[In the following essay, Ashcroft studies two of Walther's songs in which the poet, after reflecting on his life and legacy, judges his work as ultimately corrupt.]

Walther's lyric presents an extraordinary variety of first-person subjects. In part these are genre-determined, like the male and female voices in his versions of pastourelle, messenger-song, dawn-song or tensone. In male-voice songs of courtly love, the I-subject may come across sometimes as exemplary lover, sometimes as critic of society's values and constraints, while the role of lover is often coextensive with that of the poet-performer of love-song. In the political and ethical lyric, Walther's personas and self-stylisations are scarcely less diverse, though the performing voice of the ‘Spruchtöne’ is more consistently projected, in the nature of the genre, as the personal utterance of Walther the professional singer. Of particular interest to recent commentators have been the quite numerous songs in which Walther appears to experiment in merging the two putatively discrete categories of ‘Minnelied’ and ‘Spruchton’, whether formally in hybrid ‘Spruchlieder’, thematically by introducing social criticism and satirical perspectives into love-song, or poetologically in songs which reflect explicitly on the relationship and compatibility of the two main roles of the lyric performer: the (traditionally courtly-chivalric) poet-lover, and the (traditionally itinerant-mercenary) professional ‘Spielmann’.¹

To this last type belongs L. 62,6.² The song begins with a self-congratulatory assertion of Walther's credentials as courtier:

Ob ich mich selben rüemen sol,
sô bin ich des ein hübescher man,
daz ich sô manige unfuoge dol,
sô wol als ichz gerechen kan.

(I,1-4)

Courtliness is defined in terms not of rank or function but of behaviour and social ethic. The ability to tolerate uncouthness in others with self-restraining equanimity echoes the virtues of mansuetudo, disciplina, and elegantia morum found in the Latin literature of curialitas in the twelfth century and earlier, then transposed into the ethical lexis of vernacular court poetry: senfter muot, zuht, schoene site.³ From the start, however, this claim to possess key qualities of the courtier is undercut with ambiguity and hints of other possible behavioural strategies. The implied apology for self-praise perhaps concedes its uncourtly immodesty and may allude to the proper obligation of court poets to praise famous men or virtuous women. Nor can Walther resist reminding his audience that he is well able to punish unfuoge. When he then measures the degree of his tolerance by invoking the saintly hermit who figures in other songs as embodiment of true Christian virtue and piety—Ein klôsenaere, ob erz vertrüege? ich waene, er nein (I,5)⁴—he prompts his listeners to recall that he has other faces and functions in different modes of song. As the lofty seer, castigating disorder in Church and Empire in the crisis after 1198, he asserts a vatic status more ambitious than that of the emollient courtier. Yet political poetry is not, like minnesang, a genre with noble pedigree, but the preserve of the mercenary ‘Spruchdichter’.

This subtext, which might call into question the overt claim to courtly qualification, runs through the second strophe too. Now directly addressing a vrowe, Walther acknowledges her as schoene and wert, but declares that beauty and esteem are complemented by genâde. This is, of course, a word which connotes, often euphemistically, the return the courtly lover hopes for from devotion and service.⁵ The veil of decorum is a thin one here: as lover he asserts his right to desire her, to have erotic thoughts, to give free rein to sexual phantasy—waz schadet iu, daz man iuwer gert? / joch sint iedoch gedenke vrî. / Wân und wunsch, daz wolt ich allez ledic lân (II,3-5)—while as poet he is unapologetic about song which expresses sensuality in the elegant courtship of minnesang:⁶

höveschent mîne sinne dar,
waz mac ichs, gebents iu minen sanc?

(II,6-7).

It is her prerogative to ignore the lover she finds importunate, if not offensive, but the poet is confident that praising her before the court will earn him its thanks and esteem. The contention that erotic desire, transmuted into courtly lovesong, deserves recognition regardless of the lady's indifference is a version of a familiar proposition: desire and its frustration are turned into witty song that enhances the joy of the court and earns acknowledgement for the exemplary behaviour and the aesthetic skill of the lover-poet. Here, again, the roles of courtier-lover and courtly poet interact and interfere with each other.

In this Walther conforms still, if only just, to the courtly demand for seemly behaviour. At least he stops short of the vengeful tones he hinted at in the first strophe and of threatening the lady with poetic oblivion as he does in the sumerlaten-song (L. 72,31):⁷

mich enwil ein wîp niht an gesehen,
die brâht ich in die werdecheit,
daz ir muot sô hôhe stât.
jôn weiz si niht, swenne ich mîn singen lâze, daz ir lop zergât?

(II,6)

His appeal is now, rather, to her honesty and integrity. If the woman exhorts him to turn sorrow into joy, as the courtly poet should, then it is neither consistent nor truthful of her not to convert the swaere she inflicts on him likewise into vröide. This is her obligation to him in his dual role as lover and singer:

lât iuwer wort niht velschen sich
und werdent guot, sô habent ir wâr.
vil          guot sint ir, wan daz ich guot von guote wil.

(III,8-10)

The running play on the word guot (III,4 and 9-10) picks up the lurking ambiguity signalled by the vocabulary of reward in the first two strophes: if she is ‘good’, she should be ‘good’ to him, and he demands from her some ‘good’ share of this ‘good’. From the notion of ethical obligation the pun slides into the erotic and the mercenary.⁸ The lover who tests the limits of decorum and requires reciprocity has another face, for guot umbe êre, payment for praise, is also the demand of the professional entertainer. In the fiction of his song, at least, Walther convincingly plays the courtier-lover, yet each strophe of his song makes visible behind this role another one, the poet-singer whose demonstration of courtliness has its price.

What form is this guot to take? Walther's final demand is prefaced by new, extravagant praise:

Vrowe, ir hânt ein werdez tach
an iuch gesloufet, den reinen lîp,
wan ich nie bezzer cleit gesach.
ir sint ein wol becleidet wîp:
Sin          und saelde sint gesteppet wol dar in.

(IV,1-5)

He constructs an ambitious allegorisation of the woman's lîp, her body—or, less blatantly, in a familiar metonymic association, her ‘pure self’—as a sumptuous gown embroidered with the legend of her moral character. As Hubert Heinen comments, it »might have been lifted directly from a theological treatise«.⁹ Now the song plunges again, breathtakingly, down the slide from ethical to erotic to mercenary:

getragene wât ich nie genan:
dise naeme ich als gerne ich lebe.
der keiser wurde ir spileman
umbe alse wünneclîche gebe.

(IV,6-9)

Dramatically Walther sheds courtly decorum to demand that already worn garment as his minstrel's payment for love-song. Whilst the discarded finery of noble patrons was a common form of payment in kind for servants of the court and professional entertainers, Walther is a cut above the average and spurns the second-hand. In this case he will happily accept a reward which, though beneath his normal tariff, would tempt the emperor himself to turn travelling minstrel. The discordant ambiguities, of courtly lover and paid singer, of erotic and poetic reward, that have dogged the song are ostensibly resolved in a feat of elegant wit—albeit a kind of foudat worthy of William IX of Aquitaine (and just as offensive to the woman).¹⁰ It is, however, a risky as well as a risqué manœuvre. The notion later voiced by Ulrich von Baumburg¹¹ was probably common currency in Walther's time: swer getragener kleider gert, / der ist nit minnesanges wert—and Walther is not only taking a social and professional risk by degrading himself from mercenary poet who is persona grata at court to truly marginal common entertainer.¹² By decoding his allegorical flight of fancy as a blatant declaration of sexual desire, he completes the deconstruction of courtly love as an erotic stratagem, which has been gathering in the subtext of the song from the start. The loss of status Walther risks by revealing himself in his true colours as spileman, compounded by his taking a ‘worn’ garment, is restored as he turns the conventional hyperbole—‘my beloved is fit for a king’—into a spectacular resolution of concern about his courtly status. He will let the emperor—who may occasionally really have been in his audience, and very occasionally himself composed love-songs¹³—sing in his place; but no, the offer is swiftly revoked: dâ, keiser, spil! nein, hêrre keiser, anderswâ! To the end, Walther's wit has an ambivalent undertow. By reducing emperor to minstrel, he also enforces even on the highest figure in the courtly hierarchy his demasking of courtly love as rhetorically embellished lust.¹⁴

Walther the professional minstrel brooks no superior, at least in the fiction of his song and in the performance he controls. What in the end defines and constitutes him as hübescher man is his artistry as poet, composer and singer. Disreputable calling is transformed into accreditation. However, as courtly spileman he is not a conventional minnesinger but also the ‘Spruchdichter’, critic and satirist of values and pretensions.

Clothing, new or superior cast-off, was the mark of patronage and could also be perquisite of the courtier.¹⁵ It might visibly express the court's partial assimilation of the peripheral, itinerant entertainer, but could also be (though on a large scale only after Walther's time) the courtier's livery, the uniform of service in a lordly household. In reminding his audience that he takes guot umbe êre¹⁶ in the form of new clothing, Walther confesses his marginal status as a professional minstrel whilst also asserting his claim to be dressed as a courtier. Perhaps Walther is also advancing a cultural claim, by inscribing himself obliquely into the literary genre of the ‘cloak-poem’, the witty plea of the indigent poet for a practical token of his patron's magnanimity, invented by Martial, revived in the 1130s-1140s by the Middle Latin poet Hugh Primas and imitated at the imperial court in the 1160s by the Archpoet.¹⁷ Clerics and litterati in Walther's audience could savour his ironical tribute to literary tradition and the ingenuity with which he presses the plea for a cloak to new heights of audacity. Seen in this context, the invitation to the keiser to compete with the mendicant poet would have a further intertextual referent, while Walther the spileman would be inviting comparison with the Archpoet, panegyricist of the emperor's court.

It is of course quite literally the case, and the only well attested historical fact about Walther, that he was the recipient of a cloak: on 12 November 1203, at Zeiselmauer, Wolfger of Erla, then bishop of Passau, paid him five ‘long’ shillings pro pellicio—for (or in place of) a fur coat, at that price clearly a new one.¹⁸ Walther himself records comparable gifts. Duke Leopold VI of Austria, perhaps at his accolade in 1200, dispensed largesse:

Man gap dâ niht bî drîzec pfunden,
wan silber, als ez waere funden,
gap man hin und rîche wât.

(L. 25,32-34)

At a bad time for lyric, der hof ze Wiene bemoans its dearth of bounty, golt, silber, ros und dar zuo kleider (25,7). If, as Walther seems to suggest, the duke of Carinthia ordered him clothes made to measure: dô er hâte mir geschaffen kleider (32,22), his anger at being denied the gift, vented in two strophes of the ‘Unmutston’, could be construed as disappointment at missing a hoped-for enlistment as curialis. As Martin Warnke shows, the gift of seasonal clothing, like Walther's at the onset of winter in 1203, was commonly an instalment in a regular allocation of winter and summer wear to artists and regular servants of the court, with the alternative of a monetary payment in lieu.¹⁹ Such allocation marked the bearer as a servant of the court, while »the level of the payment, often a sizeable portion of the recipient's total remuneration, indicates the importance of the sartorial entitlement, as do the written petitions and reminders in which the artists claimed it« (p. 128). Perhaps it is significant that Wolfger's payment to the cantor de Vogelweide fell just a day after the feast of St Martin, Christian prototype of the charitable gift of a cloak (and thus, so to speak, the ‘patron-saint’). Walther may have relished another link this created between him and the Archpoet, who flatters his episcopal benefactor, Archbishop-elect Rainald of Cologne:

Largissimus largorum omnium
presul dedit hoc mihi pallium,
magis habens in celis premium
quam Martinus, qui dedit medium.(20)

However, the potential symbolism of the date is ambivalent. Bishop Wolfger knew that St. Martin gave half his cloak to clothe a naked beggar, and that the Church forbade clerics to divert charity to mercenary entertainers. And Martinmas was not just a day for charitable giving but a legal term for the settlement of accounts. Wolfger's domestic records could indicate either that Walther was an occasional recipient of largesse from a bishop of secular tastes, or that in some measure he was the bishop's man, whose gifted clothes marked some status in, or in the eyes of, the episcopal household.²¹

Analyses of the fragmentary accounting records of Wolfger's journeyings in Austria and Italy in 1203-1204 concur that five solidi is a relatively large payment on the scale that can be reconstructed.²² Brother Henry, a cleric in the bishop's familia, gets a fur coat costing five shillings less nine pence. At New Year 1204, the bishop's own ioculator receives a mere 30 pence.²³ Most commentators accept that the accounts place Walther towards »the top of a professional pyramid«²⁴ and ahead of the ruck of istriones and ioculatores who crowd the leaves of the bishop's petty-cash ledger. Yet it remains difficult to locate Walther at all precisely in this multifarious world of thirteenth-century show-business. There is a tendency, fed more by pietas than by fact, to assume that the generosity of Walther's fee reflects the quality of his art and performance.²⁵ However, Maria Dobozy's study of ‘Spielleute’ finds no literary evidence that they were rewarded according to ability.²⁶ It may be, rather, that Walther was paid more because he was a frequent as well as an appreciated performer at the bishop's court. We cannot rule out that the payment is not only for singing (cantor does not appear in the first draft of the accounts) but also for other services rendered. While Walther was a professional singer for »forty years and more« (L. 66,27), we must not presume that he had no other uses and functions in the long course of his peregrinations and his attachments to noble households.²⁷

Walther's designation, in the second draft of the accounts, as cantor de Vogelweide does not help us to pin down his status. Vogelweide may indicate birthplace or family location, though we may suspect that it was a self-chosen sobriquet or at any rate came to be regarded as a ‘sprechender Name’, reflecting and advertising professional activity and status,²⁸ thus distinct from the designations of other minnesingers—von Aist, von Hausen, von Aue, von Morungen: fief and castle names locating their bearers in feudal or dynastic structures. Much in Walther's lyric speaks for his having a clerical education (not least the allegorisation of the woman's body as cloak of virtue, or the links with the Middle Latin cloak poem, in L. 62,6).²⁹ Wolfram calls him hêr Vogelweid (Wh 286,19), on the face of it giving him a chivalric title, but with a strong whiff of irony. This promotion of the minstrel to ritter is endorsed by later poets and by compilers and illustrators of fourteenth-century codices. But it is belied by Walther's own self-depiction as suppliant mercenary in his ‘Bittsprüche’ and by his allusions to his lowly rank. He is nôtic man, excluded from the rewards of chivalric crusading (L. 125,5); although der werden ein, then despite his social status, swie nider ich sî (L. 66,37). That courtly esteem balanced deficit of rank is attested in tributes by contemporary and later poets. Ulrich von Singenburg commemorates him as unsers sanges meister, who claims the gratitude of the court and the mercy of God dur sînen werden, hovelîchen sanc (SM 12.20, V = L. 108,6-13). Hugo von Trimberg's version of the sentiment is blunter: alein er were niht rîch des guotes, / doch was er rîch sinniges muotes (‘Der Renner’ ll. 1189f.).

The label cantor is unusual in the ‘Reiserechnungen’. It too does not define Walther unambiguously. While picking him out of the general run of itinerant performers, it does not demarcate him or confer a distinct status. Perhaps, as Cyril Edwards suggests, it was prompted by association with Middle High German (minne)singer, which would mean that it carried the connotation of courtly acceptability.³⁰ But cantor seems to illustrate again a problem common to all the labels which attach to Walther and to the ways in which his art was rewarded. The lexis of social classification in the early thirteenth century (and well beyond) is insufficiently precise to register what are to us at any rate important gradations in the hierarchy of artistic activity.³¹ This particularly affects Walther, a professional poet-composer-performer intent on gaining an audience at princely and episcopal courts, and thus a new phenomenon in his time.

Early descriptions of the composition of court society illustrate the problem from another angle.³² Bishop Huguccio of Ferrara, in the last decade of the twelfth century, ranks knights, lawyers and officiales as holding a honestum officium at court, while minstrels and actors (histriones) have an inhonestum officium. However, strictly speaking, entertainers must be excluded from membership of courtly society, since they lack the quality of curialitas. By the mid-fourteenth century, Konrad von Megenberg defines three levels of courtly function and status: the servi honesti, the clerical and university-trained chaplains, notaries and medics, who form the inner circle of a lord's executive, the servi utiles, who hold the classic court offices such as steward, chamberlain and marshal, and the servi delectabiles, who provide the court with entertainment: »ein buntes Spektrum von Musikern, Sängern, Schauspielern und Possenreißern«.³³ Walther might have seized on Konrad's definition of courtliness: curialitas est bonorum morum nobilitas. But this notion of a nobility of merit, and the somewhat enhanced position of entertainers in Konrad's Oeconomia, may be partly conditioned by vernacular courtly literature in Walther's age and after. Around 1200, it is unlikely that even this degree of formal status, or the relative security of even a peripheral court office, was accessible to the professional cantor. Walther's quest for werdekeit and the hulde of the court (see L. 66,21) was an insecure enterprise in an age which thought hierarchically but lacked a model of society and a language which articulated status with any precision. One contemporary who perhaps understood Walther's aspirations and the obstacles to their realisation was Gottfried von Strassburg, himself probably capellanus and thus servus honestus at court. In his literary-critical excursus in ‘Tristan’, he elects from among the nahtegallen of minnesang diu von der Vogelweide as their meisterinne, and designates her kameraerin at the court of Love (ll. 4800-4811). This promotion of a servus delectabilis to be servus utilis, and to a court office which was becoming the prerogative of highborn nobles, reflects a sophisticated awareness of Walther's problematical status at court and of the pretensions of song to compensate for deficiency of rank. Nor is the choice of office fortuitous, for the chamberlain was after all master of the wardrobe.³⁴

If at court minstrels were tolerated at the social margin, and Walther, exceptionally, could hope to gravitate towards the centre, secular and canon law, and theology, judged more harshly. In feudal law minstrels were virtually denied legal rights and redress, and were excluded from the royal peace.³⁵ Theologians questioned their right to receive the sacraments.³⁶ From Tertullian and Augustine to the Lateran Council of 1215 (which Patriarch Wolfger attended), clerics are forbidden to give shelter or payment to histriones and ioculatores, unless on grounds of their indigence, in which case they may receive alms or sustenance but not reward for their performance—criteria clearly not met by Walther or Wolfger's five solidi. The bishop evidently turned a blind eye to these prohibitions. Clerics and scholars associated with his court reflect the same double standard. The Florentine jurist Boncampagno includes in his collection of model letters a number of recommendations for entertainers headed De remuneratione ioculatorum. Thomasin von Zerclaere, critic of Walther's satirical verses on Pope Innocent III, censures in ‘Der Welsche Gast’ those who give to varndn liutn and durch êre geben mêr / dan durch got (ll. 3778-3798). Certainly, Wolfger came to holy orders as a middle-aged widower, evidently with a taste for secular song he found impossible to abandon. But bishops figure prominently as patrons of Latin and vernacular poetry, and it is hard not to conclude that the Church's ban was honoured chiefly in the breach, and if prelates ignored it, their secular brethren had little incentive to observe it either.³⁷

But just as the language and structures of the secular world made no clear distinction between aspirants to courtly werdekeit and the motley crew which sang for its supper, so also the Church's condemnation was undifferentiated. The penalties were ultimate. In a school text, Honorius Augustodunensis has the pupil ask his master about the salvation of minstrels:³⁸

DISCIPULUS:
Habent spem ioculatores?
MAGISTER:
Nullam: tota namque intentione sunt ministri Satanae, de his dicitur: Deum non cognoverunt; ideo Deus sprevit eos, et hominus subsanabit eos, quia derisores deriduntur.

While Walther was obviously not one of the gumpelliute, gîger und tambûrer whom Berthold of Regensburg consigned to the tenth choir of creation, the followers of Lucifer, he did fall into the broad category of the instabiles, those non habentes certum domicilium, to whom Thomas of Chobham (echoing earlier writers like John of Salisbury and Hugh of St. Victor) denied a claim to salvation, unless they eschewed gossip and slander, music and immoral song, and confined themselves to reciting deeds of heroes and saints. For all his immense self-awareness and commitment to the secular ethos of chivalric court society, a poet with some measure of clerical learning, with Walther's experience of the issues and concerns of his time, and with his capacity for reflecting on Christian thought and practice, cannot have been ignorant, nor yet insouciant of the Church's censure and of the peril it predicted for his soul.

»Are poets saved?« W. H. Auden wondered in the tricky case of Byron.³⁹ Medieval poets, even those not so exposed as Walther may have been to the strictures of the theologians, show concern that their salvation may be endangered by their secular writings. Perhaps most famously, Geoffrey Chaucer appended to the last of the ‘Canterbury Tales’, the Parson's manual of penitence, his own retracciouns of his enditynges of worldly vanitees, including large parts of the ‘Tales’ themselves, thilke that sownen into synne, along with many a song and many a leccherous lay, that Crist for his grete mercy foryeve me the synne.⁴⁰ That this was no merely conventional gesture seems confirmed by the story of Chaucer's deathbed lamentation as retailed by Thomas Gascoigne, a repentance with the same flaw as that of Judas, coming too late, when penance and restitution are no longer possible:

Vae mihi, vae mihi quia revocare nec destruere iam potero illa quae male scripsi de malo et turpissimo amore hominum ad mulieres sed iam de homine in hominem continuabuntur. Velim. Nolim.⁴¹

Much less late in life, we may presume, Hartmann von Aue accompanied his legend of the good sinner, ‘Gregorius’, with the confession that

Mîn herze hât betwungen
dicke mine zungen
daz si des vil gesprochen hât
daz nâch der werlde lône stât

(ll. 1-4)

—and the insight that it is never too early to repent, and to make restitution in the way best befitting the poet, by speaking die wârheit, and by earning the prayers of the community of grateful hearers and readers with whom he hopes to be reunited in heaven (ll. 3989-3999). The poet's apology for past transgressions, the convention of the confession of poetic sins and the admission of the polarity of worldly lüge and divine wârheit, occur not only in religious literature but, for all its avowals of exemplary intentions, also in secular courtly poetry by the later twelfth century.⁴² Walther von der Vogelweide's major contribution to this tradition is the ‘Alterston’ (L. 66,21), acknowledged as a personal confession which puts aside fictional role-play: »Hier spricht offensichtlich ohne Maske der alternde Künstler und Mensch«.⁴³

It begins as a valediction to the courtly public: ir reiniu wîp, ir werden man. Walther claims, not for the first time but with the sense now of still fuller entitlement, their recognition and homage, êre und minneclîchen gruoz. The claim is grounded on a professional lifetime of song, wol vierzic jâr […] unde mê, and on the whole span of his art, von minnen und alse iemen sol. It is a final tribute he solicits, for the poet who like no other in his time has been defined by his art, and identifies himself in and through it, now detaches himself from his song:

nû enwirt mirs niht, ez wirt iu gar.
mîn minnesanc, der diene iu dar,
und iuwer hulde sî mîn teil.

(I,10-12)

This is an implicit testament, in which Walther, his face turned to his life's ending, renounces and bequeaths to his public the love-song which holds no more pleasure (I,9-10) for him and belongs, so to speak, to the varnde guot of this world, not to the next.

The figure who, in the second strophe, walks away from his public and from his song, incorporates, with his staff, at once the aged man, the itinerant poet, mobile since his youth as he follows the court, and the pilgrim through this life who journeys, like every man, to the end. In all these facets, he asserts the persistence of his quest for werdekeit. This earthly summum bonum raises those who achieve it by merit and attainment over the hurdles of social disadvantage and of envy. Yet the highest achievement of a life devoted to werdekeit is to prepare a man for the end of that life:

ez wart nie lobelîcher leben,
swâ man dem ende rehte tuot.

(II,11f.)

But nothing can arm man against the stark finality of death.

Welt, ich hân dînen lôn ersehen:
swaz dû mir gîst, daz nimest dû mir.
wir scheiden alle blôz von dir.

(III,1-3)

Beyond achievement and self-realisation in art, beyond the esteem of the estimable, the poet like all mankind is merely a sinner naked in death. Futile to rail against the treachery of the world; as in Walther's other attacks on the world and its deceits (see L. 59,37 and 100,24), all secular distinctions fail and an older, starker consciousness of contemptus mundi, the vanity of the whole material world, asserts itself. There is momentary consolation in the knowledge that the transient world will itself be consumed in apocalyptic wrath. Yet that leaves unresolved the poet's confession:

Ich hân          lîp unde sêle—des was gar ze vil—
gewâget tûsentstunt durch dich.

(III,5-6)

Walther's self-reflexion has arrived at that question which it had amused the theologians to debate: are poets saved?—and in particular the question bears in on those who make their livelihood out of secular entertainment.

Mîn sêle müeze wol gevarn!
ich hân zer welte manigen lîp
gemachet frô, man unde wîp.
kunde ich dar under mich bewarn!

(IV,1-4)

In this extremity, the life-long singer of des lîbes minne is endangered beyond the norm. Love-song which was his qualification for courtliness now disqualifies, for the voice of his own conscience exposes it as lüge and folly, the irreconcilable antithesis of the wâre minne which endures into eternity. This voice of his soul cannot be gainsaid. It breaks out of the reported speech of lines IV,5-8 and seems briefly to usurp the narrative of the song, overriding the poet's voice with an urgent plea for a late conversio morum:⁴⁴

Lîp, lâ die minne, diu dich lât,
und habe die staeten minne wert.
mich dunket, der dû hâst gegert,
diu sî niht visch unz an den grât.

(IV,9-12)

The drastic ‘bad taste’ of the metaphor signals the ultimate challenge to the poet's self-valuation.

It provokes a last tribute to the power of his art to reflect the beauty of the created world and the secular joy of the court,⁴⁵ yet one that is shot through with an overwhelming sense of transience and loss:

Ich hâte ein schoene bilde erkorn,
und owê, daz ichz ie gesach
und ouch sô vil zuo ime gesprach!
ez hât schoene und rede verlorn.
Dâ          was ein wunder inne, daz fuor ich enweiz war.
dâ von gesweic daz bilde iesâ.
sîn          lilienrôsevarwe wart sô karkervar,
daz ez verlôs smac unde schîn.

(V,1-8)

bilde is complexly suggestive of the image of the divine word in created nature, in the beautiful body which the lover celebrates in idealisation and desire, recreated and enhanced by the poet's words, in the ‘corpus’ of his own minnesang, in which he himself is reflected and embodied.⁴⁶ But the earthly image falls to decay, pales to the grey hues of the prison and the grave. So, inevitably, does the poet's own body, his material self created in the image of God.

Mîn bilde, obe ich gekerket bin
in dir, sô lâ mich ûz alsô,
daz wir ein ander vinden frô,
wan ich muoz aber wider in.

(V,9-12)

The metaphor switches its referent and then its ground of meaning. Death is an escape from the prison of mortal decay, the precondition of the resurrection of the body, incorruptible, when »we shall be changed […] and this mortal must put on immortality« (1 Corinthians, 15:52f.). The song ends with the unsubstantiated hope that the reintegration of the created self at the Last Judgement will be a ‘happy’ one.

Perhaps Walther's bilde consciously echoes St. Paul: »And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly«.⁴⁷ Walther too »shows us a mystery«, and I do not suggest that 1 Corinthians 15 unlocks the enigma of his song. My reading of this strophe owes a great deal, it will be evident, to the seminal essay by Timothy McFarland, which has done much to clarify the potential meanings of bilde. However, the essay has also encouraged a now dominant tendency to deny the fundamental orthodoxy with which Walther poses and answers ultimate questions about the value of his legacy of minnesang. Thus McFarland concludes that Walther's »main concern« is not with »the conflict of body and soul«, but »with the survival of his own self, which is threatened by this dichotomy«, and that the »eschatological goal on which his attention is fixed is not the soul's salvation, but the resurrection of the body, seen in terms which suggest a view of man made in the image of God«. It is unclear what kind of Christian anthropology is being imputed to Walther here, if it postulates a ‘self’ distinct from body and soul. And the reunion of body and soul at the general resurrection cannot be a goal in itself but only a necessary preliminary to Judgement, thus to salvation or damnation. My own reading of the text runs strongly counter to McFarland's claims that the first two strophes of Walther's song are not to be read »as a final renunciation or farewell« and »certainly not […] as the words of a pilgrim who has renounced his past life«, while the whole text is »not […] concerned with his relationship to the divine in any absolute, transcendental sense«.⁴⁸

Pursuing a broadly similar line, Burghart Wachinger even reinterprets the wâre minne of the fourth strophe as »den wahren Minnesang«, while the final plea to mîn bilde he paraphrases in an entirely secular reading: »entlaßt mich aus der alten Rolle des Minnesängers, damit ich wie einst zu eurer und meiner Freude singen kann als Sänger der wahren Minne für die wahrhaft werden«.⁴⁹ Reflected in this whole trend of interpretation is a reluctance to accept, as Schweikle puts it, »daß das Lied, das anfangs in so ernstgemeinter Emphase künstlerische und gesellschaftliche Probleme reflektiert, diese so plötzlich für nichtig erklärt und sich ganz individueller Heilsproblematik zuwendet«.⁵⁰ Walther's status and achievement as a great secular lyric poet must, it seems, exempt him from the mere confession that timor mortis conturbat me. Thus Christoph Cormeau reads the final strophe »als metaphysische Rechtfertigung, eben die des Künstlers, der die Hinfälligkeit alles Sinnlichen anerkennt und doch auf der Möglichkeit besteht, darin Wahrheit zu sehen und sichtbar zu machen; und letztlich ist das für ihn die entscheidende Frage, wichtiger als die nach seinem Seelenheil«⁵¹—an astounding claim to make about the priorities of a poet in the early thirteenth century and his ability to conceive a »Metaphysik des Ästhetischen«. Jan-Dirk Müller reframes this line of interpretation in terms of a distinctly revisionist, certainly not Pauline theology. In this reading, »das wir ain ander vinden fro würde nicht auf die neuerliche Vereinigung der einzelnen Seele mit ihrem Leib zu beziehen sein, sondern—statt des Untergangs der Welt im Feuer—auf die erhoffte Rettung einer Welt der sinnlichen Erscheinung am Jüngsten Tag, während ich mvos aber wider in als Rückkehr des Ich in seinen göttlichen Ursprung zu verstehen wäre«. Müller too asserts that »Walthers Lösung ist im Kern nicht theologisch, sondern ästhetisch«.⁵²

The ‘Alterston’ is not a conventional retraction of enditynges of worldly vanitees in secular poetry, but nor does it fly in the face of theological orthodoxy and the medieval Christian's concern for salvation. In it the aged poet depicts his withdrawal from his professional career and his exemplary preparation to leave this life and face his judgement. He does not retract his love-song. Rather, he proudly bequeaths it to a public whose gratitude he claims as his due. But he does, and must, relinquish it, and with a gesture of finality: nû enwirt mirs niht, ez wirt iu gar. His minnensanc is not invalidated by this act of renunciation, but its validity is wholly secular. And if on his remaining passage through life he continues to seek and value the esteem of the estimable, this is so because he deems it the best way to approach his imminent end. Art and the status it accrues belong to this life, albeit to the best it can offer or achieve. The ineluctable necessity of renunciation is ruthlessly enforced in the third strophe. Nothing that belongs in and to this world can survive death, and even to protest against that is to risk confessing a perilously compromising pursuit of secular rewards:

wir scheiden alle blôz von dir
schame dich, sul mir alsam geschehen.
Ich hân lîp          unde sêle—des was gar ze vil—
gewâget tûsent stunt durch dich.

(III,3-6)

This is a point of no return which Walther reaches in a number of other songs too (see L. 41,13; 59,37; 182,1; 100,24; 122,24), and the ‘Alterston’ cannot challenge its finality either. Indeed, it broaches a question Walther otherwise does not explicitly raise. A life predicated on werdekeit, but which seeks that validation through forty years or more of love-song, earns the gratitude of the court but faces in an acute form the ultimate question all mankind finally asks: kunde ich dar under mich bewarn?

Habent spem ioculatores? Though Walther demonstrates his courtly credentials in songs like L. 62,6, he cannot escape guilt by association, the lack of demarcation between the esteemed cantor de Vogelweide and the vulgar throng of ioculatores, the dubiousness of moral, as well as social, status that dogs the professional singer of love-song. That very song which set out to display his ability to play the courtier-lover counterpointed this role with the persona of the mercenary performer, and ended with a spectacular disrobing of the courtly frouwe which simultaenously unmasked the erotic lineaments of the courtly love. At this most vulnerable stage in the argument of the ‘Alterston’, Walther does not attempt a plea in mitigation of his lifelong service of the joy of the court. He accepts the soul's judgement of the inadmissibility, sub specie aeternitatis, of des lîbes minne, and in terms which square with those of the theologians:

inter amorem huius mundi et amorem Dei haec est differentia, quod huius mundi amor in principio esse dulcis videtur, sed finem habet amarum; amor vero Dei ab amaritudine incipit, sed ultima eius dulcedine plena sunt.⁵³

The soul has the last word, and insists on the vanity and mendacity of worldly love, though it calls for a renunciation—lîp, lâ diu minne, diu dich lât—rather than a retraction.⁵⁴ The poet's bequest of his minnensanc to his noble audience seems to be sharply relativised, but not revoked, by his acceptance of the ultimate nullity of secular art. That contrasts, certainly, with the concern that, according to Gascoigne, made Chaucer despair: his inability to undo the evil his poetry goes on wreaking, illa quae male scripsi de malo et turpissimo amore hominum ad mulieres sed iam de homine in hominem continuabuntur. The urgency of retracting before it is too late for amendment, the fallacy of a penitence performed only »when you are unable to sin, [when] the sins are abandoning you, you are not abandoning the sins«,⁵⁵ goes unacknowledged by Walther. Though worldly love and secular love-song must be relinquished and abandoned at the last, they are not recanted. It is in this that Walther differs from the accustomed tradition of poetic retraction, from Chaucer, Hartmann von Aue, or Jean de Meun:⁵⁶

j'ai fait en ma jonesce maint dis par vanité,
où maintes gens se sont pluseurs fois délité;
or m'en doint Diex ung faire par vraie charité
pour amender les autres, qui pou m'ont profité.

Walther's new evocation of physical and aesthetic beauty and eloquence, with which the final strophe begins, bows to the soul's demand with its words of regret and remorse:

Ich hâte ein schoene bilde erkorn,
und owê, daz ichz ie gesach
und ouch sô vil zuo ime gesprach!
ez hât schoene und rede verlorn.

(V,1-4)

What the singer's art creates and celebrates is subject to the law that »flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God« (1 Corinthians 15:50), that material forms, even animated by the divine image, must wither and perish. But while »it is certain we can take nothing out« of this world (1 Timothy 6:7), the song ends in the assurance that »as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly« (1 Corinthians 15:49). If Walther never explicitly condemns his poetry, he accepts that it is as sinner, not as singer, that he can hope for a joyful resurrection of the body—it is the sinner not the song that can be redeemed.⁵⁷

Walther's artistic self-awareness as a professional singer is stamped on this song. Yet it is characteristic of much of his lyric that, however inimitable and individual his voice and persona, he performs roles which demonstrate exemplary patterns of behaviour and belief. In relinquishing his art in the ‘Alterston’, first bestowing it on his public as his legacy to the courtly world, then acknowledging that it is part of the finite order, conceding that in the perspective of eternity it is not just corruptible but corrupt, he becomes a figure of general humanity, reduced before the leveller Death to the naked being hoping for salvation. The poet unafraid to praise himself concedes that poets in particular have cause to fear for their souls. To the extent that Walther's valediction stops short of unambiguously retracting his life's work, this is still brave theology for a spileman. In fact, the belief that a man, and a poet at that, may end his life in such a way that sêle is not compromised by lîp, and yet keep the hulde of the courtly world by his werdekeit, echoes word for word Wolfram von Eschenbach's credo at the end of ‘Parzival’, and places Walther where he belongs, as an exponent and exemplar of the key values of the ‘Blütezeit’.

Notes

1. For example, I. Kasten, Frauendienst bei Trobadors und Minnesängern im 12. Jahrhundert, Heidelberg 1986 (GRM Beihefte 5), pp. 350-357. See also the typological categories used to structure the anthology Walther von der Vogelweide, Werke. vol. 2: Liedlyrik, ed. by G. Schweikle, Stuttgart 1998 (RUB 820).

2. All text quotations of songs by Walther are taken from Walther von der Vogelweide. Leich, Lieder, Sangsprüche, ed. by C. Cormeau. My account of L. 62,6 owes debts to the following: W. Mohr, Minnesang als Gesellschaftskunst, in: Der deutsche Minnesang, ed. by H. Fromm, Darmstadt ²1972 (WdF 15), pp. 225-228; H. Heinen, Clothes make the Man. Walther 62,6 and the Status of the Poet/Performer, in: Word and Deed (FS W. F. Michael), ed. by D. Monostory and T. Ryan, Bern 1992, pp. 67-89; Schweikle [n. 1], pp. 596-599.

3. See C. S. Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness. Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals 939-1210, Philadelphia 1985, pp. 36-40 and 129-133.

4. See L. 9,37; 10,33; 34,33.

5. For example, L. 63,36; 72,23; 185,1.

6. As Heinen [n. 2], p. 71, points out, höveschen »even at this early date could also be used pejoratively: ‘to seduce as courtiers are wont to do’«.

7. Schweikle [n. 1], p. 596.

8. Compare P. Wapnewski, Walther von der Vogelweide. Gedichte, 7th edn, Frankfurt a.M. 1977, p. 248.

9. Heinen [n. 2], p. 72.

10. L. Paterson, The World of the Troubadours. Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1100-c. 1300, Cambridge 1993, p. 101, defines foudat as »the whimsical and sometimes outrageous audacity of the jester«. See also Kasten [n. 1] on foudat (pp. 48-53) and on Walther's art of the erotic (pp. 357f.).

11. Die Schweizer Minnesänger, ed. by M. Schiendorfer, vol. 1: Texte, Tübingen 1990, 28.6, III, 13-14.

12. Heinen [n. 2], pp. 74 and 77f., on the contrary, talks here of Walther's »assertion, albeit a playful one, of one's social equality with the highest«.

13. See V. Mertens, Kaiser und Spielmann. Vortragsrollen in der höfischen Lyrik, in: Höfische Literatur, Hofgesellschaft, Höfische Lebensformen um 1200, ed. by G. Kaiser and J.-D. Müller, Düsseldorf 1986 (Studia Humaniora 6), pp. 455-469, here pp. 455 and 467f.

14. Compare L. P. Johnson, Down with ‘hohe Minne’!, in: Walther von der Vogelweide. Twelve Studies, ed. by T. McFarland and S. Ranawake, Oxford German Studies 13 (1982), pp. 36-48. A. Kircher, Dichter und Konvention. Zum gesellschaftlichen Realitätsproblem der deutschen Lyrik um 1200 bei Walther von der Vogelweide und seinen Zeitgenossen, Düsseldorf 1973 (Literatur in der Gesellschaft 18), presents a crudely skewed picture of Walther as a plebeian subversive who combines mercenary lipservice to courtly values with demasking them as false ideology.

15. R. E. Harvey, Joglars and the Professional Status of the Early Troubadours, Medium Aevum 62 (1993), pp. 221-241, here p. 230, points out that in Occitan sources »gifts made to joglars […] were precisely those given by lords to all their retainers […] great or small«. But compare K. Schreiner, ‘Hof’ (curia) und ‘höfische Lebensführung’ (vita curialis) als Herausforderung an die christliche Theologie und Frömmigkeit, in: Kaiser and Müller [n. 13], pp. 67-139, here p. 76, who emphasises the hierarchy of court dress.

16. See F. H. Bäuml, Guot umb êre nemen and Minstrel Ethics, JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology] 59 (1960), pp. 173-183.

17. See T. Latzke, Der Topos Mantelgedicht, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 6 (1970), pp. 109-131.

18. Text in H. Heger, Das Lebenszeugnis Walthers von der Vogelweide. Die Reiserechnungen des Passauer Bischofs Wolfger von Erla, Vienna 1970, pp. 81 and 86.

19. M. Warnke, The Court Artist. On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist, Cambridge 1993 (Ideas in Context), p. 4. He quotes the case of Magister Petro de Ispania, pictor regis, who received unam robam sibi convenientem de dono regis at the English court in 1258.

20. I quote the text from Hugh Primas and the Archpoet, ed. by F. Adcock, Cambridge 1994 (Cambridge Medieval Classics 2), I,39, p. 78.

21. There is general agreement that Walther was not a member of Wolfger's familia. See Heger [n. 18], p. 232; C. Edwards, »Nur ein fahrender, als er unterwegs war?« Zu Rang und Reisen Walthers von der Vogelweide, in: Reisen und Welterfahrung in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, ed. by D. Huschenbett and J. Margetts, Würzburg 1991, pp. 96-109, here pp. 101f.; F. P. Knapp, Der Hof des Kirchenfürsten Wolfger von Erla und die Literatur um 1200, in: Wolfger von Erla Bischof von Passau (1191-1204) und Patriarch von Aquileja (1204-1218) als Kirchenfürst und Literaturmäzen, ed. by E. Bischof and F. P. Knapp, Heidelberg 1994 (Germanische Bibliothek, 3rd series, 20), pp. 345-364, here p. 355; M. G. Scholz, Der biderbe patrîarke missewende frî und dominus Walterus—auch ein Versuch zum Begriff des fahrenden Spruchdichters, in: Wolfger von Erla [see above], pp. 301-323, here pp. 308-310 and 322f.

22. See especially M. Curschmann, Waltherus Cantor, OGS [Oxford German Studies] 6 (1971-72), pp. 5-17.

23. Heger [n. 18], pp. 81, l. 73, and 90, l. 188.

24. Curschmann [n. 22], p. 13.

25. Curschmann [n. 22], p. 13; Heger [n. 18], pp. 224f.; L. P. Johnson, Vorgreifliche, kuriose und nicht zusammenhängende Gedanken zu Wolfger von Erla als Mensch und Mäzen, in: Bischof and Knapp [n. 21], pp. 281-299, here p. 283; Knapp [n. 21], p. 355.

26. M. Dobozy, Beschenkungspolitik und die Erschaffung von Ruhm am Beispiel der fahrenden Sänger, FmSt [Freuhmittelalteriche Studien] 26 (1992), pp. 353-367, here p. 363.

27. See Scholz [n. 21], pp. 318-321; and for Occitan evidence of the employment of troubadours in other capacities at court, Harvey [n. 15], pp. 13-17. Scholz, pp. 310-316, demolishes the attempt to document Walther's employment as episcopal and royal nuntius by B. Hucker, Ein zweites Lebenszeugnis Walthers?, in: Walther von der Vogelweide. Beiträge zu Leben und Werk, ed. by H.-D. Mück, Stuttgart 1989 (Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek 1), pp. 1-30.

28. Heger [n. 18], p. 215, suggests an analogy with the Archpoet [n. 20], X, 3, who likens himself as peripatetic poet to a migrating bird: ut per vias aeris vaga fertur avis.

29. See F. P. Knapp, Waltherus de Vogelweide vagus. Der zwischenständige Sänger und die lateinische Literatur in Österreich, in: Mück [n. 27], pp. 45-60.

30. Edwards [n. 21], p. 101; Heger [n. 18], p. 221; Curschmann [n. 22], pp. 7-9; J. Margetts, Ein Sänger ist seines Lohnes wert: »qui (non) sibi professionis finem in pecunia seu gloria constituat ac proponat«, in: Mück [n. 27], pp. 61-74.

31. See Harvey [n. 15] and Kasten [n. 1], pp. 50f. and 343-347.

32. For the following, see W. Rösener, Hofämter an mittelalterlichen Fürstenhöfen, DA 45 (1989), pp. 485-550, here pp. 511-514, and Schreiner [n. 15], p. 73.

33. Rösener [n. 32], p. 512.

34. As Rösener [n. 32], p. 536, points out, the chamberlain was especially important at an episcopal court.

35. See W. Hartung, Die Spielleute. Eine Randgruppe in der Gesellschaft des Mittelalters, Wiesbaden 1982 (Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte Beihefte 72), pp. 50-52.

36. For my sketch of Church attitudes and teaching, I draw on Hartung [n. 35], pp. 30-49; Heger [n. 18], pp. 239-246; Schreiner [n. 15], pp. 90-98, 104-114, 118f.; J. Bumke, Höfische Kultur. Literatur und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter, Munich 1986, pp. 694-699.

37. R. Schnell, Kirche, Hof und Liebe. Zum Freiraum mittelalterlicher Dichtung, in: Mittelalterbilder aus neuer Perspektive, ed. by E. Ruhe and R. Behrens, Munich 1985, pp. 75-111, argues that vernacular literature was a minor aspect of court life, which presented no perceived challenge to the Church's teaching and morality.

38. Hartung [n. 35], p. 41; Schreiner [n. 15], p. 106.

39. W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron V’, in: W. H. Auden and L. MacNeice, Letters from Iceland, London 1937, pp. 232-235, here p. 235.

40. Riverside Chaucer, ed. by L. D. Benson et al., 3rd edn, Oxford 1987, p. 328.

41. On the retracciouns and on Gascoigne, see S. Wenzel's explanatory notes in the Riverside Chaucer [n. 40], p. 565; D. Wurtele, The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer, Viator 11 (1980), pp. 335-359; M. Furrow, The Author and Damnation. Chaucer, Writing, and Penitence, in: The Practice of Medieval Literature, ed. by M. Chinca et al., Forum for Modern Language Studies 33 (1997), pp. 245-257.

42. The classic study of this tradition is still J. Schwietering, Die Demutsformel mittelhochdeutscher Dichter, Abh. der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Phil.-hist. Kl., N. F. XVII,3 (1921), pp. 70-88. See also O. Sayce, Chaucer's ‘Retractions’. The Conclusion of the ‘Canterbury Tales’ and its Place in Literary Tradition, Medium Aevum 40 (1971), pp. 230-248; and J. Tatlock, Chaucer's ‘Retractions’, PMLA 28 (1917), pp. 521-529.

43. Schweikle [n. 1], p. 768. In limited space I cannot acknowledge or take issue with all that has been written on this song. I owe obvious debts to, but differ in various ways, the most important of which are noted, from the following more recent studies: C. Cormeau, Minne und Alter. Beobachtungen zur pragmatischen Einbettung des Altersmotivs bei Walther von der Vogelweide, in: Ruhe and Behrens [n. 37], pp. 147-165; F. P. Knapp, Ein schoenez bilde. Ethik und Ästhetik in Walthers ‘Alterston’, Poetica 25 (1993), pp. 70-80; T. McFarland, Walthers bilde. On the Synthesis of Minnesang and Spruchdichtung in ‘Ir reinen wîp, ir werden man’, in: McFarland and Ranawake [n. 14], pp. 183-205; J.-D. Müller, Walther von der Vogelweide: Ir reinen wîp, ir werden man, ZfdA 124 (1995), pp. 1-25; B. Wachinger, Die Welt, die Minne und das Ich. Drei spätmittelalterliche Lieder, in: Entzauberung der Welt. Deutsche Literatur 1200-1500, ed. by J. F. Poag and T. C. Fox, Tübingen 1989, pp. 107-118.

44. See Schweikle [n. 1], pp. 769f. However, I cannot follow his notion that »Walther hier entwirft eine zukünftige Disputation zwischen seiner sêle und dem lîp«, or that in the final strophe Walther refutes this »konventionelles Muster« with »eine Rechtfertigung der Lebensleistung des Künstlers«.

45. It will be apparent that my discussion of the last strophe owes much to McFarland and to Müller [both n. 43]. See also M. Camille, The Gothic Idol. Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art, Cambridge 1989 (Cambridge New Art History and Criticism), especially pp. 298-336 (to which Knapp [n. 43] draws attention). However my interpretation, it will be seen, diverges substantially from theirs.

46. Müller [n. 43] suggests a link between the bilde as a reflection of the poet's self and the Narcissus image of Morungen. Camille [n. 45], pp. 309 and 317-321, connects this »self-regarding« element of courtly love with versions in medieval art of the Pygmalion legend, and with the emergence of a new conception of the artist »who, like Pygmalion, is a maker blessed with belief in his own capacities to create«. See also J.-D. Müller, Pygmalion, höfisch, in: Pygmalion. Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur, ed. by M. Mayer and G. Nermann, Freiburg i. Br. 1997 (Rombach Reihe Litterae 45), pp. 465-495.

47. Igitur, sicut portavimus imaginem terreni, portemus et imaginem caelestis (1 Corinthians 15:49). McFarland [n. 43], p. 198, refers to 1 Corinthians 15 in connection with Reinmar von Zweter's Spruch 189, with which he compares and contrasts Walther's final strophe.

48. McFarland [n. 43], pp. 200-202.

49. Wachinger [n. 43], pp. 112f.

50. Schweikle [n. 1], p. 770.

51. Cormeau [n. 43], p. 161.

52. Müller [n. 43], pp. 17 and 20. The resurrection of the body is indeed a restoration of the divine image, but it is God's human creation, not the artist's image of it, which can be »raised incorruptible«.

53. Hildebert of Lavardin, quoted by Schwietering [n. 42], p. 83. Ulrich von Singenberg's obituary strophe for Walther, which may allude to the ‘Alterston’, is ambiguous: nu wünschen ime dur sînen werden, hovelîchen sanc, / sît dem sîn vreide sî ze wege, / daz sîn der süeze vater nâch genáden phlege [n. 11], SM 12.20, V,6-8. It may be read as suggesting that those on earth should pray for Walther's salvation because of his legacy of song but that God will be moved only by his divine mercy, or that courtly song which possesses werdekeit may itself help Walther's case for salvation.

54. Even here, the modern critic is tempted to salvage what he can: »Irdische Minne ist nicht visch unz an den grât, aber doch visch«—or a curate's egg, perhaps? See G. Hahn, Walthers Minnesang, in: H. Brunner et al., Walther von der Vogelweide. Epoche—Werk—Wirkung, Munich 1996, pp. 74-134, here p. 129.

55. J. Bromyard, Summa praedicantium, quoted by Wurtele [n. 41], p. 352.

56. ‘Testament’ attributed to Jean de Meun, in: Le Roman de la Rose par Guillaume de Lorris et Jehan de Meun, ed. by M. Méon, Paris 1814, vol. 4, p. 1. For all the very different conception and practice of art in the Renaissance, Michelangelo, in a late sonnet, inscribes himself into essentially the same tradition as Walther: Onde l'affettuosa fantasia / che l'arte mi fece idol e monarca / conosco or ben com'era d'error carca / e quel c'a mal suo grado ogn'uom desia. […] Né pinger né scolpir fie più che quieti / l'anima, volta a quell'amor divino / c'asperse, a prender noi, 'n croce le braccia. (So now I acknowledge how my passionate imagination, which made art for me an idol and sovereign, was laden with error, as is all that men desire to their own harm. […] Neither painting nor sculpture can any longer quieten my soul, now turned toward that divine love which on the cross opened wide its arms to embrace us.) Michelangelo, Rime, ed. by E. Girardi, Bari 1960, no. 285, pp. 135f.

57. Auden's satire of the poets' heaven as a celestial PEN Club in the style of P. G. Wodehouse comes to a similar conclusion: »Are Poets saved? Well, let's suppose they are / And take a peep. I don't see any books … « [n. 39], p. 235.