Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Arnold, Benjamin

Titel

From Warfare on Earth to Eternal Paradise: Archbishop Anno II of Cologne, the History of the Western Empire in the Annolied, and the Salvation of Mankind

Ist Teil von

• Viator (Berkeley), 1992-01, Vol.23, p.95-114

Ort / Verlag

Berkeley, CA: Brepols Publishers

Erscheinungsjahr

1992

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• "From Warfare on Earth to Eternal Paradise: Archbishop Anno II of Cologne, the History of the Western Empire in the Annolied, and the Salvation of Mankind." The unique hagiographical, historical, and theological memorial known as the Annolied is a short but complex epic (878 lines) in Middle High German which is highly resistant to interpretative consensus due to the lack of manuscripts (the text survives in Opitz's 1639 edition) and to the ignorance of authorship, patronage, or secure dating (about 1080 to 1140). Initiated as a vita of Archbishop Anno II of Cologne (1056-1075; canonized 1183), the text is a marvel of compression in which imperial history from the Romans to the western Empire of the Salians and didactic sermonizing based mainly upon biblical exegesis unexpectedly outweigh the hagiographical conventions. The epic is interspersed with highly emotive passages on the city and episcopate of Cologne; on the world's creation, the Roman Empire, and the German gentes; and on the recent War of Investitures. The purpose is to create tension eventually focused upon the example of Anno II whose tribulations are likened to those of David, Job, Moses, and Christ himself. The charisma and miracles of the archbishop, buried at Siegburg Abbey not far from Cologne, are offered in the Annolied as a message of personal and collective salvation to the clergy and laity of the diocese. With its terse style and its varied content, the Annolied above all directs attention to human salvation, an earnest purpose in keeping with the preoccupations of the Age of Reform in the economically fast-moving Rhineland of the earlier twelfth centuty.