Studies are particularly well represented at LMU, not least through its Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
“Munich’s Medieval Studies community is unique in Germany,” says Weidner with great delight.