Abstract
Among the tales and legends that circulate in nineteenth-century Vienna, we find a number of stories that feature women monastics. These stories find their home among other urban tales that seek to explain the present by examining real or projected “events” of the past: the tower stories that we encountered in chapter 2, or stories of the discovery of Turkish attempts to tunnel under the city walls during the siege.1 Most modern scholarship on legends has focused on questions of genre, content, or transmission, tracing themes and linkages to common sources. Scholarly work on the Himmelspförtnerin, a story in which a statue of the Blessed Virgin comes to life to cover up the absence of a nun who flees into the world but later returns penitent, for instance, traces the legend back to miracle collections of the thirteenth century, and connects it to parallel versions in Belgium, England, and Spain.2 Such comparative accounts of legends, however, obscure the power such stories have as vehicles for construction of local community identity. As an analysis of Viennese story collections shows, nearly all such stories emphasize tangible local details of topographical place and of material culture. Moreover, nineteenth-century authors of legends typically adopt a multipart narrative mode that connects two or three discrete events with an envoy that connects the historical story to the present day.
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Notes
Viennese legends have been collected in Gustav Gugitz, ed., Die Sagen und Legenden der Stadt Wien nach den Quellen gesammelt und mit kritischen Erläuterungen herausgegeben, Österreichische Heimat, 17 (Vienna: Brüder Hollinek, 1952); and in
Leander Petzoldt, Sagen aus Wien (Munich: Diederichs, 1993);
Petzoldt has published broadly on the genre. See also the exemplary analysis of Turkish-focused legends in Karl Teply, Türkische Sagen und Legenden um die Kaiserstadt Wien (Vienna: Hermann Böhlau, 1980).
Heinrich Watenphul, Die Geschichte der Marienlegende von Beatrix der Küsterin, Inaugural Diss., Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen (Neuwied: Heuser, 1904), offers a comparative review of Latin, Old French, and other medieval vernacular renditions, but he ignores the circulation of the gatekeeper legend in nineteenth-century Vienna.
Adolfo Mussafia, Studien zu den mittelalterlichen Marienlegenden (Vienna: F. Tempsky; continued by Carl Gerolds Sohn, 1887 – 98), likewise focuses his concerns on the comparative (and predominantly medieval) tradition rather than taking a reception-history approach.
Maria Tatar, The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts, Criticism, A Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1999).
Timothy R. Tangherlini, “‘It Happened Not Too Far from Here… ’: A Survey of Legend Theory and Characterization,” Western Folklore 49 (1990): 372 [371–90].
Hugo Pfundstein, Marianisches Wien: eine Geschichte der Marienverehrung in Wien, Österreich-Reihe, 218/220 (Vienna: Bergland Verlag, 1963);
Hans Aurenhammer, Die Mariengnadenbilder Wiens und Niederösterreichs in der Barockzeit (Vienna: Verlag des Österreichischen Museums für Volkskunde, 1956).
A review of several trends in legend research can be found in Donald Ward, “On the Genre Morphology of Legendry: Belief Story versus Belief Legend,” Western Folklore 50 (1991): 296–303.
Bennett emphasizes the community construction of legend in her review of what she calls “belief stories”: Gillian Bennett, “‘Belief Stories’: The Forgotten Genre,” Western Folklore 48 (1989): 289–311. Most scholars accept her emphasis on the context of storytelling, though more recent scholarship has tended to collapse the various subcategories back into a single and inclusive category of “legend”; see for example
Linda Dégh, “What Is a Belief Legend?” Folklore 107 (1996): 33–46.
Gustav Adolph Schimmer, Das alte Wien: Darstellung der alten Plätze und merkwürdigsten jetzt grösstentheils verschwundenen Gebäude Wien’s nach den seltensten gleichzeitigen Originalen, 2 vols. (Vienna: J. P. Sossinger’s Witwe and L. C. Zamarski, 1854, 1856);
Alfons Žák, “Das Frauenkloster Himmelpforte in Wien (zirka 1131–1586),” Jahrbuch für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich, N. F. 4 and 5 (1905 and 1906): 137–224; N.F. 6 (1907): 93–188;
Alfons Žák, “Zur Geschichte des Frauenklosters St. Klara in Wien,” Monatsblatt des Vereins für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich 8 (1908/09): 353–58;
Albert A. Wenedikt [= Moritz Bermann], Geschichte der Wiener Stadt u. Vorstädte (Vienna: R. v. Waldheim, 1871);
Moritz Bermann, Alt- und Neu-Wien, oder, Geschichte der Kaiserstadt und ihrer Umgebungen (Vienna: Hartleben, 1880).
John J. Scullion, “Märchen, Sage, Legende: Towards a Clarification of Some Literary Terms Used by Old Testament Scholars,” Vetus Testamentum 34 (1984): 326 [321–36].
Johann Nepomuk Vogl, “Mittheilungen einer alten Pfründnerin,” in Aus dem alten Wien (Vienna: Prandel & Ewald, 1865), pp. 205–14.
J. P. [Johann Paul] Kaltenbaeck , Die Mariensagen in Oesterreich (Vienna: Ignaz Klang, 1845).
The Viennese “Katholikenvereins” is discussed in Thomas W. Simons, “Vienna’s First Catholic Political Movement: The Güntherians, 1848–1857,” The Catholic Historical Review 55 (1969/1970): 173–94, 377–93, 619–26.
See also Otto Weiss, “Katholiken in der Auseinandersetzung mit der kirchlichen Autorität: Zur Situation der Wiener Katholiken und des Wiener Katholikenvereins 1848–1850,” Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 10 (1991): 23–54.
Hanns Maria Truxa, “Maurer, Josef,” in: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 52 (1906): 248–49 [Online edition]; http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd129247715.html. Truxa also provided a full-length biography of Maurer:
Hanns Maria Truxa, Der österreichische Geschichtsforscher, Schriftsteller und Dichter Pfarrer Josef Maurer: Ein Vorbild: literarischen Wirkens und echt priesterlichen Lebens, 3rd ed. (Vienna: Truxa, 1900).
Wilhelm Kisch, Die alten Strassen und Plaetze Wien’s und ihre historisch interessanten Haeuser: Ein Beitrag zur Culturgeschichte Wien’s mit Rücksicht auf vaterländische Kunst, Architektur, Musik und Literatur (Vienna: M. Gottlieb, 1883, rpt. Cosenza: Brenner, 1967);
Friedrich Umlauft, Namenbuch der Stadt Wien: die Namen der Straßen und Gassen, Plätze und Höfe, Vorstädte und Vororte im alten und neuen Wien (Vienna: A. Hartleben, 1895). Both authors relish retelling various legends as they move the reader mentally through the city’s various neighborhoods.
S. Elizabeth Bird, “It Makes Sense to Us—Cultural Identity in Local Legends of Place,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 31 (2002): 525 [519–47].
Troy Lovata, Inauthentic Archaeologies: Public Uses and Abuses of the Past (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007).
“Himmelspforte (Kloster zur),” in Realis, Curiositäten- und Memorabilien-Lexicon, 2:38 [38–39].The document is edited in Urkunden der Benedictiner-Abtei unserer lieben Frau zu den Schotten in Wien vom Jahre 1158 bis 1418, ed. Ernest Hauswirth, Fontes rerum Austriacarum, Zweite Abtheilung, Diplomataria et Acta, XVIII Bd. (Vienna: Kais. Kön. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1859), p. 63, document XLV, of December 6, 1272.
Some, but not all, of the literary debates are reviewed in John Colin Dunlop and Henry Wilson, History of Prose Fiction, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (London: George Bell, 1906).
John Davidson, “The Ballad of a Nun,” The Yellow Book, 3 (1894): 273–79;
reprint as John Davidson, The Ballad of a Nun, illustrated by Paul Henry (London and New York: John Lane, 1905).
Owen Seaman, “A Ballad of a Bun,” in The Battle of the Bays (London and New York: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1896), pp. 22–26.
Francis G. Gentry and Ulrich Müller, “The Reception of the Middle Ages in Germany: An Overview,” Studies in Medievalism 3 (1991): 401 [399–422].
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© 2013 Cynthia J. Cyrus
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Cyrus, C.J. (2013). Virgin Intercessor and Other Monastic Miracles. In: Received Medievalisms. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230393585_5
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