THE DUTCH LIBRARY.

THE DUTCH LIBRARY

III

A MARVELOUS HISTORY
OF MARY OF NIMMEGEN

Printed in the Netherlands

A
MARVELOUS HISTORY OF
MARY OF NIMMEGEN

WHO FOR MORE THAN SEVEN YEAR
LIVED AND HAD ADO WITH THE DEVIL

Translated from the Middle Dutch by
HARRY MORGAN AYRES
Associate Professor in Columbia University

With an introduction by
ADRIAAN J. BARNOUW
Queen Wilhelmina Professor in Columbia University

Of this series fifty copies have been printed
on real Dutch hand-made paper, in 8vo size

The miracle play of Mary of Nimmegen is one of the gems of Dutch mediaeval literature. Its heroine is a reincarnation of Beatrice, the runaway nun from a Brabant convent who, after wandering seven years with her paramour, and living other seven as a public woman, returned, a repentant sinner, to the convent to find that she had never been missed. For all those fourteen years the Mother of God had served, in her person, as sacristan, because Beatrice had never let a day go by without praying an Ave Maria.

The love idyll of this early legend has been turned into a grotesque caricature by the author of our miracle play. The handsome youth whose seductions proved stronger than the nun’s monastic vows is[ii] changed into “an ill-favored devil of a man”, as he is described by one of the tipplers in the Antwerp tavern. Leering Moonen’s one eye is a mirror that distorts the smile of love into a grimace. His promise to satisfy the girl’s craving for pleasure and finery is the substitute magic whereby he works his charm upon her, and even that would have failed of its effect without the aid of Mary’s fit of despair. Despondency is the devil’s abettor. To us moderns, accustomed to the searching analysis of mental reactions, the girl’s easy surrender to both the fit and the fiend is not sufficiently accounted for. But the author of “Mary of Nimmegen” did not attempt to unravel the involutions of the mind. His aim was to glorify the ways of God’s mother to man, and the actions of man required no further exposition than sufficed to exemplify her divine mercy in its fullness. For that[iii] purpose the relation between cause and effect could be expressed in the simplest of terms, such as give force to the proverbial wisdom of those early days. Wanhope is the devil’s snare. That homely truth, a reflection of the mediaeval doctrine that wanhope was one of the sins against the Holy Ghost, is illustrated by Mary’s reckless invocation of “either God or all the fiends of Hell”, and Moonen appears on the scene at once in accordance with the Dutch adage which says that when you speak of the devil you tread on his tail. English sense of decorum, which shuns the mention of the unspeakable one, pretends to hear the flutter of wings when it speaks of an angel of heaven. Dutch love of realism, in scorning to barter the tangible tail under foot for the invisible wings over head, is truer to the experience of life, for weak humanity has always been more easily susceptible[iv] to the suggestive power of evil than of good.

Mary of Nimmegen finds it so. Her “God or the Devil, ’tis all one to me”, is a vain pretence at impartial allegiance. Who stands at the parting of the ways to Heaven and Hell, waiting for God to call or for the Devil to snatch her, has already passed beyond the point of retrievement. The response to the divine summons will require a moral effort which the snatcher will spare her. The way of least resistance is the way to Hell.

Mary is never in doubt as to the real nature of her one-eyed companion. “Ye be the devil out of hell!”, is her reply to Moonen’s introduction of himself, and in her first lament over the sinful life she is leading she admits to her own soul that

[v]

The innocent maiden who lived a blameless life in her uncle’s home has, by one night’s experience, become a hardened sinner. It is difficult for a modern reader to believe in Mary’s sudden wickedness. But we must remember that the mediaeval playwright did not mean to show his audience the consecutive stages of her degradation. The action on the stage is an epitome of that mental process, condensing temptation and surrender into one simple scene, the intervening phases of mental struggle and agony being left to the imagination of the audience. The language, which is more conservative than the stage, has retained that simple allegory which modern drama has discarded: we still speak of “a fallen girl”, although we demand from the modern playwright that he show us how she slid into sin.

While the inner life is thus translated into the[vi] simplest of allegories, life’s visible pageant is mirrored in all its variety. Its realistic portrayal is the chief beauty of this drama. In the romantic playlets of “Esmoreit” and of “Lanseloot” a faint reflection is seen of courtly manners imported from France. In “Mary of Nimmegen” the everyday life of Netherlands burghers is astir on the stage. We get a glimpse of the simple household of a village priest, who, not unknown to his niece, dabbles in necromancy, we are introduced into the low life of Antwerp and hear the drawer’s call to the tapster repeating an order, “A first, ho, a first! Draw of the best and fill to the brim!”, we watch with the good people of Nimmegen the performance of a mystery on a pageant-wain in the market-place, and see women take a passionate part in the political factions of the day.

This participation of women in politics was evidently[vii] characteristic of the Netherlands. Their meddling with affairs of state suggested to an English dramatist of a later period a vivid scene between an English gentlewoman and a group of Dutch Pankhursts. They counsel her to follow their example:

[viii]

Women in the Netherlands were evidently emancipated before their sisters elsewhere. The Italian Quirini, Venetian envoy to the Court at Brussels, in the early sixteenth century, was amazed at the freedom the women of Antwerp enjoyed. “The ladies”, he wrote in 1506, “wear bright costumes and spend all their leisure, when the work is done, in dancing, singing, and playing musical instruments, giving themselves entirely over to pleasure. They keep house, in addition, and manage all domestic affairs, without their husbands’ control.” And when Albrecht Dürer visited Antwerp, with his wife and maid, in the autumn of 1520, he found it difficult to bring his own ideas of decorum into line with the equality which there prevailed between the sexes. At the banquet given in his honor by the Guild of St. Luke, the artists’ wives were all present, and[ix] Dürer could not do otherwise than bring his women companions to the feast. But at his inn in the Woolstreet where he could live in German fashion, he let his wife and maid have their meals in the kitchen, and took his own in the parlor with mine host.

The Antwerp that Dürer knew can not have been much different from that where Moonen and Mary lived for seven years. For hardly more than a generation had passed, in 1520, since the author conceived his play. The wicked aunt’s fealty to Duke Adolf of Guelders is a motif extraneous to the plot, as poetic justice demands that her suicide be an atonement for her cruelty to young Mary, but it reconciles the historian to its preposterous intrusion by affording him a clue to the date of composition of the drama. The old Duke Aernout was imprisoned by his son in the year 1465, and in 1471 occurred his release,[x] which stirred the virago’s wrath to such a pitch that “she cut her throat out of pure spite”. At the time of Mary and Moonen’s return to Nimmegen three years had gone by since her death, and Mary, after her pilgrimage to Rome, is said in the Epilogue to have survived the miracle of the rings for “about two years.” The play does not tell us how many years her penance lasted, but supposing that it was short and that the author wrote soon after Mary’s death, the date of composition can hardly have been much earlier than 1480. It matters little whether the poet dramatized historical events or an invented story. The records of the town of Nimmegen contain no reference to a performance of the wain-pageant of Maskeroon, nor has a trace been found of Mary’s grave, with the three rings suspended over it, in the convent for converted sinners at Maastricht. But[xi] even if she were a fictitious character, the author, while inserting these chronological data into the play, imagined the incidents of his female rake’s progress as actual occurrences in a recent past, which justifies the historian’s use of these data in trying to fix the date of composition.

If the poet were also the writer of the prose sections, it would be wrong to ignore the statement that Mary’s uncle, after their visit to the Pope, lived yet, according to the earliest version, for twenty-four years in his village near Nimmegen. The author recording events of a quarter of a century ago would, in that case, have written, at the earliest, in the year 1498. But there is good ground to believe that the poet was not responsible for the interpolated prose, which is not essential to the play on the stage. Some Dutch critics hold the prose to be part of the drama[xii] as originally written, and intended to be spoken by a stage manager who supplied in his narrative the missing links between the scenes. But the fact is that only in a few instances does the prose serve that purpose, and in those isolated cases the imagination of the audience could be relied upon to help itself. By far the greater part of the prose narrative either repeats the drift of the preceding dialogue or anticipates the incidents of later scenes. The first meeting between Mary and her aunt is introduced by a short account in prose from which we gather that the aunt “held of the side of the young Duke, and after did destroy herself whenas she learned that the old Duke was made quit of prison”. If this was destined to be addressed to the audience from the stage, not the past, but the present, tense would have been in order. But apart from this grammatical unfitness for a[xiii] speaker’s role, these words are dramatically unfit as they forestall the surprise of the audience at the aunt’s scornful reception of her niece. That the author can not be guilty of thus crudely spoiling his own creation is sufficiently evident from many instances of his insight into the exigencies of dramatic technique. By premonition and foreboding he will give the audience an inkling of imminent calamity, but to blurt out the full truth before the truth is seen in action is not his manner. When Mary has departed from her uncle, the good priest becomes aware of a heaviness that he can not explain:

The audience get an intimation that something awful is impending, but they are kept in suspense as to[xiv] what it will be and who will be the victim, whether Mary or her uncle. In that we observe the subtle touch of the artist who wrote the dialogue. He can not have been the same man who inserted the superfluous and meddlesome prose.

How, then, must we account for its intrusion if the prose did not originally form part of the play? The manner in which the drama has been preserved accounts for it. “Mary of Nimmegen” has not come down to us in manuscript form. The earliest known version is a printed chapbook from the press of Willem Vorsterman of Antwerp, who was admitted as a member of St. Luke’s Guild in 1512, and remained at work in that city until 1543. The volume is not dated but probably came from the press in 1518 or 1519. Printed plays were a novelty at that early date. Vorsterman may have felt that to publish[xv] a drama in book form needed some justification. The word that was intended to be spoken could not be made to serve the reader’s purpose without a compromise between the dramatic and the epic. For the book is the story-teller’s domain, and the dialogue was not felt to be a story until the narrator’s “quoth he” subordinated every speech to his control. That seems to be the purpose of the inserted prose sections. They were not written, in the first instance, to elucidate situations left indistinct by the dramatist, but to lend to the drama the semblance of a narrative and thereby justify its appearance in print. Willem Vorsterman was careful not to offer his book to the public as a play: “A very marvelous story of Mary of Nimmegen who for more than seven years lived and had ado with the devil”, is his description of the contents of the volume on its title-page. And the[xvi] three subsequent editions, that of 1608 by Herman van Borculo, of Utrecht, that of 1615 by Pauwels Stroobant, of Antwerp, and a reprint of the latter probably published in Holland, though falsely bearing the imprint of Stroobant on the title-page, all persist in calling the book a “story”, be it a “very marvelous” according to Vorsterman, or a “beautiful and very marvelous and true” according to Van Borculo and Stroobant. The printers knew too well that the play’s dramatic qualities would not secure its ready sale. The moral tale it embodied, not its literary form, was its chief attraction, and as a “story” it made its appeal to the reading public.

This popular estimate of the drama as literature accounts for the manner in which an English translator of “Mary of Nimmegen” felt free to handle the original. “Here begynneth a lyttell story that[xvii] was of a trwethe done in the lande of Gelders of a mayde that was named Mary of Nemmegen that was the dyuels paramoure by the space of vij yere longe”, runs the title of this rendering, and its “Amen” is followed by the statement, “Thus endeth this lyttell treatyse Imprynted at Anwarpe by me John Duisbrowghe dwellynge besyde the camer porte.” The story in dialogue as printed by Vorsterman became a “treatyse” in the English version as printed, in probably the same year, by his fellow citizen Jan van Doesborch. Vorsterman left the dialogue of the playwright intact from no scrupulous respect for an author’s work of art. It suited his convenience to print it as it was written, his own prose, or that of the scribbler he employed, being sufficient to justify his labeling the book a “story”. But the translator, who had to re-word the entire[xviii] dialogue in any case, had no reasons of convenience to make him spare the poet’s creation. He made a fairly literal rendering of the interpolated prose and turned the dramatic dialogue into a clumsily phrased narrative, of which the following extract may serve as a sample:

The Englishman who perpetrated this murder of a good book was not more guilty in intention than[xix] Willem Vorsterman, only the result of his labor, due to the different task he undertook, makes him seem the greater sinner of the two.

Although extraneous to the play as it was acted, the prose is not altogether a negligible accretion. For its writer evidently drew on his recollections of the play as he had seen it staged for his description of some of the incidents. The quarrel between the aunt and her gossips, enacted by their shouting and cursing and pulling of each other’s hair; the row stirred up by Moonen among the crowd that listened to Mary’s recital of a “goodly ballat”, one among the folk being stabbed to death, whereupon “he who did this had his head smote off”; the manslaughter committed by one of Mary’s potmates at the Golden Tree; the uncle locking the rings round Mary’s neck and hands; these are apparently bits of pantomime[xx] as essentially part of the play as is the written context. And because of its value as the only testimony we possess of an eye-witness of the drama’s production on the mediaeval stage, the prose has been retained by the present translator, his book being a faithful reproduction in English of the earliest version of the play as printed by Willem Vorsterman.

Of the author of our little drama nothing is known. He was, doubtless, not a native of the good town of Nimmegen. For it appears from verse 652 that he imagined Mary’s uncle to live at Venlo, and a citizen of Nimmegen would have known that the distance between these two places was not a three hours’ walk but four times as long. The poet was evidently more familiar with the city of Antwerp, and his picture of the drinking scene in the tavern of the Golden Tree is vivid enough to be a first-hand impression. He[xxi] was a poet of no mean talent, and not unconscious, it seems, of his own excellence in the noble art of rhetoric. The pride of the poets of the Renaissance is forestalled in his praise of poesy, of which he made Mary his mouthpiece:

The goodly ballat lamenting in its refrain that “through folly falls poesy to decay” seems itself to bear the marks of folly’s blight. It was a concession to the taste of the day, which held the accumulation of rhymes, the use of grandiloquent gallicisms, and the elaborate structure of stanzas—all skilfully reproduced in Mr. Ayres’ rendering—to be the[xxii] elements of poetry. That was the kind of versification admired and cultivated in the so-called Chambers of Rhetoric, a kind of mediaeval theatre guilds where the local poets and poetasters imbibed the love of poetry with their beer. But our author, who believed in “Poeta nascitur, non fit”, proved by his own achievement that neither can the born poet be unmade by the temporary vagaries of poetic fashion. Where he wrote the language that his mother had taught him, instead of the bombast admired among the brethren of his craft, it yielded true poetry, vibrant with emotion in the lyrical parts, and full of plastic force in its realistic passages. Intricate rhyme schemes are employed to emphasize the lyrical note, but the verse runs on so smoothly through the reverberation of sounds, and the language remains so simple and direct, that the artificial effort does not obtrude itself[xxiii] upon our notice. Sometimes the dialogue assumes the form of a rondeau, and in the scene between uncle and aunt this device is applied with consummate skill, the uncle’s sad lament “Alas, my sister, ye deceive me”, which is its “leitmotif”, becoming intensified at its second and third repetition by its contrast with the aunt’s replies, which proceed from mockery at her clodpate brother John to heartless slander of the lost girl. The poet’s device of varying the rhyme scheme of the dialogue according to the mood of the speakers has been carefully reproduced by the translator, so that the reader can form his own opinion of its effectiveness.

Apart from its poetical qualities the play of “Mary of Nimmegen” deserves to be read—and enacted, to be sure—because it is a fine specimen of mediaeval drama. Recent productions in Holland have shown[xxiv] that the play does not miss its effect upon a twentieth-century audience. The author selected a plot which yielded to modern literature two of its noblest dramatic compositions. For the heroine of the Dutch poet is a female prototype of Faust and of Tannhäuser. To have been the first to discover its fitness for the stage is a title of distinction for our playwright, and we regret our ignorance that can not link his name, as it deserves, with those greater names of Marlowe, Goethe and Wagner. His drama also affords an early instance of the effective introduction of the play within the play. It served a double purpose in this case. For not only did the show of “Maskeroon” cause Mary to repent her sinful life, but it was, at the same time, an “oratio pro domo” of the poet, as it fitly impressed the audience with the ethical value of his art. “Better than many a preaching,” was the[xxv] village priest’s verdict. And we, of the twentieth century, can agree with him, though we do not share the poet’s Mariolatry. For Heaven’s joy over a repentant sinner must ever find its echo in the poetry of this world which is a gift of Heaven to its chosen. And of those chosen was our nameless author. The play of “Maskeroon” has long ceased to impress repentant Maries, but “Mary of Nimmegen” herself has attained immortality, thanks to her maker’s gift, which was of the Holy Ghost’s bestowing.

In the days that Duke Arent of Guelders was done in prison at Grave by his son Duke Adolf and his knavish fellows there dwelt three mile from Nimmegen a devout priest hight Sir Gysbrecht, and with him dwelt a fair young maid hight Mary, his sister’s daughter, whose mother was dead. And this aforesaid maid kept her uncle’s house serving him in all needful with honesty and diligence.

¶ How Sir Gysbrecht hath sent his niece Mary to Nimmegen.

It chanced that this Sir Gysbrecht would send his niece Mary to Nimmegen there to buy what so they needed, saying to her thus:

[2]

¶ How Mary was shamefully bespoken of her aunt.

Thus is Mary departed from her uncle and come unto Nimmegen, where she did buy all that was needful for her or her uncle. And on the selfsame day that she was come to Nimmegen her aunt had fallen out with four or five of her gossips concerning the Duke Adolf who had done into prison the old[5] Duke his father. So that she was the rather mad or a raging she-devil than a Christian wight; for she held of the side of the young Duke, and after did destroy herself whenas she learned that the old Duke was made quit of prison by the hand of the chastelain of Grave, as ye will hereafter learn. Mary, seeing that it grew to evening when she had done all those things for the which she had come to Nimmegen, said unto herself thus:

¶ How Mary took leave of her aunt and departed out of Nimmegen.

Thus is the young maiden, Mary, departed from her aunt and piteously weeping in sore distress hath betaken her out of the town Nimmegen in the dark of evening, until she is come to a great thick hedge,[11] beneath the which she sat her down in sorrowful mood, weeping and wailing, and oft commending herself to the devil, and to herself sorrowfully saying:

¶ The Devil, who always spreadeth his nets and snares wherein to catch souls ripe unto damnation, on hearing these words said with himself as follows:

After these words Emma and Moonen have taken their way to Bolduc, where for some while they[23] tarried, feasting merrily, and paying the shot of each and all who ate and drank in their company.

Now shall we stint a little of Emma and Moonen and tell of Sir Gysbrecht, her eme.

After that Mary, the which now hight Emma, had been for some while away, Sir Gysbrecht, her eme, much wondered at her tarrying, and said with himself thus:

After these words is Sir Gysbrecht gone to his sister’s house, asking after Mary, the niece of them both, the which answered rudely that she wist nought of her. Whereat he was right sad, saying to her thus:

After this Sir Gysbrecht departed him from his sister sad at heart because he gat no tidings of Mary his niece.

[28]

¶ How the wicked aunt thrust a dagger in her throat.

In the meanwhile the chastelain of Grave let the old duke Arent forth of the prison and led him to the town of Bolduc where he was right royally received by the lords of that same. Which hearing, the wicked aunt waxed so wrathful in her venomous heart that she well nigh burst for spite, saying:

¶ How Emma and Moonen journeyed to Antwerp, where they wrought much evil.

When Emma and Moonen had for some while tarried at Bolduc they journeyed to Antwerp whither they be speedily come. And Moonen said unto Emma thus:

To hear this goodly ballat great press of folk gathered and Moonen beholding this did after his hellish kind and stirred among them such strife that one among the folk was stabbed to death. And he who did this had his head smote off. Thus Emma and Moonen lived at Antwerp at the sign of the “Golden Tree” in the market, where daily of his contriving were many murders and slayings together with every sort of wickedness. In the which he greatly rejoiced, saying with himself thus:

¶ How Emma doth a little lament her sinful life.

Emma thus dwelling in Antwerp and being ware of the evil of her life, since for her sake marvelous much wickedness was daily done of Moonen’s contriving, said with herself thus:

After this she sat her down to drink with her potmates,[42] among the which Moonen so wrought that again one of them met his death. And he who did it was led of Moonen beyond the city walls where at the devil’s prompting he slew yet another, in the hope, as Moonen had told, that he should thus possess him of great store of money; whereat Moonen rejoiced exceedingly saying:

After Emma and Moonen had lived wellnigh six year in Antwerp at the sign of the “Golden Tree”, where marvelous much wickedness was done of them, it fell out that Emma was minded once more to see her eme and likewise her friends in the land of Guelders, and she prayed Moonen that he should thereto consent and fellow her on the journey thither, whereon he spake thus:

[44]

¶ How Emma and Moonen journeyed to Nimmegen.

Thus Emma and Moonen journeyed to Nimmegen, where they be come on Procession Day, whereat Emma rejoiced exceedingly. And Moonen to her spake thus:

Emma besought Moonen so hardly that she might hear the play that he thereto consented, though sorely[50] against his will as ye have heard. And the play began thus;

Emma hearkening to this play bethought her of her sinful life with sad heart, with herself saying:

The longer Emma hearkened to this play, even the more she bethought of her sins, saying thus:

After these words hath Moonen the devil caught up Emma in the air higher than is any house or church, the which her uncle and all the people beheld, wondering exceedingly and not knowing what it might mean.

¶ How Moonen cast down Emma from on high and how she was discovered to her uncle.

When Moonen the devil had caught up Emma high above all the houses, he cast her down from above into the street as he was minded to break her neck, whereat the people were sore adrad. And Sir Gysbrecht, her eme, who hearkened also to the play, marveled what it meant and who it might be that fell[60] from so great height, saying and asking of them that stood by thus:

After this Sir Gysbrecht is gone with his niece to all the most learned priests in the town of Nimmegen, but none of them, howsoever learned or expert or holy or devout, when they heard her story, durst undertake to absolve her or to prescribe to her penance for her sins, the which were fearful and against kind, whereat both they were sore downcast.

¶ How Sir Gysbrecht journeyed to Cologne with his niece.

The next day at early morn Sir Gysbrecht made preparations as if he would celebrate mass taking the precious holy sacrament in his hand and set out with Emma his niece on the way to Cologne. And Moonen the devil followed them from afar but he dare[69] not approach nigh nor draw near to Emma in any wise on account o£ the power of the holy sacrament. Nevertheless he threw sometimes the half of an oak tree or another from above at them, minded to break both their necks, but our Lord would not allow it for she used daily to read a prayer in honor of our Blessed Lady. Thus they traveled so long and much that they came to Cologne where she confessed to the Bishop. But there no man knew what counsel to give her for her sin was so against kind and great that the Bishop had not power to absolve her.

¶ How Emma and her Uncle journeyed to Rome and how Emma confessed her to the Pope.

After this Emma and her eme departed them from the Bishop and leaving Cologne journeyed to Rome, where they be come after much travail and journeying. And Emma has made confession to the Pope with weeping eyes, saying:

Thus hath Emma received her penance from the Pope. And her eme straightway let make the rings so fast about her neck and arms that in her lifedays they might not be done off but by the will and the miracle of our dear Lord.

¶ How Emma journeyed from Rome and how she became a nun at the cloister of Converted Sinners at Maestricht.

Whenas Emma hath put on the rings like as ye have heard she departed her with her eme from Rome the city and they two journeyed so long until they were come to Maestricht where Emma was holpen of her uncle to be a nun in the cloister of the Converted Sinners. And after he had thereto holpen her he took his leave of her and journeyed to his own country where he lived yet twenty-four year after he had holpen his niece to come into the cloister, the which he visited each year so long as he lived.

[76]

¶ How the angel of God did off the rings from Emma’s neck and hands.

Emma dwelling in the aforesaid cloister lived so holily and did such strong penance that the merciful Christ forgave her utterly her sins, sending his angel to her where she lay and slept, the which did off the rings, whereat Emma rejoiced greatly, saying:

¶ AMEN

¶ This Book hath been examined and approved by a learned man thereto appointed.