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III

By way of conclusion, it is worth pausing to consider the question of how Johannes' anthology migrated from Thuringia to the Tirol. Walter Senn


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adopts the romantic but wholly unsubstantiated view that the book was acquired by Oswald von Wolkenstein during his travels, and that the minnesinger bequeathed it to the monks at Neustift when he died in August, 1445.[24] Similarly, Wolfgang Michael, who has long been intrigued by the possible influence of Goliardic verse on the development of German religious drama, speculates that the playbook may have been carried south by wandering scholars.[25] Although it is true that the Ludus de resurrectione concludes with St. John's plea to the audience to donate "braten / schuldern und ouch vladen" to the hungry students in their midst (ll. 1176-77), the three plays are all conceived on such a vast and elaborate scale as to make them totally unsuitable for performance by a small troupe of vagantes. Indeed, Hartl (pp. 130-131) and Neuhauser (p. 5) are correct to point out that a reference to the prayers of "dy pristere und dy schulere alle" in the exhortation by St. John cited above (l. 1183) suggests that the play was staged by a monastic schola cantorum.

There is no need to invent such colorful intermediaries as minstrels or vagantes, however, if one accepts the more mundane premise that the Augustinians at Neustift simply acquired the plays from brothers of their own order in Thuringia. During the fourteenth century, the Augustinians enjoyed a period of great expansion throughout central Europe. Even as early as 1300 the order had over forty houses in Germany. It is surely not without significance that two of the oldest and most prominent Augustinian houses were those at Gotha and Schmalkalden, in the very heart of the region which produced not only the three plays in Innsbruck Universitätsbibliothek Cod. 960, but also a number of similar plays now preserved elsewhere.[26] What is more, there is considerable evidence of direct contact between Thuringia and various Tirolian monasteries throughout the period in question. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, for example, numerous clerics from central Germany served as bishops, abbots, and provosts in the Tirol, including such a distinguished figure as Nicholas of Cusa, who was bishop of Brixen from 1450 to 1458.[27] Walter Neuhauser (pp. 13, 18, n. 29 and 30) records the names of several scribes who found their way from central Germany to Tirolian monastic scriptoria, and notes that a certain "Georg, genannt der Heuss" (the Hessian) resided at Neustift in 1384. Taken together, this evidence suggests that although the plays in the Innsbruck codex may not have been originally


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composed by or for monks,[28] it is quite likely that they were collected in the vicinity of Schmalkalden by Augustinians who eventually carried their small anthology south to their sister house at Neustift bei Brixen.

It has recently been argued that because every new performance of a play is tantamount to the creation of a new textual variant, it is unreasonable to criticize editors who propose fanciful, if dramatically effective, emendations of the manuscripts which we have inherited. According to this line of reasoning, it is not the individual extant text, but rather the dramatic tradition itself—a process predicated on constant variation from performance to performance—which is the legitimate object of critical attention:

Therefore, even if the same man composed the baker's speech and the speeches of the other tradesmen [in the estates satire of the Easter play], even if he wrote them on the same page, all that is irrelevant. The tradition allows them to be broken up and placed anywhere in the manuscript or in a production of the play where they seem appropriate. . . . Hartl's edition of the Innsbruck Easterplay, then, is not wrong; it is no more than an indication of another potential variation, which Hartl transforms into a real variation by creating a text. . . .[29]
Few would argue that later adaptations and performances are unworthy of study in their own right. Nor can it be claimed that codicological evidence alone enables one to make definitive pronouncements about a playwright's intentions or about how a play may have been staged at any given performance. Nevertheless, it remains true that manuscript studies can teach us a great deal about the origin and transmission of medieval plays.[30] Moreover, as this study has attempted to demonstrate, the analysis of scribal errors can be an especially useful test to help us decide whether a copyist was acting as an independent redactor or as a scrupulous transcriber of texts which, to him at least, seemed authoritative, complete, and performable exactly as they had come to his hand. In the present case, the palpable embarrassment of the scribe who crossed out his own errors on fol. 38r, only to be mocked for his carelessness by a later reader, testifies to the fact that the maker of the Innsbruck playbook understood that his task was not to alter or improve his source, but to preserve it. While directors and actors must indeed be free to manipulate texts in order to serve their own theatrical purposes, historians and editors can surely do no less than adhere to the same strict standards of textual fidelity which Johannes and his peers adopted for themselves.