Gippartgeregint, Taubenherz und Ave-Maria. Liebeszauber in den Codices Palatini germanici der UB Heidelberg

[Autom. eng. transl.] A good third of the 848 Codices Palatini germanici that are in the Heidelberg University Library today have medical content: It is one of the largest German-language medical recipe book collections in the world. On the occasion of the new cataloging of the holdings, I had the opportunity to work with these valuable manuscripts and collected a corpus of sources on the subject of love magic. The codices, in which I found blessing formulas and love spell instructions, cover a period of about three centuries, from the year 1321 to the end of the 16th century. These are independent prose texts, mostly of limited length (from two to fifty lines), written partly in Latin and partly in German, as was typical of specialist prose from the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. The texts are characterized by a great variety, both in their linguistic design and in the socio-cultural classification and in the procedures that are used to realize the desire for love. For this purpose, religious, magical, demonic or sympathetic powers were used. Many texts are characterized by a profound syncretism, because the interrelationships that can be ascertained between the tradition of ancient and Germanic paganism, the Christian practice of blessing and the doctrine of medical signatures are considerable. Overall, the examined texts can be traced back to three groups: texts with a predominantly Christian character, peppered with liturgical formulas; Magic spells based on the conjuring of magical powers and directly reminiscent of the Germanic-metric tradition of forms; Finally, ‘medical’ recipes, which are based on the principle of similia similibus, which has been tried and tested in medicine, and on the knowledge of the wonderful, hidden powers of plants and animals (magia naturalis).