Kessler, Herbert L., and Johanna Zacharias. Rome 1300: On
the Path of the Pilgrim. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 2000.
Oestreich, Thomas. “Pope Boniface VIII.” The Catholic En-
cyclopedia, 1999. (Online edition: http://www.newadvent.
org/cathen/02662a.htm.)
Tosti, Luigi. Pope Boniface VIII and His Times, trans. Eugene J.
Donnelly. New York: Samuel R. Leland, 1933.
Gary P. Cestaro
BOPPE, MEISTER (fl. end of the 13th c.)
Boppe was a poet and composer best known for didactic
lyrics. References to fellow poet Konrad von Würz-
burg (d. 1287) in an obituary prayer to King Rudolf of
Habsburg (1273–1291) and to the margraves of Baden
indicate that Boppe had composed his verses and music
in southern Germany by the end of the thirteenth century.
As for most of the didactic lyrical poets (Sangspruch-
dichter), however, there is no external documentary
evidence of this. The famous Heidelberg University
Codex Manesse attributes forty stanzas in eight different
metrical and melodical forms (Töne) to him, but other
manuscripts ascribe six of these Töne and seven of the
strophes to other poets. The Jena manuscript, which
gives Boppe the title Meister (master) preserves only
the fi rst To n, later named Hofton (court verse form),
with eighteen stanzas. A nine-strophical Ave Maria in
the Hofton survives in a fourteenth-century Heidelberg
manuscript. As Boppe ranks with a group of twelve fa-
mous old Sangspruch masters, more than two hundred
further stanzas in the Hofton are recorded in Meistersang
manuscripts of the fi fteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Boppe is commonly regarded as the composer of the
Hofton and the author of the Hofton stanzas in the older
manuscripts, with the exception of the religious Ave
Maria. The stanzas of the other Töne not attributed to
other poets may be his. The number of the Meistersang
texts that are his work—and to what extent they are his
work—remains uncertain.
Boppe’s poems treat the common themes of the
thirteenth-century didactic lyric (Sangspruchdichtung)
in conventional ways. In the role of teacher and coun-
selor, the poet gives instruction and advice to his courtly
audience, praising secular chivalric ideals and female
virtues as well as God and the Virgin Mary. While divine
grace is the highest value in one stanza, earthly love’s
rewards outrank everything else in another, and in a
satirical strophe money is the ultimate ideal. The poet
laments his own poverty and extols decency, charity, and
princely generosity, a merit particularly important for
the wandering artists; he decries miserliness, self-praise,
and unjustifi ed eulogy. He has knowledge of the myster-
ies of Redemption, the dignity of the priesthood and of
mankind, the preexistence of the Virgin and her identity
as God’s mercy, the contrasts between outer appearance
and inner worth, good advice and false counsel. In the
role of the minnesinger, he gives a satirical catalog of the
lady’s preposterous demands. Boppe’s technical devices
indicate considerable rhetorical skill. He repeatedly uses
the traditional bestiary imagery to exemplify good and
false behavior and has a special preference for cumula-
tive enumerations, displayed by catalogs of countries
and peoples, values and virtues, biblical exempla (ex-
amples), and series of parallel statements and rhetorical
questions, often combined with anaphora.
See also Konrad von WürzburgFurther Reading
Alex, Heidrun. Der Spruchdichter Boppe: Edition, Übersetzung,
-Kommentar. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998.
Brunner, Horst, and Burghart Wachinger, eds. Repertorium der
Sangsprüche und Meisterlieder des 12. bis 18. Jahrhunderts.
Vol. 3. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986, pp. 209–245.
Tolle, Georg. Der Spruchdichter Boppe. Versuch einer kritischen
Ausgabe seiner Dichtungen. Sondershausen: Programm der
fürstlichen Realschule, 1894.
Gert HübnerBRAGI BODDASON (9th century)
Braggi Boddason (the Old), a Norwegian poet probably
of the second half of the 9th century, is generally reck-
oned to be the earliest skald whose compositions have
been preserved, although in fragmentary form. Details of
his life are tentative, and several semimythological sto-
ries exist, linking him in one case with ancestors of set-
tlers in Iceland (Landnämabók, S112, H86, M30; Hálfs
saga ok Hälfsrekka, ch. 11; Geirmundar Þattr heljar-
skinns, ch. 2). Skáldatal, an Icelandic catalogue of poets
and their patrons, names him as a court poet of Ragnarr
loðbrók (“hairy-breeches”), Eysteinn beli (“belly”), and
Bj ̧o rn at Haugi (Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, ch. 3, pp.
251–69). Snorri Sturluson also connected Bragi with
Ragnarr loðbrók and attributed two groups of stanzas to
a Ragnarsdrápa, a drápa or sequence of stanzas with a
refrain, in honor of Ragnarr. Snorri quotes these stanzas
in chs. 52 and 62 of Skáldskaparmál (Finnur Jónsson
1931: 134, 155; Faulkes 1987: 106, 123–4). Although
Ragnarr was a hero of the Danes, recent scholarship
indicates the probability of a Norwegian origin for this
legendary Viking (Smyth 1977).
Bragi’s Ragnarsdrápa is thought to have been a
shield poem, which gave verbal representation to a
set of pictures and mythological subjects painted on a
leather-covered shield that the poet had received from
his patron. The resulting poem was the skald’s counter-
gift to his lord. A similar context underlies Þjóðólfr of
Hvin’s Haustlo ̨ng. In 1860, Gísli Brynjúlfsson proposed
that such shields were divided into four fi elds and hence
had four poetic subjects. Subsequent editorial arrange-BONIFACE VIII, POPE