Quedlinburg Abbey

Quedlinburg Abbey enters the Strasbourg nose episode through a delegation led by its abbess and four senior chapter dignitaries. Their visit to consult the university about a case of conscience is overtaken by the city’s collective agitation: in the narrator’s comic account, the stranger’s nose reaches into their dreams and keeps them awake.

Delegation and Purpose

The abbess comes to Strasbourg for the week with the prioress, deaness, sub-chantress, and senior canoness. They have traveled to consult the university on a case of conscience concerning their placket-holes. The passage gives no resolution of that question; instead, it makes the delegation’s serious institutional purpose the setup for a night of extravagant disturbance.

The Nose in the Night

After the tumult in Strasbourg subsides for the night and its inhabitants go to bed, sleep does not bring the abbess relief. The narration imagines Queen Mab dividing the stranger’s nose, without diminishing its size, into as many different noses as there are heads in the city. The abbess is ill through the night, while the nose is said to perch on the pineal gland of her brain and stir the fancies of the four dignitaries so violently that none can sleep. They rise like ghosts, their sleeplessness turning the city’s public fascination into a private bodily ordeal.

Chapter and City in Commotion

The next morning, Strasbourg’s cathedral clergy assemble to consider the absence of buttered buns: amid the preceding confusion, the bakers have forgotten to set their leaven, leaving none for breakfast. The passage places the abbess’s troubled night alongside this civic disruption, extending the nose’s effects from dreams and bodily restlessness into the routines of the city. The delegation from Quedlinburg Abbey is not shown resolving its original case of conscience; its brief appearance instead helps the episode make the stranger’s nose a force that unsettles both private sleep and public order.