The Life and Afterlife of St. Elizabeth of Hungary: Testimony from her Canonization Hearings

249 Pages·2010·1.28 MB·English

by  Kenneth Baxter Wolf

The Life and Afterlife of
St. Elizabeth of Hungary
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The Life and
Afterlife of
St. Elizabeth
of Hungary
Testimony from Her
Canonization Hearings
Translated with Notes

and Interpretive Essays by
kenneth baxter wolf
1
2010
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The life and afterlife of St. Elizabeth of Hungary: testimony from her
canonization hearings / translated with notes and interpretive essays
by Kenneth Baxter Wolf.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-973258-6
1. Elizabeth, of Hungary, Saint, 1207–1231. 2. Christian women saints—Hungary—Biography.
I. Wolf, Kenneth Baxter, 1957–
BX4700.E4S69 2010
282.092—dc22
[B] 2009047290
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To the memory of
Gustav Friedrich Wolf (1830–60),
an immigrant
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Acknowledgments
This book represents the first fruits of a grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities that I received in 2004–2005,
a llowing me to pursue my interest in “poverty saints.” My o riginal
intention had been to translate and study the lives of half a dozen
such figures as a way of contextualizing my earlier work on
St. Francis of Assisi. The more I delved into the sources related
to Elizabeth of Hungary, the more I became fascinated by her
p articular story. In the end, the portion of the book dedicated
to Elizabeth would not be contained within a single chapter, so
I decided to give her a book of her own. This seemed to me to be a
particularly propitious modification at the time, given the looming
800th anniversary of Elizabeth’s birth. As it turned out, another
year of teaching intervened and then I began a three-year stint as
a ssociate dean, so this book is more likely to commemorate the
800th anniversary of Elizabeth’s arrival in Marburg.
Beyond the NEH, I am grateful to Pomona College for
supplementing the grant and for providing me with travel money that
allowed me to visit Marburg for the first time in 1997 and again in
2009. In addition to its financial support, Pomona College has given
me an academic context conducive to the kind of scholarly itineracy
that has characterized my career as a whole. If I were not a professor
at a liberal arts college with a small history department, I doubt that
I would have felt as free to move from the martyrs of Córdoba, to the
Normans in Sicily, to the poverty of St. Francis, to the canonization of
St. Elizabeth. There are some liabilities to this shotgun approach to
medieval history, but I believe that I am a better scholar for having
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
done it this way. At the very least, I have never been bored. I would also like
to acknowledge that handful of students at Pomona College who, taking my
Medieval Latin Translation tutorial over the last few years, found themselves
faced with various chunks of the Elizabeth corpus. Having to justify my inter-
pretations to them made me more confident in my own translations. On more
than one occasion, they saw things that I had missed.
I want to thank the two anonymous readers of the original manuscript I
submitted to Oxford University Press in 2008. The final product has benefited
immensely from their thoughtful reading.
Finally, it is unlikely that I, a self-styled medieval Mediterraneanist, would
have been as receptive to the idea of studying a German saint were it not
for the influence of Friederike Liese-Lotte von Franqué, who, among other
things, helped me find my great-great grandfather Gustav, to whom this book
is dedicated.
Preface
Elizabeth of Hungary, also known as Elizabeth of Thuringia, was
born sometime in 1207, most likely in the town of Sárospatak.1 She
was the second child of King Andrew II of Hungary and his Bavarian
wife, Gertrude of Andechs-Meran.2 As a child of four, Elizabeth
was betrothed to the future Landgrave of Thuringia and promptly
sent to the Wartburg castle overlooking Eisenach to be raised in the
court of Hermann I. She was only thirteen or fourteen when her
marriage to Hermann’s son and heir Ludwig IV was consummated.3
Their first child—a son—was born the following year, and by the
time Elizabeth turned twenty, she was pregnant with their second
daughter. But less than three weeks before little Gertrude was born,4
Ludwig died in Otranto while preparing to embark with
1. The most balanced, concise, and up-to-date biography of Elizabeth is Ortrud Reber,
Elisabeth von Thüringen, Landgräfin und Heilige: eine Biografie (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich
Pustet, 2006). The year of Elizabeth’s birth can be deduced from Conrad of Marburg’s testimony,
that she died the night of November 16/17, 1231, in her twenty-fifth year. Conrad, Summa Vitae, p. 3.
Though Elizabeth’s birthplace is not indicated in the contemporary sources, Sárospatak—which
was part of her mother’s holdings—has the best claim. Reber, Elisabeth von Thüringen, p. 49.
2. Being the daughter of Andrew, a member of the Arpadian dynasty that included the
canonized Hungarian kings Stephen and Emeric—as well as of Gertrude, who was the sister of
St. Hedwig of Silesia—Elizabeth benefited from an unusually holy bloodline that helped pave the
way for her own canonization. For more on this phenomenon, see Gábor Klaniczay, Holy Rulers
and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe, Past and Present Publications
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
3. Ludwig—who was six or seven years older than Elizabeth—was actually the second of
Hermann I’s sons, but the eldest, also named Hermann, died on the last day of December 1216.
Ludwig was subsequently named heir by his ailing father, who himself died on April 26, 1217.
4. Elizabeth’s son Hermann was born on May 28, 1222, her daughter Sophia on March 20,
1224, and her daughter Gertrude on September 29, 1227.