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Introduction to the Source

The Millstatt Plaint of Sin is transmitted in full in Klagenfurt Landesarchiv Cod. GV 6/19, a major anthology of ‘Early Middle High German’ verse texts. It was made around 1200, or slightly later, in Bavaria or Austria, and contains the Old German Genesis, Exodus, and Physiologus, accompanied by illustrations, followed by five short religious poems, of which the Millstatt Plaint of Sin is the third. We do not know for whom it was made – perhaps for nobility or for a female religious community. The part of the manuscript containing our poem is heavily damaged and so the poem itself is often difficult to reconstruct. Some insight into the missing sections is however offered by two other manuscript witnesses that contain fragmented versions of the same poem: 1) Munich BSB Cgm 5249/60a, four parchment fragments of Honorius’ Elucidarium from the late twelfth century, with a German text written below in a smaller hand (although perhaps the same hand) that correlates – albeit with considerably deviation – to around 100 lines of the Millstatt Plaint of Sin; 2) Zurich Zentralbibliothek Cod. Rh. 77, a ninth- or tenth-century Latin manuscript with various twelfth-century additions, including a fragment of a German poem often known as the Rheinau Paul. This poem correlates fairly closely to parts of the end of the Millstatt Plaint of Sin, although it is by no means identical.

Introduction to the Text

The Millstatt Plaint of Sin, written in middle of the twelfth century perhaps in the South West of Germany, is a substantial poem addressed to God in the voice of a sinner. The poem is conventionally counted as part of a small sub-genre of Early Middle High German religious poetry known as the ‘Sündenklage’, or ‘plaint of sin’. These poems – there is also the Vorau Plaint of Sin and the more simplistic Uppsala Plaint of Sin – all have at their heart a confession of sinfulness and a prayer to God for mercy, and are thought to have taken their inspiration from the more pragmatic text-type of the German confession (Beichte). These confessions, generalized first-person confessions in prose, are transmitted widely from the ninth century and had a variety of liturgical and devotional functions.

The manuscript of the Millstatt Plaint of Sin is heavily damaged, but it is nonetheless possible to get a good sense of the poem and its themes. It is not simply a confession of sins, but rather offers a conceptualization of the world, as well as the place of man and his sins within it. By framing the confessional act with sections praising God and his creation and structuring sins around the inappropriate use of individual body parts, the Millstatt Plaint of Sin explains that God is in everything and that all created things are a way of seeing God; hence sinning is perceived as an almost illogical malfunctioning of creation. Although ostensibly quite straightforward, the poem tackles – in a rewarding and indeed quite challenging way – a number of contemporary issues that will be of interest to readers: the relationship between body and soul; bodily fragmentation; and the nature and construction of selfhood.

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