Few manuscripts can claim to hold as much interest for students of
early German religious drama as Innsbruck Universitätsbibliothek Cod.
960, the so-called "Innsbrucker Spielhandschrift."[1] The manuscript, which consists of
sixty
undecorated paper leaves filled with narrowly spaced verse, is essentially
the work of a single scribe known to us only as "Johannes," who according
to his own testimony copied out the entire book during a period of about
two weeks late in the summer of 1391.[2] Despite its rather unprepossessing
appearance, the Innsbruck codex is a rare treasure in that it preserves a
complete fourteenth-century playbook containing three highly innovative
vernacular dramas: a unique tripartite play depicting the preaching of the
Apostles, the Assumption of the Virgin, and the conquest of the Jews (fols.
1r-34v); a justly famous Easter play (fols. 35v-50r); and a spectacular
processional play designed for
the feast of Corpus Christi (fols. 51r-59r).
The manuscript is all the more remarkable for two other reasons. In
the first place, each of the plays in the book is the earliest extant complete
work of its kind.[3] Secondly, each
play manifests such theatrical, musical, and literary
sophistication as to deserve extensive critical attention in its own right.
Indeed, a recent bibliography of studies devoted to the three plays in
Innsbruck Cod. 960 runs to more than two hundred and thirty items.
[4] Despite a healthy tradition of
scholarly
interest in its contents, however, Walter Neuhauser's introduction to the
facsimile edition of the manuscript remains one of the very few
paleographical or codicological analyses of the book itself. The purpose of
the present study, then, is to enlarge upon Neuhauser's meticulous
description of Innsbruck Universitätsbibliothek Cod. 960 by showing
that the physical condition of the manuscript still has a great deal to tell us
about the history of the three plays and their association with one another,
about the way medieval readers responded to the allegedly disordered or
fragmentary state of the plays, and about the process which may have
brought the texts from their native Thuringia to their
final home in the Tirol sometime between 1391 and 1445.
