Matins

Matins is the morning office that bounds the night-long comic disturbance in Hafen Slawkenbergius’s tale of the stranger’s nose. Its arrival measures the episode not by ordinary sleep but by the exhaustion of religious communities whose imaginations and bodies have been set in motion by the nose.

The Night Without Sleep

After the tumult in Strasburg subsides, the townspeople go quietly to bed, but the stranger’s rest is different: the episode turns to the nose’s imagined effects on those who have seen or heard of it. The abbess of Quedlingberg and the senior women of her chapter cannot sleep, and the severer orders fare worse still. They tumble from side to side, scratch and maul themselves, and rise almost flayed; the narrator says they have not closed their eyes from Vespers to Matins.

The Exception of Saint Ursula

The nuns of Saint Ursula respond differently: they do not attempt to go to bed at all. Their refusal to enter the conditions of the other sisterhoods makes them the story’s pointed exception, while the next morning the dean and clergy wish they had followed the same example. Matins thus closes a night whose comic force lies in collective sleeplessness, bodily agitation, and the contrast between those who endure the bed and those who avoid it.

Narrative Function

Rather than serving merely as a time marker, Matins supplies a precise endpoint for the escalating account of the nose’s effects. The span from Vespers to Matins makes the disturbance feel prolonged and communal, while the tale’s extravagant language turns an office of daily religious routine into the measure of an almost grotesque ordeal. The passage belongs to an embedded narrative, where ecclesiastical hours lend formal structure to a scene of disorder.