New critical edition of Abbot Wilhelm of Hirsau's vita
Final Report Abstract
Few contemporary sources are available for research on the monastery of Hirsau. One of the key sources for the history of Hirsau is the vita of Abbot Wilhelm, who presided over the monastery from 1069-1091. In research, this text has played a subordinate role so far. Although the Vita has repeatedly been used as a central document for the history of Hirsau Monastery and the Investiture Controversy, it has hardly been examined in its entirety in a source-critical manner. In the course of the new edition project of the Vita, it was necessary to reclassify and reinterpret a number of statements in and about the Vita. The new edition offers for the first time the text of the Vita on the basis of an extended text base of copies, annotated and introduced in consideration of recent medieval research. The extended text basis allows numerous conclusions to be drawn about the text as a whole as well as about the mechanisms of its dissemination. This reveals a dominance of copies that date from the 15th century and were distributed under the impression of the late medieval reforms. Against this background, the idea of a Hirsau reform must be reconsidered. The Vita of Wilhelm can be used to illustrate how a text could be embedded in new contexts of transmission. It can be shown that in times of reform movements, old texts were consciously used and given a new relevance. Moreover, the Vita of Wilhelm and its dissemination leave no doubt that reform and order boundaries did not play a decisive role in the transmission of hagiographic texts. The new edition reflects once again on the intention of the writing, the circumstances of the writing and the historical image it contains. In the process, it becomes clear how the perception of a period of upheaval in the monastery flowed into the text. Themes such as the future direction of the convent and the preservation of Abbot Wilhelm's legacy determine the narrative. The deceased Wilhelm becomes the heavenly guarantor for the continued existence of the monastery and his legacy. Such a text can only have been written down in this form as a result of the inner conflicts with Abbot Gebhard († 1107). It can be seen that it was originally only fully understood in Hirsau and could only later develop a new relevance in other contexts. In his literary composition, the author drew on two other contemporary vitae: the Vita of Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg, written by Bern von Reichenau, and the so-called Touler Vita of Pope Leo IX. It is striking that the author of the Vita Wilhelmi drew almost exclusively on these two models in chapters dealing with Wilhelm's character and everyday behaviour. The resulting Wilhelm is thus over long stretches a literary duplicate of the two famous models. Thus, it must be critically questioned to what extent modern reconstructions of Wilhelm's life and the monastery of Hirsau can be based on a text like Wilhelm‘s Vita.
