Klaus Nass, ed., 2 vols. (Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Die Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit 10.) Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017. Pp. cxxvi, 747; 2 tables. €198. ISBN: 978-3-4471-0946-8.
The so-called Codex Udalrici (CU), produced in Bamberg around 1125 by the eponymous Udalrich, a custos of the cathedral church there, has long been studied as a collection of literary templates for training scribes, as well as a key repository of important letters and other records relating to high-level imperial politics and the Investiture Controversy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Its complete contents—nearly four hundred texts ranging from royal and papal letters and charters, to epitaphs, formularies, and synodal protocols, as well as documents and correspondence of more local and regional interest—survive in two later twelfth-century copies: one from the abbey of Zwettl (Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. 283), labeled Z, and another from Heiligenkreuz, though perhaps not originally, today in Vienna, Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 398, labeled H. Both appear to descend more or less directly from the (no longer extant) archetype in Bamberg. Five other manuscripts, all of south German or Bavarian provenance as well, contain excerpts from the CU of various lengths, and descend from a separate, but closely related, line of transmission from H and Z. The large number of imperial charters and letters preserved in the collection—many uniquely—once led to speculation that it represented the remnants of an imperial chancellery formulary or archive from the reign of the Salian emperor Henry V (d. 1125). That proposition has been thrown into doubt by more recent scholarship, but questions about the CU's origins, sources, and overall purpose have long been hampered by the lack of a modern critical edition.
Although such an edition was long planned by the MGH and the Institut für österreichische Geschichtsforschung in Vienna, the CU project faced repeated setbacks over the years, leaving researchers to rely on the partial edition published by Philip Jaffé between 1864 and 1873, which, in addition to omitting material that had been published elsewhere, attempted to rearrange the content chronologically and repair supposedly defective readings. Klaus Nass and the MGH have now finally brought this much-anticipated project to a happy conclusion with a complete edition in two volumes containing the collection in its original form (as transmitted in Z and H), including some supplementary texts added in the 1130s. Scholars and students are now able to work with a reliable text reflecting Udalrich's original conception, along with a comprehensive introduction and critical apparatus, concordance tables for previous editions, and several indices for senders and recipients, biblical and literary citations, and proper names and places. Because the full searchable text is available via the dMGH portal, Nass has forgone a traditional vocabulary index.
With the complete work and the original organization of the texts now brought into sharper focus, Nass is able to offer some new insights about the CU's design and purpose. The early- and mid-twentieth century scholarship on the CU's history was complex and contentious at times, with historians and diplomatists clashing over what the collection, and especially the diverse source material upon which Udalrich drew, meant for understanding royal administration, clerical education, and notarial practice in the twelfth century. For his part, Nass is skeptical that the collection's primary purpose was simply teaching the ars dictaminis, or art of composing documents and letters, and that the collection displays a clear interest in the contemporary and historical affairs of both the church and empire (cf. xlv–lii). Indeed, the CU is unique in that it assembles key texts from both sides—papal and imperial—in the Investiture Controversy, and places particular emphasis on episcopal-royal and episcopal-papal relations. Rather than represent a partisan dossier, or mere schoolbook, however, it seeks to delineate the vast horizons, past and present, of the ecclesiastical landscape of the medieval empire, and of the church of Bamberg in particular, underscoring the way in which carefully composed documents and letters remained the fundamental tools for staking one's claims within it. Other contemporary (and equally heterogeneous) collections, like the Tegernseer Briefsammlung (ed. Helmut Plechl, MGH Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit 8, 2002), would repay new examination through a similar lens. As we do so, it will become more apparent how monasteries and cathedral church communities played a key role not only in preserving texts and their memory but in using them to actively imagine, and perhaps reimagine, the contours of a rapidly changing world.
By John Eldevik
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