From the Material to the Mystical in Late Medieval Piety: The Vernacular Transmission of Gertrude of Helfta's Visions By RachaKirakosian, Cambridge University Press. 2021. pp. xviii + 349. $99.99 (hardcover or ebook)

Abstract

Philology, Racha Kirakosian engages with the German versions of Gertrude of Hefta's Legatus divinae pietatis, arguing that each reshaping of the text served its readership as uniquely as did its predecessor. She rejects the notion that the vernacular texts were mere translations and instead refers to them variously as redactions, reshapings, and rewritings. As the Legatus took different shapes-first in Latin and eventually in German-redactors and readers could self-reflectively generate their own devotional meaning from images described in Gertrude's earlier text. Gertrude's descriptions of material objects-a garment or the heart, for example (corporeal images)-could be reimagined in the redactor's and in the reader's own devotional context; hence, a portion of the book's title: From the Material to the Mystical.The Legatus divinae pietatis was composed, at least in part, by Gertrude of Helfta (commonly known as Gertrude the Great) in the Cistercian convent Helfta near Eisleben in about 1300. German redactions began to appear not long afterward. These texts, Latin and German, are the focus of Kirakosian's study.The opening chapters of Kirakosian's study set the scene in which Gertrude's text was produced and transmitted. Chapter 1 ("The Helfta Scriptorium") characterizes the complex and collaborative nature of authorship among the Helfta nuns, drawing particularly on the newly discovered Leipzig Legatus (Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, Ms. 827, fols. 25 v −148 r ), whose special prologue and distinctive structure underscore that reshapings and redactions were applied to the text even before vernacular versions appeared. Chapter 2 ("Redactions within a Dynamic Textuality") first reviews