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Introduction to the Text

The Sultan’s Daughter in the Flower Garden is a 400-line rhymed couplet text in Middle High German that was probably composed anonymously in the 14th century. Categorized in scholarship as a “Klosterlegende”  or monastery legend, but also exhibiting characteristics of saints’ lives, courtship narratives, stories of noble “heathens” who convert, as well as of docta ignorantia (learned ignorance) and Marian literature, the narrative was probably translated from a no longer extant Latin source and is also transmitted in low German prose versions, as well as in song form. While the prose versions have a “modest” transmission in late medieval manuscripts and early modern prints, the songs’ reception stretches into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Middle High German rhymed couplet version presented here appears, however, in only two late fifteenth-century manuscripts: Berlin, Staatsbibiliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, mgo 222, dated to after 1475, and Budapest, Bibl. et Archivum P. P. Franciscanorum, Cod. Esztergom 11, dated to around 1500. Both manuscripts were produced in the southern German-speaking areas and tell the following story: After learning of the arrival of a foreign nobleman whom her father wishes her to wed, the daughter of the Sultan of Babylon goes into their beautiful garden. Among the flowers, she marvels at the beauty of the lilies, whereupon an angel appears and recruits her to worship the God who made them, as long as she can commit to complete chastity. She agrees and he whisks her 3000 miles away, instructing her in the Christian mysteries along the way. The angel delivers her to a convent. where she is accepted, baptized, educated, and eventually becomes abbess.

The dominant aspects of the tale situate it most comfortably in the traditions of Marian literature and docta ignorantia narratives. The references to lilies, to chastity, and to the annunciation from the angel in an enclosed garden come into greater relief in the Berlin manuscript compilation, which includes a number of other texts relating to the Marian tradition (e.g., a pater noster exegesis, a treatise about the rosary, a devotion to Mary, a set of Marian miracles, and an allegory about the heart as cloister). This focus corresponds to the known ownership of the manuscript, which, as indicated in the pastedown on the inside front cover, was a reformed convent of Augustinian nuns in Inzigkofen, a town located about 25 miles north of Lake Constance. In contrast, the Budapest manuscript, most likely produced in a Franciscan context, seems more interested in instructing an audience of lay noblemen in the benefits of giving up their sinful behavior and embracing a more chaste existence for the sake of their fate in the afterlife. Accordingly, the other texts included in the Budapest compilation, many more of which are in verse—as opposed to the Berlin manuscript, where only the Sultan’s Daughter text is rhymed—focus on the concepts of sin and confession (e.g., model confession texts, a Latin catalogue of sins, verse prayer for a good end, a Totentanz, the dream vision of Tundalus, a section from the Lucidarius on the afterlife, and two secular rhymed couplet tales: The Count of Savoy and The Knight in the Chapel).

The text is noteworthy more for its content than for its poetic attributes, the rhymes and imagery being relatively mundane. The combination of the variety of narrative models into one tale is of interest, however, as well as the miraculous trajectory of the clever maiden from an object of exchange between men in Babylon to model Christian, scribe, teacher, and ultimately abbess of a German convent. In addition, the focus in the text on the choice to obey the angel, that is, on the maiden’s agency in determining her fate, is also striking.

Further Reading

Poor, Sara S. “Imagining the Origins of a Clever Woman: The ‘Sultanstochter’ and the Path to Learning in the Late Medieval Devotional Book.” Mendicant Gender Discourse(s) - Comparative Studies, Reti Medievali vol. 41, forthcoming 2021.

• Thorough introduction to the text, including detailed analysis of manuscript context.

Poor, Sara S. “Women Teaching Men in the Medieval Devotional Imagination.” Partners in Spirit: Women, Men, and Religious Life in Germany, 1100-1500, edited by Fiona J. Griffiths and Julie Hotchin. Brepols, 2014, pp. 339–65.

• Readings of late medieval German narratives of docta ignorantia featuring women, the manuscripts that transmit them, and the historical context.

Morgan, Ben. “The Pleasure of the Text: What Two Manuscripts Can Tell Us About Becoming God.” Medieval Mystical Theology, vol. 23, no. 1, 2014, pp. 52–64.

• Examination of the Kirchheim reception of the related narrative, the Sister Catherine Treatise, with a focus on its theological content.

Winston-Allen, Anne. Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages. Pennsylvania State UP, 1997.

• Informative study of the late medieval Marian literature through the evolution of the rosary and the poems, texts, and gardens associated with it. Includes excellent bibliography and also many illustrations.

Credits

Transcription by Johannes Bolte, Translation by Sara S. Poor, Introduction by Sara S. Poor, Encoded in TEI P5 XML by Dante Zhu