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Article Excerpt
Sometime between 776 and 786, (1) a nun of Anglo-Saxon origin, at the Bavarian double monastery of Heidenheim, composed the Lives of two of her kin, SS Willibald and Wynnebald. As a woman following the conventions of her time, she left the works anonymous, but as an early Carolingian writer, influenced by the teachings of Boniface, she inscribed her name cryptically in a space between her two texts. The nun's secret was long hidden; as recently as 1896, Lina Eckenstein wrote, `Her name is lost, it is as the anonymous nun of Heidenheim that she has come down to posterity.' (2) After almost twelve hundred years of anonymity, her cryptogram was deciphered by Bernhard Bischoff in 1931. Having the name `Hugeburc' to place alongside other self-references in her prefaces, Bischoff entitled the brief article announcing his discovery `Wer ist die Nonne von Heidenheim?' (3) Her name, though, is only a partial answer, and Bischoff's question has implications that extend beyond even an enquiry into the concrete details of her life. (4) Walter Benjamin has written, `traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel'. (5) Through a study of the Vita Willibaldi, this paper considers Hugeburc as a storyteller who leaves traces of herself and her culture in her writing.
Hugeburc's most literal representation of herself in her writing is deliberately obscure. Inserted between her Vita Wynnebaldi abbatis Heidenheimensis and Vita Willibaldi episcopi Eichstetensis, in Codex latinus Monacensis 1086, the oldest surviving manuscript of the biographies, are four, apparently meaningless, lines of text:
Secdgquar.quin.npri.sprixquar.nter. cpri.nquar.mter.nsecun.hquin.gsecd. bquinrc.qarr.dinando.hsecdc.scrter. bsecd.bprim
No editor of the Lives has described or commented on this puzzling intertextual gloss. (6) In 1931, while involved in a palaeographic study of this late eighth-or early ninth-century manuscript, Bernhard Bischoff noticed the inscription and deciphered its code. (7) The abbreviated names of the ordinal numbers `primus' to `quintus' stand in for the corresponding vowels. When replacements have been made, the inscription reads:
Ego una Saxonica nomine Hugeburc ordinando hec scribebam.
Inscribing her name in secret writing, Hugeburc is following convention, to an extent. Wilhelm Levison places Hugeburc's cryptogram within a Fulda tradition, which seems to have been initiated by the teachings of St Boniface. (8) Although Hugeburc's linguistic puzzle is similar to the examples Levison describes in its general method, its specific way of signifying vowels, through abbreviated references to their order in the alphabet, is distinct--in Levison's opinion it is `unique' (p. 294). Several of Levison's examples illustrate claims to authorship, scribal work, or even repair of a manuscript. These are not overt announcements, but covert expressions of identity and the desire to be recognized and remembered. Cynewulf, writing Old English poetry in the ninth century, (9) scatters the runic letters spelling his name throughout the closing lines of his four poems, asking not only to be remembered but to receive the readers' prayers. Dhuoda, in her ninth-century Liber manualis, (10) although her authorship is openly expressed from the outset, writes a poem in which the first letters of each couplet form the message: `DHUODA DILECTO FILIO VVILHELMO SALUTEM LEGE' (`Dhuoda, to her dear son William. Read.'). Both Cynewulf and Dhuoda, besides their explicit appeals, challenge their readers to find their names and identifies--their presence--in their texts. Hugeburc's cryptogram poses a similar challenge and seems to have a similar goal, although it is inserted between, rather than embedded within, her compositions; in this position, it did not demand attention and managed to be overlooked for twelve centuries. Still, alongside the writing in which she remembers and inscribes in history the achievements of Wynnebald and Willibald, Hugeburc leaves a quiet request that her own not be forgotten.
More overtly, Hugeburc's representation of her role as a Christian historian permeates the biography. In her prologue she explains why she wrote the Life of Willibald, often as a way of apologizing for having done so:
ego quidem vobis religiosis ac catholicis viris, caelestis bibliothicae ministris, ob utilitate memoriae pauca perstringendo paulatim de primordiale vitae eius venerandi viri Wilibaldi prochemio disputare decreveram. (p. 86, lines 29-32) (Yet I had decided to discuss the early beginning of the life of the venerable man Willibald, by stringing together, little by little, a few words for you religious and orthodox men, keepers of the heavenly library, for the sake of remembrance.) (11)
She writes, then, in order that this period of his life be remembered by her audience, those immediately interested in learning of and then recalling Willibald's activities--`religiosi et catholici viri' (earlier referred to as priests, deacons, fathers, and monks). She elaborates on her impulse to write, reiterating her purpose of conveying memory of the Bishop's life:
spontaneo voluntatis meae violentia coacta, velut quadam ignara parva de pectoris prudentia pauca decerpens et ex multis frondosum frugiferumque arborum florum varietate honustorum exiguo qualibet arte saltim extremis in ramis vestrae memoriae coaptos pauca excerpere, conpagare edisserequae me libet. (p. 86, line 34-p. 87, line 2) ([I am] voluntarily compelled by the ferocity of my will, as if I were an inexperienced child, plucking a few things out of a certain discretion of the heart; it pleases me to select, gather together, from at least the lowest branches, and present, with however little skill, a few things suitable for your remembrance, from many leafy and fruitful trees with a variety of laden flowers.)
`Spontaneo voluntatis meae violentia coacta' suggests that she at once chooses freely and is compelled to write; Thomas Head translates this phrase as `freely prompted by my own willful impetuosity'. (12) She says she writes with a childlike impulsiveness, not restraining herself, as perhaps she should because of her own lack of skill in both selecting and presenting the `fruit' of Willibald's life. Her statement of humility as a hagiographer is certainly a familiar trope, practised by male and female authors throughout the Middle Ages; however, as the only woman to write a saint's Life during the Carolingian period (as far as we know, based on surviving, attributable texts), and in light of the status of her male audience, Hugeburc may well have felt as impulsive and reckless as a wilful child. (13) Nevertheless, the grace of God (`Dei gratia'), the greatness of the venerable man's (Willibald's) vision (`venerandique viri ... visionis magnitud[o]'), and the authority and strong support of the priests and deacons to whom she addresses Willibald's Life encourage her to write. Such ambivalence about her role as a hagiographer is in keeping with the cryptogram through which she covertly declares her authorship. (14)
In another halting, complex statement she tries again to explain that it was her duty to write:
Unde nunc certe, ut ita dicam, mihi videtur esse proterum, quod ista omnia muta tenacitatis silentio opilatis labiis humana taceat lingua, quas Dominus suo servo per proprii corporis laborem per visionemque oculorum ostendendo in nostris temporibus revelare dignatus est. (p. 87, lines 17-20) (Whence it certainly now seems to me, if I may say so, to be shameful that human language should pass over in the mute silence of tenacity, with sealed lips, all those things which the Lord deemed worthy to reveal to his servant, through the labour of his own body and the vision of his eyes, in order to make them known in our times.)
God made certain things known to Willibald, primarily through his pilgrimage experiences. Hugeburc believes that the revelation must not stop there, and knows that only through her mediation will it be conveyed to a larger audience and inscribed in history. Further, her familial relationship with Wynnebald and Willibald gives her some responsibility and authority as their biographer:
Sed qui me, indignam tamen, de illorum genealogii stirpe aliunde propagatam, forte de extremis ramorum cauliculis, me fore noveram, de tantis talisque virorum beatudinibus venerabileque vitae eorum, non solum in actibus, sed et in itineribus variis multifariisque miraculorum magnitudinibus perfecte proficiscentium aliquid memoriae dignum lectoris legendi manibus imponere me libet. (p. 87, lines 29-33) (But because I know myself, although unworthy, to be descended, on one side, from their genealogical stock, by chance from the lowest small stocks of...
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