‘Fifteen Signs’ before the end of the world: Ms. Ava knows them

Abstract

In the beginning of the 12th century, Frau Ava († 1127), the first known authoress writing in German, composed a cycle of four Middle High German rhyme-poems, beginning with the life of the praecursor Christi Johannes Baptista, then dealing with the Life of Jesus, and continuing with the eschatological ‘Vita Antichristi’, the story of the final adversary of Christ, and ending with the events of Doomsday, when Jesus Christ will come back to judge the living and the dead. Since Carolingian times, there exists a legend, telling that before the last judgement fifteen signs will appear to announce the world’s end. In her narration of the last things Ava in principle follows the two oldest versions of the ‘Quindecim Signa’, first the version of Pseudo-Beda (about 820) and second, more intensively, the version contained in the ‘Historia Scholastica’ of Petrus Damiani († 1072). The systematic analysis of the sources shows that Ava runs an astonishingly independent arrangement and interpretation of the tradition, leading sometimes to an anti-aristocratic impetus. However, the main objective is the pastoral creation of a consciousness of all the griefs and sorrows, of all the misery which waits for the humans at the end of the times, especially for the unjusts and sinners. During the process of literarization of the last things the ego of the speaker just as the ‘we’ of the audience will be seized by fear. The function of the literary text is to pass the knowledge of the end and to achieve by that the conversion of all mankind.