This translation presents five poems, written in Middle High German, by Ava, the first non-anonymous woman to write in German, the first woman, in fact, to write in any European vernacular. By way of introduction, some discussion of who the poet was, what she did and how she did it may prove helpful.

A manuscript dating from after 1150, called the Vorauer manuscript (V) from its location in the Austrian monastery of Vorau, contains four poems of very similar construction and style. The poems are untitled in the manuscript, but in this translation they are entitled: “Jesus, the Son of God” (= SG: over 2260 lines), “The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit” (150 lines), “The Antichrist” (118 lines), and “The Last Judgment” (290 lines). A fourteenth-century manuscript (G), at one time in the possession of a library in the town of Görlitz (in present-day Poland) but not extant after World War II, contained most of these four poems and in addition a fifth poem about the life of John the Baptist (= JB: 446 lines).

At the end of “The Last Judgment” are these words, found only in V:

    The mother of two children
    composed these books.
    They told her this meaning.
    They shared great joy together.
    Dear to the mother were the children,
    one of whom has departed from the world.
    Now I pray all of you,
    great and small,
    whoever reads these books,
    that you beg grace for his soul.
    And also for the one who is still alive
    and who still labors at his tasks—
    for him beg grace
    and for the mother, who is Ava.

It is very likely that all five poems were composed by the same author. The poems differ in vocabulary, but this is a function of their differing subject matter. They are consistent in their grammatical usage, in their use of assonance rhyme, and in the way they make use of material from the Scriptures and from common Christian tradition.

Is it possible to know anything about this Ava, whose works were copied several times, once as late as the fourteenth century? The chronicles and necrologies of several monasteries of the Danube region in present-day Austria mention the death of an Ava. The necrology from Melk for February 7 reads: MCXXVII Ava inclusa obiit, i.e., “1127 Ava the enclosed woman died.” In addition, the Melk annals for 1127 mention her death (this time, however, for February 6). Nearly all scholars assume that this Ava is identical with the Ava (often called Frau Ava, i.e., Dame Ava, by modern scholarship) named in the final line of “The Last Judgment.” She was the “mother of two children” who loved them very much and had great joy in sharing spiritual conversation with the two. Some scholars conjecture that the two sons (the pronouns for the children are both masculine) may have been monks at Melk.

If Ava did live as an enclosed woman associated with a monastery, she would have participated, through a window leading from her cell into the church, in the Divine Office, with its psalms, antiphons, hymns and readings, and in the liturgy of the Mass. She would have heard sermons, seen paraliturgical events such as plays, and she would have counseled others and been counseled by them. Even as an inclusa, her life would have been guided by the life of the monastic community that provided for her needs and by the Rule of Saint Benedict. She would have passed her days in the round of feasts and seasons of the Church’s year.

We have no way of proving that Ava the poet and Ava the inclusa were the same person. What we do have is her poems, and many things in them make it very probable that the author of one of the longest bodies of German religious poetry of the twelfth century was indeed Ava, the inclusa. In them we find that Ava was familiar with the canticles sung at the liturgical hours, that she knew a number of phrases, names, and terms from the Latin liturgy and that she had a very precise grasp of the intervals between the events commemorated in the round of the liturgical year.

Beyond these particular bits of evidence from the poems, and beyond what we can suppose about the life of a twelfth-century inclusa, there is the whole project of the poems and what they mirror about the one who composed them. We discover in Ava’s poems the very sort of retelling one would expect from a person who cultivated a life-long familiarity with the Gospels. Her poetry was the fruit of her lectio divina, i.e., “divine reading.” This phrase, common in monastic tradition, refers to the meditative, prayerful reading of the Scriptures and writings of the Church Fathers. Lectio divina begins in the Mass and Divine Office and flows back to them. Reading was almost always done out loud; thus readers (and listeners) could commit to memory a whole latticework of cross-references, word associations and images much more easily than we might think possible.

Ava’s seamless weave of Gospel material, commentary, exhortation and devotion testify that she made the scriptural story part of her prayer and spiritual consciousness. Ava and the tradition in which she stands treat the four Gospels as mutually illuminating and providentially complementary ways of coming to the one Gospel, which is Jesus Christ, the Word of God. The Scriptures, while sacred and not to be altered, are not ends in themselves. By hearing and reading them, by meditating on them, by digesting them and forming one’s mind on them, a person can hope to have a share in the New Covenant, which is the birth, life, death, resurrection and Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

For example, in the story of the Magi (SG 169-304), Ava has molded elements found in works of many of the Church Fathers and in liturgical sources into one single narration. One can hear allusions to a homilies of the Church Fathers, to the common heritage of Christian interpretation, and to readings, responsories, and other elements of the Divine Office. Legendary and apocryphal material, on the other hand, are noticeably absent. In the background, we also hear the phrase of the Nicene Creed: “light from light” (lumen de lumine) and the “light” (lux) of the prologue of John’s Gospel. Further, we may be hearing an echo of the vespers hymn for Epiphany, “O Wicked Herod, You Enemy” (Hostis Herodes impie), which has this verse:

                The Magi went, following
                the star which they had seen going before them:
                By its light [lumine] they are seeking the Light [or Lamp: lumen]
                by their gift they acknowledge God.

In SG 201-2, Ava has the Magi ask where the “King of the Jews, the Lamp of virtue” (chunich der judene, liehtvaz der tugende) is. Then in SG 249ff., the star that reappeared guided the Magi along until it came to the holy place “[the place] where the child lay, where the mother was sitting, there did the lamp stand still” (... da gestuont daz liehtvaz). Ava thus has the stellar lamp guide the kings to the eternal Lamp.

Ava’s account of the Magi shows that it is impossible to demonstrate that she used this or that particular source, chiefly because there is no way of knowing by what avenue themes and images reached her. They could have come through a sermons, digests of sermons, conversation, readings during Mass or Divine Office, or through personal reading—and probably via all of these routes together. The treatment of the Magi episode looks like common Christian tradition set down in writing. And this should come as no surprise. As with patristic authors, so too with Ava: a mind formed by and trained in the Scriptures and in commentaries on them can quote good-sized passages from memory, each time getting it slightly differently, omitting phrases, transposing words and phrases, and conflating related passages.

Several questions in this regard are provoked by the final lines of “The Last Judgment.” What did Ava’s children do in telling her the “meaning” or “sense,” and does this German sin correspond to the Latin sensus, which almost always means the spiritual as opposed to the literal meaning of a biblical text? Did they discuss it? To what extent did she recast, rephrase, and embellish what they told her? To what extent and in what circumstances did Ava have direct access to the liturgical texts of the Mass and Divine Office, to written collections of sermons and commentaries? How much did she understand of the Latin antiphons, readings and sequences of the Mass and Divine Office?

Besides spoken and written sources, we have to reckon with possibility of visual ones. For example, the falling of the idols of Egypt at the approach of the Holy Family in their flight from Herod (SG 377ff.) has Isaiah 19:1 as its biblical source, but it is a favorite theme of manuscript illustrators. Or again, Ava’s description of the Hell-mouth (SG 1752ff.) may stem from a visual representation of it which she had seen painted in a manuscript or on a church wall.

In short, Ava had at her disposal a trove of words, images, and stories that are the common inheritance of Christians, made available through preaching, liturgical reenactments, instruction, visual art, and texts.

II The Five Poems

“John the Baptist” and “Jesus, the Son of God”

These poems are dealt with together, since they both deal with Gospel material. The first of Ava’s poems (found in G but not in V) deals with the life of the precursor of Christ, John the Baptist. The second and by far the longest poem treats the life of Christ from the Annunciation to Mary to the Ascension. To call this poem “The Life of Jesus,” as do all histories of early German literature that mention Ava, is unfortunate, since it implies that Ava is out to trace a biography of Jesus. Rather, her aim in this poem is to recount the Incarnation of the Word and his saving and self-revealing activity on behalf of human beings. Ava’s favorite title for Christ is gottesun, “God’s Son,” and so “Jesus, the Son of God” better reflects the poem’s aim and contents.

Very nearly all the Gospel accounts that underlie Ava’s retelling occur in the great seasons of the Church year: Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter.

The selection and arrangement of biblical material in “The Life of Jesus” depend on nothing less than on “accidents” or “poetic license.” The orientation to the pericopes of the liturgical cycle of readings, especially the way they are used and rooted in the unfolding of the Church year—all this not only makes it obvious that the structure was planned but also shows how much the whole poetic work must be seen and understood against the background of the life of faith which found its fulfillment every day in this Church year.

Ava’s arrangement of Gospel events reflects the time intervals of the liturgical year. A few clear examples of this procedure may be seen in her account of Jesus’ baptism (SG 434), the wedding at Cana (SG 617), the raising of Lazarus (SG 1093) and the anointing at Bethany (SG 1123).

The content and form of JB and SG are treated in greater depth in part III of this introduction: “The Artistry of the Poems.”

The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit

This poem deals with Christian life and growth in virtue. It stands logically between the poems based on the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles and those which foretell what will happen at the end of time. The poem’s structure follows, in reverse order, the listing of what are traditionally called the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. They appear in Isaiah 11:2ff.: sapientia—wisdom, intellectus—understanding, consilium—counsel, fortitudo—fortitude, scientia—knowledge, pietas—goodness or piety, and timor domini—fear of the Lord. To each gift corresponds one of the beatitudes from Matthew 5:3ff. Further, to each of the first four gifts there corresponds one of the four elements (earth, fire, water, air), and to the last three gifts corresponds one of the parts of the human soul (memory, will, reason). These two divisions coincide with the vita activa, the life of active virtue, and the vita contemplativa, the life of contemplation, of direct union with God. To the last three sections also are assigned three attributes of God: power, wisdom, goodness. A number of the virtues to which the Holy Spirit’s gifts lead reflect a monastic or ascetic milieu. There are many echoes of the Rule of St. Benedict, especially chapter 4, which lists the tools for doing good works, chapter 7, a treatise on humility, and chapter 6, which deals with silence.

“The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit” is perhaps the most unique of Ava’s works, in that it speaks neither about history nor about the end of time but about events which are theological and moral. Nonetheless, the theme of the poem flows directly out of the scene with which SG ends, i.e., Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the first Christians.

The Antichrist

Ava’s fourth poem deals with the distress that Christians will undergo at the end of history and at the coming of the Antichrist. Behind Ava’s poem lies the tradition of Christian apocalyptic writing with its rich and complicated imagery and numerology. The chief New Testament witnesses to this apocalyptic tradition are the book of Revelation, especially chapters 4–20, and the so-called synoptic apocalypse found in Mark, chapter 13 and its parallel passages in Matthew and Luke.

In addition to numerous scriptural references, Ava’s poem has much in common with other treatments of the Antichrist theme in German, as well as with German recountings of the Plagues of Egypt. Sr. Eoliba Greinemann’s comments are worth quoting here at some length. She sets out a balanced view of what it means to say of an author, living in twelfth-century central Europe, that she depends on a certain source:

One should never forget that the works which have come down to us and among which we make comparisons and establish dependencies represent only a tiny fraction of the written works which were actually available and disseminated at that time.... It does not seem to me permissible to derive, from these few parallels, a direct dependence. There do exist agreements, but they should be regarded as witnesses to the general dissemination of ideas rather than as proofs for a dependence which can be traced in detail. The features in question prompt us to look for the common source from which all artists could draw in the same measure and in fact did draw, a source which I think I have identified in the liturgy, in the broadest sense of the word.... The apocalyptic style is alien to Ava; its characteristic features are missing in her poetry. Without excluding the possibility that German poems on this theme could have been part of the spiritual property on which she drew, still we should seek the source for her poem in the area of liturgy, perhaps in this case especially in contemporary sermons on apocalyptic texts which were used at the end of the Church year as liturgical readings.

The Last Judgment

The subject matter of the fifth poem is the final fifteen days of the world, the coming of Christ as Judge on the Last Day, the judgment pronounced upon the good and the wicked, and the joys to be experienced by the blessed. At the end of the poem is the afterword discussed above, in which Ava is named.

Parallels to the material found in “The Last Judgment” can be found elsewhere, but what was said about dependence in the previous section applies here as well. The listing of fifteen signs that herald the final coming of Christ was widespread in Christian literature. Because of the nature of the material dealt with, the precise meaning of many words and the exact nature of the pictures Ava paints with them is often elusive. Again, Greinemann’s assessment of Ava’s poem is very helpful:

The parousia discourses in the New Testament and the body of sermons about the Last Judgment, especially as they appear in the thought of the early Fathers of the Church, Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory, and are then handed on, form the basis of a poem at once confident and, in the context of traditional material, quite independent in its structure. This poem is characterized by personal involvement and deep-felt belief; in its genuinely catechetical purpose, it intends to summon its audience, above all by its representation of the joys of the life to come, to a life that is pleasing to God.

III The Artistry of the Poems

Some scholars hold that Ava pieced her poems together naively, perhaps with a good deal of assistance from her sons. Having studied all the poems in close detail, Greinemann concludes that they show a unity of conception: “This work gives no evidence of being ‘patched’ together; it is, rather, an organic formation. Biblical text and biblical explanation have been brought together by a single hand, with great self-confidence (and in places very skillfully) into a didactic poem whose style is akin to that of biblical narration.”

Ava demonstrates a keen sense of words and sound poetic judgment. Some lines bespeak a genius for short yet trenchant phrases, for example, SG 1017–1018: er gab mir miniu ougen / ich wil an in gelouben (“He gave me my eyes. I will believe in him”), the unreserved faith response of the cured blind man, and JB 154: an gote bin ich zwivels vrie (“About God I am free of doubt”), a summation of the faith posture of Mary and of every Christian. Ava uses words very effectively to relate one character to another, e.g., her use of the same adverb, innechlichen (“inwardly”), for both Herod (JB 417) and John the Baptist (JB 429); both men felt strong inward emotion: the former, sorrow over his hasty oath, and the latter, joy at the total giving of himself into God’s hands.

Working with a modest and unpretentious vocabulary, Ava handles sensitive and doctrinally weighty material with competence and poetic skill. In the annunciation to Mary (SG 11ff.), Ava sets out the traditional Eve–Mary parallel very deftly, switching noun and adjective in the two members of the comparison (maget / ungeborn // magetlich / geburt):

wan diu maget ungeborne            Just as that maiden not born
vil manige werlte hete                     caused so many ages to be
      verlorne                                             lost,
daz daz widertan wurte                so what she had done
                                                              would be undone
mit der magetlichen geburte.        by the maiden birth.

The account of the wedding at Cana provides an even clearer example of Ava’s ability to treat complicated material in seemingly effortless fashion. In very few words, Ava accurately presents one of the traditional interpretations of the dialogue between Jesus and Mary at the wedding feast, namely that Jesus was revealing the union of the divine and human natures in him, a revelation that would be repeated by Jesus on the cross. Mary’s words to her Son are followed by Jesus’ reply (SG 626f.):

Nu erzaige dine gotliche            Now show your divine
    chrefte.                                            power!
Do sprach der wandels vrie       Then spoke the One free
                                                             from change
Zuo Sande Marien:                      to Saint Mary:                      
Wip, hore her zuo mir:                Woman, listen to me:               
Waz gehort daz zuo mir              So then, does that belong
    oder zuo dir?                                  to me or to you?
Her nach chumet diu zit,             Afterwards the time will
                                                             come,
Wilt du merchen, guot wip,         note this, good woman,
Daz ich vil wol erzaige dir           that I will surely show you,
Waz ich han von dir.                   what I have from you.

    Later, from the cross, Jesus says to Mary (SG 1663):

Sich, wip, ditze ist din sun.           Look, woman, this is your son.

Ava seems to give special attention to scenes in which Jesus encounters women: the woman at the well of Samaria, the Canaanite woman, the sinful woman who anoints Jesus’ feet, the woman caught in adultery, Martha and Mary, the women at the tomb, and his mother Mary at the wedding of Cana and on Calvary. The scene in which Jesus is anointed by the sinful woman is one of the longest in the active ministry of Jesus (SG 837ff., 84 lines) and is exceeded only by that of the man born blind (SG 981ff., 111 lines). It is very difficult to say whether in fact Ava handles these settings with any more intimacy and warmth than she does other scenes. The considerate demeanor of Jesus and the prominence given to women by such narratives is already present in the Gospels themselves, and the Church’s liturgy reads all the above encounters between Jesus and women during the major liturgical seasons.

We see in small but significant details ways that Ava used to make Jesus’ contact with people, especially women, more intimate or personal. For example, in SG 918–920, Ava has Jesus speak directly to the sinful woman a remark which in the Gospel of Luke is addressed to the bystanders: “Because of your great love, I let you go from here without your sins. Now go with God’s protection” (Luke 7:47). Such heightened intimacy must be balanced by instances in which Ava relates without dialogue a scene which in the Gospels is dramatic. The story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman as told in the Gospel of John, chapter 4, begins with sixteen verses of dialogue between Jesus and the woman. In Ava’s retelling, the dialogue has disappeared, and the account of the meeting is conveyed in nine short lines. Strangely, Ava does not recount the very touching scene in which Jesus meets the widow of Naim, whose son is being carried out for burial. Likewise, she barely mentions the raising of Lazarus (SG 1093ff.), before which John’s Gospel relates how Jesus spoke with both Martha and Mary.

Furthermore, other factors may have influenced Ava in her handling of the scenes in question. The anima, “soul,” is grammatically feminine, and Christian writers often interpret women in the Scriptures as symbols of the soul in its relationship with God or Christ. In so doing, they are continuing the tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures, in which lover—beloved and husband—wife imagery is often used to express the relationship between the Lord and the people Israel.

Before we could identify as unique Ava’s treatment of Jesus’ encounters with women, we would have to examine the way other authors, especially those who wrote in the vernacular, treated them. However, let us note here one salient feature of SG. A simple listing of the headings used in this translation shows that half of the scenes of the public ministry of Jesus have the Savior in contact or dialogue with a woman:

    The Marriage Feast of Cana (Jesus’ mother, Mary)
    Jesus and the Samaritan Woman
    Jesus and the Canaanite Woman
    Jesus in Simeon’s House (the sinful woman)
    Jesus Blesses Children
    Jesus at the house of Martha and Mary
    The Raising of Lazarus (Martha and Mary)
    The Anointing at Bethany (by Mary)
    The Woman Caught in Adultery

Even granted that the liturgy provided Ava with a framework, this list of headings represents a remarkable selection of Gospel events.

IV Translating Ava’s Poetry

This translation is an English rendering of Ava’s text based on V and G established by Kurt Schacks. He relies on the older V in preference to the much later G, which he thinks often misconstrues Ava’s use of alliteration and misinterprets many of her early Middle High German words. According to Schacks, G also inserts a number of explanatory comments into Ava’s text. Schacks omits such lines from his critical text, and they have not been translated here.

All five of Ava’s poems have the same poetic structure: short lines with no pattern of accent, paired by means of a loose assonantal rhyme. The following fourteen lines, taken from Ava’s account of the birth of Christ (SG 137–150), will give some idea of the variety of line length and of line-final assonance:

dô entwaich der esel unde                    Then the donkey and the
        daz rint                                                   ox drew back;
si ęrten iesâ daz vrône                           immediately they
           chint                                                    worshipped the child,
                                                                        the Lord.
der dâ lach an dem lufte                       The One who lay there
                                                                        exposed to the air
der hât in sîner hant alle                        is the One who holds all
        himeliske chrefte                                  the heavenly powers in
                                                                      his hand.
den bevie der magede wambe             The maiden’s womb
                                                                      contained him
der ist noch unbevangen                      who cannot be contained
in himele unde in erde                          by heaven and earth.
daz er gebôt daz muose                       What he commands must
        werden                                                 happen.
dô erscain ain engel alsô hęr               Then a glorious angel
                                                                       appeared
an dem velde ze Betlehem                   in the field at Bethlehem.
er sagete den hirten                               He said to the shepherds
die dâ wacheten uber ir                        who were guarding
        chorter                                                 their flocks there
daz dâ geborn wâre                              that in that place had
                                                                     been born
der werlt hailâre                                    the Savior of the world.

Little would be gained by forcing an English translation into such a system of assonance. The strength and movement of Ava’s poetry is best conveyed by clear phrases and simple vocabulary. This translation tries to convey Ava’s words as literally as possible without straying from natural English. Ava’s pairs of short lines are printed with the second line indented.

Ava’s poems teem with short words that are semantically very rich and are used in a broad spectrum of contexts. This is one particular genius of Middle High German. Such words are difficult to translate, since English does not have words with precisely congruent meanings or patterns of use. Two examples will stand for many. The central meaning of the very common adjective scôn is “beautiful.” Depending on the context, however, it may be translated by a wide range of English words: “bright, magnificent, glorious; careful; well-suited; friendly; solemn; direct; thorough.” Consider also the difficulty of rendering adequately the small word sin. It can mean “physical sense, good sense, mental energy, mind, understanding, judgment, disposition, meaning.” The context must play a dominant role in determining the best English equivalent.

V Section Headings, Scriptural Citations and Line Numbering

In the original text, neither poems nor sections have titles. The headings in this translation that divide the poems into sections are merely an aid to comprehension. Next to the section headings of “John the Baptist” and “Jesus, the Son of God,” there appears in italics a reference to one or more sections of the four Gospels. It is important to note that these verse numbers are meant merely to help the reader locate the material that Ava treats in her poems. As should be evident from this introduction, the citation of verses does not suggest that Ava had specific Gospel passages as her immediate source. Rather, there is every indication that Ava is out to recount the Gospel story, not as it occurs in the complete text of the four Gospels, but as read, sung, and paraphrased in the liturgy of the Mass and the Divine Office, both as directly experienced by her and as mediated to her by others. Citations most often refer to the Gospel according to Matthew, and this for two reasons: because it was the Gospel most frequently represented in the readings at Mass, and because, with the help of a New Testament with cross-references, the reader will find it a simple matter to see how and where the other Gospels treat parallel material.

The unique way in which Ava handled encounters between Jesus and women (indeed between Jesus and all the people whom he met), her particular talent for shaping scattered elements into a new whole, her steering a steady course between literalism and unbridled imagination—these and similar facets of Ava’s poetry are for the reader to discover and delight in. Even though much of the genius of her poems must escape those who do not read Middle High German, still this translation of Ava’s poems is offered as a testimony to what was accomplished by a Christian woman writing in German in twelfth-century Europe.