27
extant manuscript of
Indiculus, Codex
Palatinus Latinus 577, is a copy from ca. 800.
Unfortunately, the document consists only of
the headings; that is, it reads practically as a list
of contents, but there is no further information
about exactly what the practices listed actually
entailed.
5
And here lies the problem. With no further
description we have only these headings to go
by. It is heading number 19 on this list that is
relevant, and it reads as follows:
De pentendo
quod boni vocant sanctae Mariae [‘About
[
pentendo] which good people refer to as Saint
Mary’s’]. The implication of ‘good people’,
presumably Christians, invoking Saint Mary
must be that other, not-so-good people invoke
someone else. The impression is that heading 19
describes a mixed tradition whose non-Christian
version involves a heathen deity, but whose
Christianized version involves Saint Mary. The
extremely frustrating point is that the crucial
word,
pentendo, in itself appears to be non-
sensical and thus poses a range of translation
problems. All suggested interpretations rest on
some emendation or other of this word. The
dominant emendation is to render it as
petendo,
probably because the manuscript features what
appears to be a correction indicating that the
first ‘n’ should be deleted; however, it is
uncertain whether this ‘n’ is a later insertion
(Homann 1965: 108).
As far as I am aware, all
interpretations depart from this emendation;
that is, they all ignore the first ‘n’.
The word
pentendo, or its emended form
petendo, has by some scholars been interpreted
as referring to ‘bedstraw’. Accepting this
interpretation, the heading would read: ‘About
bedstraw which good people refer to as Saint
Mary’s’. This is, however, a highly conjectural
interpretation, which rests on a fairly radical
emendation of the text, rendering the written
pentendo as, instead,
petenstro, a supposedly
Latinized form of
petenstroh which is a variant
of
bettstroh, the German name for the plant
galium verum (Homann 1965: 108–109;
Dähnhardt 1909: 19). Apart from the required
orthographic changes, it is problematic that
this would then be the only instance in the
document of a vernacular term appearing as
anything other than the descriptive of a Latin
term. Moreover, the word-order in the sentence
as well as the form
pentendo both suggest that
this is a verbal noun describing an action, not
an object.
6
The interpretation ‘bedstraw’ nonetheless
has a long history; it seems to stem from a work
produced in 1729 by the German linguist and
historian Johann Georg von Eckhart (1729:
426–427). He makes the argument that heading
19 probably refers to a plant and goes on to
discuss a range of folk practices and vernacular
names relating to this particular plant with the
loosely similar name. Interestingly, von Eckhart
openly says that (the already emended)
petendo is difficult to translate; in other words,
he clearly presents an interpretation and does
not regard his reading as a statement of
obvious facts. He even says about himself that:
Ego vocem non Latinam, roughly: ‘I am no
speaker of Latin’ (von Eckhart 1729: 426).
That von Eckhart’s suggested explanation was
accepted by his contemporaries is made clear
in a subsequent encyclopaedia, which endorses
it (Zedler 1740: 217–218), albeit not without
noting the translation problem.
7
Despite this
difficulty, ‘bedstraw’ continues to be accepted –
apparently unquestioningly – by some modern
scholars (e.g. McNeill & Gamer 1990: 420;
Freitag 2004: 99).
But what we can at least
conclude from this
is that the association between the Virgin Mary
and
galium verum was well-known in
Germany and that the plant was known as
‘Mary’s bedstraw’ or some variant(s) thereof
already from around 1500 (Dybek 1850: 16).
That English tradition knows the name
ladies
bedstraw for
galium verum is documented in
the 1600s (Dähnhardt 1909: 18–19).
Other interpretations of
pentendo have also
been suggested. One is the emendation to
petendo, as mentioned above, which yields the
translation ‘praying’ (Homann 1965: 109;
Saupe 1891: 24). Accepting this interpretation,
the heading would read: ‘About praying that
good people address to as Saint Mary’. The
implication seems to be that some people
address similar prayers to someone other than
Our Lady, and here Freyja has been suggested
(Saupe 1891: 24).
8
Freyja’s involvement is
obviously purely speculative. It rests on the
reasonable notion that the Christian figure
replaced a heathen figure, while the ritual in
question remained the same, but there is
nothing in the
Indiculus itself that can help us