This summer at Klosterneuburg Stift, I have been doing a little bit of everything. I traced the presence of Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl’s texts in the library’s rich manuscript collection (a task others have done better, admittedly, but I needed to touch the copies). I worked on profiles and database entries for THEEND, our Prague project on 15th-century scribes; tasted wines and worked on my monograph (sometimes at the same time); and, from the suitably lofty vantage point of my rooms in the abbey, attended weddings accompanied by everything from Arabic dance to Irish folk and Balkan music. I also survived what may have been Klosterneuburg’s first 45°C week in several centuries, if not ever, and worked out my legs climbing up and down the abbey, in a sort of physical-mystical exercise.
Most importantly, I spent time with the topic that has been making me happiest lately: the late-medieval Ars Moriendi – which, given the subject, is perhaps a slightly questionable choice of words.
I had hoped to find copies of the Speculum artis bene moriendi. I found none. Instead, I stumbled upon a short anonymous German text in Cod. 1065 (ff. 181r–190v), dated to around 1472–1473. The text initially made me think of the literature flourishing around the pseudo-Anselmian Admonitio morienti, with its dialogic questions addressed to the dying. But this one is rather different: more than a dialogue, it reads as a dramatic first-person lament by a sinner suddenly confronted with an unprepared death. It paraphrases Wisdom 5:6–16, dwells painfully on time that has been wasted and can no longer be recovered (yes – this definitely made me think of my academic deadlines), and eventually turns to the people gathered around the deathbed. It feels almost like a small piece of devotional theatre, in which the dying man becomes a preacher to the living. The text’s close relationship to Thomas Peuntner’s Kunst des heilsamen Sterbens is especially striking (and incidentally a work by Peuntner follows immediately afterwards in the same codex).
And then there is the Speculum, which stubbornly refused to appear. If Monica Brînzei and I are right (but also other, more illustrious scholars from the past) about its origin into the academic milieu of 15th-century Vienna, its absence from Klosterneuburg’s collection might perhaps be a tiny indication that its earliest circulation was more academic than monastic.
In sum, Klosterneuburg was a wonderfully total experience: I actually lived inside the abbey, occasionally dragged my 7-year-old son Gregorio to look at dusty manuscripts (he preferred the maps and bestiaries, of course), and enjoyed an extraordinary freedom of consultation thanks to the generous library staff. No chains, no ceremony – almost a medieval libraria: the real thing! Only with better wine.
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