Colter Kennedy and Dr. Robert McFarland, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages
When I first started at BYU I was approached by Prof. Robert McFarland about studying the relatively unknown text, Die Denkwürdigkeiten der Helene Kottannerin (The Memoirs of Helene Kottanner) to fulfill requirements for his class covering Cultural History of Germany. Eventually this assignment grew under his supervision to an ORCA project, a conference paper, and an honors Thesis. Originally I began researching the feminist aspect of the text and how it was far more progressive than any other text written by a woman for its time. The scope of my study of this text has grown immensely to show how it is a forerunner to the development of humanistic philosophy in the northern renaissance.
Before I explain what conclusions I have reached from my research I think it is important to give some background on the text. After the death of Albert II in 1439, the first Habsburg King of Hungary, the kingdom was left unsure about its future. Albert’s wife, Queen Elizabeth, was pregnant with his only heir. To ensure the succession of the Hapsburg dynasty in Hungary, Elizabeth sent her trusted lady in waiting, Helene Kottannerin, on a secret mission to break into the stronghold of Plintenburg and steal the Hungarian crown from a heavily guarded vault. Helene accomplished this on the night of February 20, 1440. Three months later the little baby boy was crowned King of Hungary with the Holy Crown of St. Stephen while being held in the arms of Kottannerin herself.
This event is well documented in Die Denkwürdigkeiten der Helene Kottannerin (The Memoirs of Helene Kottanner). This text gives a fascinating autobiographical account through the eyes of the lady in waiting herself. It may be the oldest memoir written by a woman in the German language. These memoirs are significant as they show two astute medieval women who shaped and manipulated political events and the very symbol of the Hungarian monarchy. While several scholars have endeavored to place Kottannerin’s text into a historical context, few have addressed the place of Kottannerin’s work in the context of the genre of the autobiography or literature. The Memoirs of Helene Kottanner predates the main development of humanism in the sixteenth century. Since autobiographies are humanistic by nature, what textual tradition might have influenced Kottannerin to write her own life’s story?
This led me to apply for my ORCA research grant, which allowed me to begin my research about the text. Beginning research at BYU unfortunately had almost nothing referring to Helene Kottannerin, but it did have information about writings of the time and some of Kottannerin’s contemporaries. There was very little written before time in any German speaking land and there were several texts after her which began to focus of some of the same themes that she did. Works such as Jahannes von Tepl’s, Der Ackermann written in 1473, about a farmer who argues with death to try and save his wife from being taken in her illness was a contemporary author who focused on importance of the individual in relationship to the world and that man kind was the focus of supernatural world. Such other works helped me understand what styles and themes to look for in Kottannerin’s works in trying to understand what she writes and how she writes it.
Next I travelled to Germany to research in the national library system more about Kottannerin’s actually text and some of her background. This was greatly subsidized by the money that I received for my ORCA grant. In connection with the first BYU study abroad to Berlin, Prof. McFarland and I researched in Der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek (The German National Library), the largest collection of Germanic texts. Here we found a rare complete copy of the Die Denkwürdigkeiten der Helene Kottannerin and some scant information about Kottannerin and who she was. The most I could find about her was that she remained a lady in waiting to Queen Elizabeth until the death of the Queen, at which point wrote the text to the young King Ladislaus, the son of Queen Elisabeth, in what most scholars believe was an attempt to get money from him in 1450. Another great find in Berlin was that I was introduced to some of the Northern Renaissance philosophers that give tools in their philosophies to explain the style and thematics of Kottannerin’s text.
After returning from Germany I wrote my first major work about Die Denkwürdigkeiten der Helene Kottannerin. The paper was a thirteen page conference paper that I presented in January 2007. The paper had progressed from the feminist approach of the text to focusing more on the literary philosophy of the text. I analyzed how the humanistic theme of man striving to determine his own fate while having faith that God would bestow grace upon such determination is displayed in the text by Helene Kottanner and Queen Elizabeth, helping to qualifying it as humanistic text. I focused on the determination of the two women to show the progression of literature from the medieval focus of emphasizing deterministic plan of God in the lives of man, to showing the humanistic notion of how God assists man in man’s plans and in man’s determination.
Now in preparation for my graduation I have decided to write my entire Honors Thesis about Kottannerin’s text and emphasize how Kottannerin uses humanistic style and themes in her text that are explained by humanistic philosophers. Particularly using the works of Erasmus and Mirandola explain the emerging humanistic philosophies that are so prevalent in the text. I have also tied in such aspects as the use of Middle High German, a form of the language that was used by commoners and not the academic Latin of the time, which displays a commonality of the text that makes it more personal.
The generous gift of the ORCA grant was a key aspect in allowing me to gain advanced academic research experience while being guided by a mentoring professor. This has also provided me with the opportunity to write about a subject for an honors thesis that I have been able to be on the cutting edge of an unknown text that I will help bring to light and bring into the intertextual network of humanistic literary studies.