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Konrad Bollstatter was a mid-fifteenth-c. German scribe working in Augsburg, whose seventeen surviving manuscripts include fortune-telling games, chronicles, and prose fiction.2 Two of his manuscripts, Cod. Guelf. 75.10 aug. 2° and CGM 252, contain translations of prose fiction from Latin by Heinrich Steinhöwel and Nudas von WyIe, local contemporaries who exercised considerable influence upon the emerging print industry in Southwest Germany.3 Bollstatter's copies of the two texts - Steinhöwers translation of the Griteldis tale and Niklas von Wyle's rendering of Guiscard and Sigismundo, - predate their appearance in print. In each story a female figure plays a central role: virtue and strength characterize both women, who suffer ill fortune, mostly at the hands of men. While Bollstatter presents these texts in their entirety in Cod. Guelf. 75.10 aug. 2°, in MS CGM 252 he copied Guiskard und Sigismundo, completely and Gríseídü only partially. 4 Our investigation of CGM 252 attempts to unravel Bollstatter's perception of the works he copied and examines the manuscript matrix in which they appear.
The New Philology, which arose as a critical discipline during the second half of the last century, urged medievalists to return to the study of manuscripts. Consequently, scholars discovered that the information contained in each leaf of a text yielded far more enlightening material than that found by traditionalists while examining what were believed to be good texts (i.e., texts which seemed to represent a high degree of closeness to a hypothetical original). A variety of visual cues employed by scribes - among diese organization and illustration, and a range of annotative methods - are now recognized as keys to uncovering hidden levels of expression. Stephen G. Nichols has listed some prerequisites when one is reading medieval manuscripts, particularly illuminated texts whose
cognitive perception [requires] . . . two kinds of literacy: reading text and interpreting visual signs. This double literacy involves mimetic repetition to the extent that the visual art «predicates the poetic text. I am not suggesting that the visual art simply imitates the verbal, but that insofar as it illustrates a prior narrative, it opens itself up ... and thus offer[s] a dual route of penetration to the underside of consciousness.
In view of these methods of "reading," a perusal of MS CGM 252...