APPENDIX—
ALBRECHT VON EYB AND THE LEGEND OF ST. ALBAN

Two medieval legends that strike us for their radical exemplariness provide interesting points of contact with the culture of courtliness in its diverse ramifications. I refer to the Germanic versions of the convergent legends of St. Alban (Albanus, “Albanuslegende ”) and Saint Gregory (Gregorius). The former is extant, besides its Latin originals, in at least a German and a Dutch version, and was later included in the Ehebuch of Albrecht von Eyb (1420–1475), the humanistically educated German cleric best remembered for the first German manual of rhetoric, the Petrarca-based Margarita. The Albanus legend has been expertly studied in its Latin, German, and Dutch versions by Karin Morvay (1977), but without much attention to the analogous, though literally unrelated story of Gregorius.

The widespread hagiographic motif of Gregorius reverberated in several versions from an anonymous twelfth-century French text, the entirely fictional Vie du Pape Grégoire (no reference to any of the historical popes by that name), to Hartmann von Aue's (b. 1160-d. after 1210) four-thousand-line poem, Gregorius (probably 1187–1189, or 1195 at the latest), for which the motif is principally known, and finally Thomas Mann's novel Der Erwählte (1951), acknowledging Hartmann as immediate source. Neither the well-known British legend of St. Gregory the Great from the abbey of Whitby,^[1] nor the St. Alban associated with the monastery of St. Alban in England, nor the Sant'Albano of a fourteenth-century Tuscan manuscript (Riccardiano 2734) bears any relation to our stories.^[2] The Albanuslegende is a much more articulated

elaboration of the motif inherent in the Gregory legend, without reference to the life of any pope. In narrative richness it is superior to any other version, including the celebrated one by Hartmann.^[3] The name, Alban, which curiously enough appears only at the very end of the text, is clearly related to the contiguous citation from Psalm 50,9: “et supra nivem dealbabo” (“dealbari” in the text).

What makes the two legends worthy of attention within the context of the foregoing investigation is the presence of important courtly and chivalric elements, both in the patterns of external behavior and in the deeper moral and religious motivation.^[4] Our legendary texts share the combination of these elements with a body of literature which spans the hagiographic and the genuinely literary, in a way that exemplifies the deep moral and even theological concerns lying in the background—and sometimes coming directly into the foreground—of some of the most vital literature of courtliness and courtesy. Furthermore, some elements of Eyb's version in particular testify to the continuity of the medieval tradition which underlies the Renaissance treatises of manners, so that it appears relevant for the study of both sides of our dual subject insofar as our subject joins chivalry and manners.^[5]

The Gregorius/Albanus core stories were exempla of God's infinite mercy, since the most horrible sins can be forgiven after sincere repentance and proper atonement. Their theme displayed the most tragic criminal infractions on the canvas of the classical Oedipus complex. Hartmann's Gregorius (named both Grigorss and Gregorius in Mann's novel) is born of the incestuous union of brother and sister, who are presented as models of courtly conduct and serve as examples of the danger of yielding to the demands of the courtly code without a sense of discretion and restraint by measure, as the deeply moral Hartmann often attempted to demonstrate in his romances. The father is overcome by remorse and departs on a Crusade, meeting his death on the way. The mother decides to entrust the child to God's care and sends him floating downstream in a little boat. An abbot finds him and raises him with loving care, but, like Perceval, Gregorius feels an irresistible calling to become a knight, and his chivalrous wanderings will bring him to save a lady who has been robbed of her domain. She rewards him with her love and they marry, only to discover that she is his mother. We have, thus, a situation of double incest. Gregorius embarks on a life of penance and spends seventeen years with fettered feet on a rock set in a lake in a wild region (hence the title of the later Volksbuch version, “Gregorius auf dem Steine”). Two Roman wise men arrive with the

mission of fetching him for the papal throne, since God has manifested His choice of this holy hermit as His next vicar on earth. The mother comes to Rome seeking absolution from the new pope and both spend the remainder of their lives in deep piety, thus obtaining divine forgiveness for their sins and those of the father.

The educational burden of the story is analogous to that of the previous Erek, in which Hartmann, expanding on Chrétien de Troyes's Erec et Enide, had stressed the virtuous elements in the knightly code and condemned the disregard for measure (mâze ) as a violation of self-restraint. Shortly after its composition, Gregorius was translated into Latin under the title Gesta Gregorii peccatoris ad penitenciam conversi et ad papatum promoti by the abbot Arnold von Lübeck, who imitated the German meter. One can wonder whether this abbot's text was known to his later fellow-Lübeckian, Mann. A fourteenth-century manuscript at Munich preserves another free Latin translation in hexameters. The legend became popular once again in a new German prose version that produced a Volksbuch, first published in 1471 as Gregorius auf dem Steine and reprinted several times thereafter.^[6] The date of printing is witness to its respected position in the public eye, since at such an early date printers would not easily risk commercial failure by picking less than sure sellers. In Mann's version the chivalrous motivation is once again played up as psychological setting for the adventurous instincts that lead Grigorss, first to save his unknown mother, lady Sibylla, from her enemies, and then to marry her, with most of the principal events adhering closely to Hartmann's plot.

While factually quite different and more complex, the Albanus legend of Eyb's Ehebuch carries the same moral and theological message, inserted into an ample discourse on marriage. It is therefore not too surprising that sometimes Eyb's Albanus has been mistakenly identified as Gregorius-related: a fourteenth-century manuscript already used the title De Albano for the legend of Gregorius (Morvay 161). The story is entered as one of three novellas, which include the Marina-Novelle, a story of hard-won fidelity between husband and wife, and that of the tragic love between Ghismunda and Guiscardo from Boccaccio's Decameron (“Guiscard und Sighismunda” in Eyb).^[7]

In this story of Christian salvation through the example of a “Christian Oedipus,” Eyb declares his intentio auctoris thus: “I shall write about a certain hauptsünder who killed father and mother, wife and sister, and having unknowingly committed the sin of incest with his mother and sister did in the course of time perform such great penance

as to be numbered among the saints . . . . By this story everyone is to understand that no sinner, however great and enormous his faults may be, should give himself up to despair.”^[8]

The characters are the emperor's family, in a central European setting. The original incest (recorded in detail in the Gesta Romanorum ) is “‘trimmed and pruned’ in order to emphasize the motive of penance in the second part of the story all the more,”^[9] but from the narrative point of view the situation is completely reworked. The protagonists of the first incest are not brother and sister, as they were in some preceding versions, but the emperor and his daughter. As the story goes, a widowed emperor falls in love with his beautiful daughter, who reminds him of his lost beloved wife. The father wants to kill the child of this illfated union, but the mother persuades him to send the infant out of the country, to be abandoned with a purse at his neck containing a precious ring. A peasant couple finds him on the road in Hungary and delivers him to the king's court, where he grows up as a favorite courtier and knight.^[10] When the news spreads that, to ensure the succession to the throne, the aging emperor is seeking a spouse for his daughter, the king of Hungary sends Albanus as the most suitable bridegroom. Only on his deathbed does the king of Hungary reveal to Albanus that he is his adopted son. He gives him the purse with the ring, which soon will prove his true identity to his wife/mother/sister. Together with the emperor himself, the couple decide to retire from the world and lead a life of atonement. The bishop sends them to a holy hermit, who assigns them to a hermitage on top of a deserted mountain. After seven years they descend in search of the hermit to terminate their period of seclusion but they lose their way and have to spend the night in the wilderness, Albanus perched in surveillance on top of a tree. As daylight breaks he is horrified to note that his parents have not been able to resist the temptation and are once again joined in an incestuous embrace under the tree. He climbs down in an uncontrollable rage and slays them both. Overcome with grief and shame, he returns to the mountain for seven more years of penance. But the legend of his tragic destiny and saintly atonement has spread over the land, and when a new ruler is to be chosen the people ascend the mountain and beg him to be their leader. He declines and decides to end his life as a holy hermit, but is finally slain by a party of bandits. His corpse, floating down a river, is caught under the wheel of a mill, and when lepers come to cleanse themselves by the waters nearby, they are miraculously healed. The corpse is discovered and Albanus's saintly nature is thus revealed to all the people.

We have noted that the two legends share common motifs. At Eyb's hands what had been in Hartmann a devout Christian poem of salvation, a christliche Erlösungsdichtung, became an equally exemplary though differently plotted novella of salvation, Erlösungs-Novelle. Hartmann's version is close to the later Volksbuch as well as a host of tales, both folkloric and literary, extant in many languages, including Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Middle English, Polish, Russian, Bulgarian (the legend of Paul of Cesarea), Serbian (the story of Simeon, of which Jacob Grimm pointed out the relationship with the Gregorius legend), and Coptic (the story of Armenios).^[11]

All, except Hartmann's, were apparently derived from a prose story embedded into chapter 81 of the Gesta Romanorum, which A. van der Lee found to hark back to an original Latin moral exemplum. There are three other early versions, two in fourteenth-century French and one in Italian in a Florentine manuscript of 1399.^[12] The widely circulating Gesta Romanorum was first published in Germany (Cöln: Ulrich Zell, 1473, followed by two other editions within the next three years), precisely when Eyb was working on the different version of the story. The compilation, originally put together toward 1300, was characterized by a moralizacio appended to each story and containing a multilayered, fancifully shifting set of mystical allegorizations. Under the title “De mirabili divina dispensatione et ortu beati Gregorii papae,” chapter 81 offered an exegesis of the emperor and his sister as representing Christ and the soul, with the son Gregorius standing for mankind: again, Christ is the knight who frees the mother from the devil and then marries her, that is, the Church. The knightly and chivalric element plays a large role in Gregorius's career.

The abridged version of the St. Alban legend contained in chapter 244 of the Gesta Romanorum is noteworthy for the lower stylistic quality, the pervasive ungrammaticality, and the lack of clarity in the narrative. The moralitas that concludes it is particularly inept and confused, without the appeal to Christological symbols that marks so many of the earlier chapters, including chapter 81 on St. Gregory.^[13] The running moralizations of this theme combine Christian motifs with the more universal Oedipal matter of the son replacing the father at the side of the earth mother, in the anthropological cycle of life and death, fertility and regeneration.

The literature on this extensive body of ideally related texts is large, and much of it of difficult access. The texts can be grouped by independent clusters of variations, all stemming from a prehistoric concern with incest. Eyb's version shows similarities with the Italian legend of Ver-

gogna, studied by Alessandro D'Ancona. Reinhold Köhler (1869) called attention to the Latin Vita Sancti Albani by the papal chancery secretary Transmundus as the source of a German poem of shortly after 1186, from the Moselle region, extant only in fragments.^[14] The most widespread text was the somewhat streamlined one that appears in the Gesta Romanorum (chap. 244 of the Oesterley edition).

Let us now take a look at Eyb's career.^[15] Born August 24, 1420, in Schloß Sommersdorff near Ansbach (Franken), he died July 24, 1475 in Eichstätt. In the fall of 1444 he began to study law at Pavia, where he received his doctorate utriusque iuris on February 7, 1459, and where he met Gasparino Barzizza, Manuel Chrysoloras, Maffeo Vegio, Lorenzo Valla, and Francesco Filelfo. His mentor, the law teacher Baltasar Rasinus, introduced him to ancient rhetoric and moral philosophy. The intervening years also brought him to Bologna, Padua, and back to Bologna. Eyb moved about in the circle of the famous humanist Pirckheimer, a fellow Franconian, who was in Bologna at that time. He returned to Bamberg in 1451 in order to seek a term of residence in view of a canonry and archdeaconry in the local cathedral. The pursuit of such benefices was to cost him severe harassment from the hostile bishop of Würzburg, John III, in the fall of 1462, but it was crowned with success three or four years later, after the bishop's death. In 1460 he returned for good to Eichstätt, by now an established center of humanistic studies. Late in 1462 he embarked on a fourth journey to Italy to plead for his rights as a canon. As a cleric in lower orders he practiced canon and civil law while canon (Domherr) in the cathedral chapters of Bamberg and Eichstätt, cubicularius of Pope Pius II after 1458, and archdeacon of Iphofen after 1465, in addition to other minor ecclesiastical benefices.

In his younger years, Eyb translated two Plautine comedies, the Bacchides and the Menaechmi, as well as Ugolino da Parma's Latin comedy Philogenia, into German. From Italy he brought back extensive notebooks with ancient and humanistic literary and juridical materials, some of which are extant in manuscript form. Of the several works that he composed, starting in 1451, some appear to be the earliest humanistic writings in Germany. The following tracts have remained unpublished, except for excerpts (especially in Herrmann): De Eucharistiae Sacramento laudatio; Tractatus de speciositate Barbarae puellae (Bamberg, 1452, leaning on Piccolomini's Euyalus et Lucretia); Appellatio mulierum Bambergensium (a satire leaning on Leonardo Bruni); Ad laudem et commendationem Bambergae oracio (reputed to have opened

the German tradition of city-praise in humanistic form);^[16] and An uxor viro sapienti sit ducenda (Bayrische Staatsbibliothek München, Cod. Lat. Mon. 650, fols. 47–72; first nucleus of his later Spiegel ). His major works were printed during his lifetime, namely: the Margarita poetica, the Ehebuch or Ehebüchlein, and the Spiegel der Sitten.^[17] The Margarita (1459–1464) was published in 1472, with a last, fifteenth edition, in 1503. A good handbook on rhetoric, it comprises some thirty discourses, some of them from Petrarca's Re remediis in the third part. The Ehebuch (1471), also printed in 1472, leaned on the “Ehekapitel” in Der Ackermann aus Böhmen and Francesco Barbaro's De re uxoria. Compared with the Margarita, basically a compilation, the Ehebuch displays a notable degree of originality, and is regarded as one of the finest texts of German prose for its century. It is this work that makes of Eyb the originator of the typically German literary genre of treatises on marriage (cf. R. Koebner 1911). Eyb's last work was the less successful Spiegel der Sitten, a compilation in the guise of a mirror of manners but with a definitely moralistic orientation. Composed in 1472–1474, it was printed in 1511.

German scholarship has generally been inclined to interpret Eyb's works as part of the earliest German humanism. The most extensive non-German study on this prolific writer, by J. A. Hiller, has given a contrary interpretation that stresses his medieval, moralizing tendencies and sources. This is not the place to discuss Eyb's role in the growth of German humanism, but it seems otiose to deny a strong humanistic influence in a man who was so close, and for so long, to such leading authorities of humanism, including Pius II. The matter that concerns us specifically may be an example of the moral and religious commitment that kept both early and mature German humanists clinging to certain medieval traditions, as is typical of much of northern Christian humanism.

The Latin sources carefully traced by K. Morvay for the Albanus legend hail back to around 1300, with the extant manuscripts coming mostly from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but the German versions, probably translations at their point of origin, go back to around 1200. The legend was fortunate enough to receive the attention of a master editor of the stature of Karl Lachmann, who first entered the field of scientific research on the subject by publishing in 1836 a verse fragment of the legend from the Lower Rhine, without being able to identify the legend any further. Around 1400 Andreas Kurzmann, a poet presumably from the Salzburg area, composed an elaborate Ger-

man poem on the legend which offers what is perhaps the most extensive presentation of the material. Eyb's prose text, about half the length of Kurzmann's poem, remains quite close to the earliest prose versions in Latin.

K. Morvay speculates (esp. p. 154) that the legend may have originated in the milieu of the Roman Curia around 1186, at the time of the confrontation with Barbarossa concerning Church versus state rights, and that the exemplary sinfulness at the imperial court as depicted in the legend may be meant to reflect on Barbarossa's court. Practically all the principal versions, identified by Morvay as MS. groups A, B, and C (C being the basis for chap. 244 of the Gesta Romanorum ), begin textually with the phrase “Habitavit quidam aquilonis in partibus imperator,” which would clearly refer to the German imperial court, seen as a “northern” one from Rome. Important early versions are traceable to Italy and perhaps to the circle of the first teachers of cursus as a trademark of the papal curia, namely Albertus de Morra (Pope Gregory VIII in 1187, the last year of his life) and especially magister Transmundus, a papal protonotary under Pope Alexander III (d. 1181) who wrote a summa dictaminis in the form of a collection of letters which included the heterogeneous text of the Albanus legend. Critics have speculated on the stylistic connections of the legend with the Roman Curia on the basis of its strict textual adherence to the Roman cursus.^[18] In her apparently well documented analysis of this notarial material, Sheila J. Heathcote concludes that the Albanus legend did not belong to the original Transmundus collection, but according to Morvay (152) this does not exclude the possibility that Transmundus was also the author, at a later time.^[19]

The dates of Albertus de Morra's and Transmundus's activity at the Curia, to wit, 1178–1187, would provide a time frame of 1178–1190 for the legend, on the basis of its close adherence to those dictatores' rules about the use of the cursus. An additional dimension of the narrative lies in the theological point made about the practice of sacramental confession by the three imperial characters involved in the common sin—a powerful motif at a time of frequent excommunications and public atonements by German rulers. Furthermore, we note that while the legitimate rulers are in spiritual retreat carrying out the penance imposed on them by the bishop and the hermit, two bishops take over the political authority as acting rulers, for both the empire and the kindgom of Hungary. This was obviously an attractive solution for the Guelf ecclesiastical circles. At a somewhat later time, the legend became popu-

lar in Czechoslovakia, a phenomenon recently studied by Emma Urbánková and related to the aggressive policies of the Bohemian King and Roman Emperor Charles IV, also possibly in connection with the planned marriage of his son Sigismund (Morvay 155).

The legend of St. Alban as we have it has served a multiple function, ending with universal moral preaching but possibly starting with a political context, while it never bore a genuine hagiographic stamp (no cult of such a saint is documented, and the legend never entered into the ritual). The possible political aim, which interests us as part of the struggle between the secular ideals of proper education for public servants and the contrasting ones from ecclesiastical circles, might have been to expose the dangers of grave moral corruption in high temporal (indeed, imperial) spheres at the time of the alliance between the Hohenstaufens and the house of Norman Italy through the betrothal and then marriage of Henry VI and Constance of Sicily (Dante's “Costanza imperatrice”). This union was to bring the Hohenstaufens to Italy and to a position of hedging in the papal state from both sides. Thus the reference to the “partes aquilonis” meant exactly the German emperor, with Hungary being his close neighbor and eventual ally. This heightened ecclesiastical awareness of Guelf inspiration and background may have found its veiled polemical form in a fable of multiple incest in very high places, with powerful moral overtones couched in the effective literary garb of the Roman cursus.^[20]

In the Ehebuch we note a moral terminology that echoes some basic concepts of courtesy. Zucht, good breeding, is coupled with erberkeit (= Ehrbarkeit) in zucht und erberkeit, to mean “chastity and honor” (17, 32, 63, 92). Messigkeit (MHG mâze), weysheit, and stetigkeit, all often recurring terms, are also combined in the expression messig stete weyse menschen (90) for temperate, loyal, and prudent at the same time. Magnanimity (grossmuetigkeit ) is invoked, too (22, 57, 70, 90, 92), at least once with reference to the ruler. It is to be noted that the moral terminology in question was then undergoing a semantic shift from the medieval emphasis on external qualities to more inner ones: from the denotation of manners indicating good breeding, zuht (zucht) was becoming a sign for inner purity (equal to Keischheit, Reinheit, “chastity”), and erberkeit was similarly turning from respectability as a consequence of social approval to a sign of true “honor” by purity of conscience.

The Spiegel der Sitten is arranged according to the capital sins and has strong words against avarice and greed, whose opposite virtues are

generosity (miltigkait ), kindness, compassion, and affability (fols. xiii-xiv of the “Vorred”). It also reviews the qualities required of the civil servant and statesman, as part of the detailed analysis of each social class. Gute sitten, “good mores,” are declared to be the overarching goal of the ruling classes; knights in particular ought to distinguish themselves by magnanimity, honesty, good manners, modesty, sobriety, and devotion to the cause of peace and unity (fol. 108). Modesty (scham ), we have seen, generally carried a meaning similar to Castiglione's vergogna, that is, consideration toward others, though in Eyb the frequent term shemig generally has the connotation of Christian modesty.

Being apparently aware of the lesser role of knighthood at a time of ascendancy for the burgher class, Eyb entered a typical debate between the nobleman Celerius and the commoner Flaminius competing for the hand of the noble virgin Lucretia whom they both woo. Eyb declares that the commoner deserves victory because he can show himself more noble, edel, by being possessed of greater virtue, wisdom, and public spiritedness. Lucretia, who wanted to marry the “nobler” of the two, appears to agree and makes her choice even without need of her father and the Senate's concurring opinions (fols. 103–110).

In 1470, just a couple of years before Eyb started composing this Spiegel der Sitten, there came to light the earliest vernacular compilation of selected Italian humanistic writings in German, the Translationen oder Teutschungen by Niclas von Wyle. It included a rendering of Buonaccorso da Montemagno the Younger's Disputatio de nobilitate (perhaps shortly before 1429, the year of the author's death at the age of thirty-seven or thirty-eight), in which Lucretia, after listening to the pleadings by an ancient Roman patrician and a plebeian, gives her hand to the latter as the “nobler” of the two, because he had pursued the path of virtue by studying letters and Greek philosophy and had then decided to use his acquired excellence by serving the commonwealth in public office and on the battlefield. As Hans Baron has reminded us,^[21] the enormous success of this exemplar of civic humanism growing out of Leonardo Bruni's circle did not prevent its imitators outside Italy from expressing their hesitation toward what, in less burgherly climates, could sound downright subversive. In the 1481 English version by John Tiptoft (printed by Caxton) and in the earliest English secular drama, Henry Medwall's Fulgens and Lucres (ca. 1497), the audience was warned not to take the outcome of this debate as a critique of the excellence of hereditary nobility. Similarly, Wyle's German version

ended the debate without a conclusion, leaving the decision to the addressee, Graf Eberhard of Württemberg, a true lord endowed with the true qualities of a nobleman, that is, the author spells out, wealth, virtue, and a pedigree of humanistic imprint, going back to no less than Abraham, Aeneas, and Romulus. Baron does not mention Eyb, but clearly the Lucretia of the Spiegel is no other than Buonaccorso's disputed young lady, and it is remarkable that Eyb shows to have overcome the northern tendency to disregard or downplay the Italian original's popular, antiaristocratic sympathies.

The systematic moral catalog of the Spiegel der Sitten can be compared with the analogous vernacular texts of the genre of specula morum and its German derivative, Standeslehre, or rules of social life, including the popular “bürgerliche Sittenlehre,” Der Renner (1300), by Hugo von Trimberg (ca. 1230–ca. 1313), schoolmaster in the abbey school of St. Gandolf near Bamberg; the Thuringian priest Johannes Rothe's (1360–1434) Ritterspiegel (after 1410); and the South Tyrolean knight Hans Vintler's Die Pluemen der Tugent (Die Blumen der Tugend, 1411, printed 1486), derived, as the title indicates, from the anonymous Italian Fiore di virtù (Bologna, 1313–1323). Although Vintler's Pluemen displayed a particular severity against the vices of the nobility, the author must have been exposed from his youth to the charms of the chivalric tradition: his family's castle, Runkelstein (near Bolzano), was famous for its frescoes illustrating Tristan and other romances.^[22] Another work by Rothe, which was given the title Von der stete ampten und von der fursten ratgeben by its nineteenth-century editor A. F. C. Vilmar, deals with the organization of state councils and the duties and functions of counselors.

The texts we have glanced at, even so cursorily, manifest the inextricability of social, political, religious, and ethical motifs in enduring literary traditions that crossed so many chronological and geographic boundaries; these multiple dimensions cannot be fairly analyzed without taking into account their everpresent chivalric elements.