Kulturtopographie des alemannischen Raums
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Edited by:
Jeffrey F. Hamburger
The literary, artistic and cultural history of the German southwest (defined in terms of the Alemannic language area) underwent rapid development in the High and Late Middle Ages, turning this region into a cultural landscape of European standing. This development was driven by such phenomena as the first German Arthurian epics, the Hirsau liturgy spread by reform monasteries, the Manessian song manuscript, new types of images such as the Christ and St. John groups, the mystical writings of Heinrich Seuse and the Southwest German sister books as well as the manuscript production of the Lauber workshop in Hagenau. The cultural patrons involved were not just the monastic networks of the Benedictines, Cistercians and Premonstratensians, but also and above all by the Dominicans, Franciscans and their female branches, the Upper Rhine, Swabian and Swiss towns in the Strasbourg-Augsburg-Bern triangle and the aristocratic families and townspeople of this region from the 13th century onwards. This new series aims to encourage research into south-western German culture in the High and Late Middle Ages by publishing anthologies, monographs and editions of previously unpublished texts.
The prayer book of Margaretha von Kappel (1482) is a remarkable testament to the education and piety of one of Constance’s patrician. Margaretha herself played a significant role in the composition of her prayer book. This study explores this example of private spirituality in text and image, places it in its historical context, and analyzes the religious and literary interests of a late medieval patrician.
Three related texts about the spiritual lives of early Dominican sisters at Colmar’s Unterlinden convent – the Vitae sororum, composed in the 14th century by prioress Katharina von Gueberschwihr, and two 15th-century revisions by her successor Elisabeth Kempf – have collectively and confusingly been known as the Unterlinden Sisterbook. The current study clarifies the relationship among, and the transmission history of, these three versions of Katharina’s text, including the role played in the 17th century by a Freiburg Carthusian in transporting Kempf’s text to Austria, where it was published 100 years later by a Melk Benedictine. The study also posits collaboration between Kempf and fellow Dominican Johannes Meyer as she edited and later translated the text into German. A critical edition of (1) Kempf’s edited translation, based on two 15th-century manuscripts, and (2) a brief supplement to her translation, composed by Meyer at the behest of Kempf, are also included. The first two versions of the Unterlinden Sisterbook have been available in print since 1930 (Vitae sororum) and 1725 (Kempf’s first revision), respectively; the current publication presents Kempf’s final revision and translation into German for the first time.
The figure of the Devil represents human folly and moral convictions. This study looks at the fifteenth-century rhyming couplet poem Des Teufels Netz (The Devil’s Net) from the Bodensee region to examine how the Devil also facilitated the individual’s self-reflection and formation of conscience. The foundation for this is an exploration of the relevance of conscience for the literature and theological discourse of the Middle Ages.
As a representative of the intellectual elites of his time, Sebastian Brant (1457–1521) was active in various cultural fields (Latin and German poetry, pious literature and theology, law, book illustration). The contributions in this conference volume, which marks the 500th anniversary of Brant’s death, documents his influence and reach, which have extended far beyond their time, in those fields.
This volume seeks to understand the late medieval cultural landscape of Württemberg from the perspectives of literary studies, manuscript studies, and cultural history. These articles examine literary products of the court and cloisters. The cultural topography of Württemberg takes shape in the social and literary entanglements between these political and cultural centers, and the neighboring cloisters and free cities.
The work of the Strasbourg city and world chronicler Jakob Twingers von Königshofen, long regarded as a paradigm of municipal historiography, has undergone a number of different processes of productive appropriation. Taking into account its diverse transmission and specific internal and external contexts, the study describes different forms of reception of the work in terms of a history from the city.
The Book of the Nine Cliffs is one of the most popular works from the mystic tradition of the Upper Rhine. Though the longer of its two extant versions has been attributed to Rulman Merswin (†1382), it is uncertain whether he wrote the original or merely revised an earlier text by another author. This landmark study is based on the Upper German short version, now for the first time in a critical edition.
This interdisciplinary anthology addresses the literary and cultural life in the city of Basel from the 13th to the 16th century. It concentrates on secular and religious literature written in German and Latin. The entities involved in this literary culture and the networks they used to exchange texts take center stage in this volume. This volume connects cultural space research with questions from the field of media history.
In the mid-15th century, the observant Chronicler of the Order Johannes Meyer served briefly as a confessor in the Bern Dominican Convent. With the aim of elevating the cloister into a model reform convent, he translated the compulsory normative texts for the nuns. Based on the rulebook, it is apparent that he sought a way out of the crisis through the functional and intensified use of vernacular literacy.
This volume offers a critical edition accompanied by introductory studies of a previously unresearched Moscow manuscript from the Strasbourg Convent of St. Magdalena: a legend of St. Catherine, a legend of St. Barbara, and treatises by the Alsatian Dominican Johannes Kreutzer (approx. 1424–1468): The spiritual May, the spiritual harvest, Herbstmost I and II (with appendices from parallel transmission).
Little attention has been devoted to date to the literary potential of exempla from the Late Middle Ages. This work sheds light on the content as well as the methods of German-language prose exempla, elucidating the contexts surrounding their production and reception. The study focuses on a manuscript from the convent of St. Mary Magdalen in Strasbourg (Berlin, SBB-PK, Ms. germ. fol. 863), which contains nearly 600 prose exempla.
Despite the remarkable texts that it contains, the “Hermetschwil Prayer Book” has been largely neglected by scholars until now. This volume comprehensively presents the early 15th century German-language prayer book from a Benedictine cloister in Aargau.
The studies and selected texts in this volume focus on literary and cultural life in Strasbourg during the late middle ages. The compendium might be regarded as a “cultural topography” of the southwestern portion of the German-speaking realm during this period. It explores the connections between book production, urban culture and lives of religious devotion.
Diebold Lauber’s workshop in Hagenau produced hand-written illustrated texts in the first half of the 15th century. Up to now they have been studied mainly in relation to their serial production. They are thought to be “nicely painted” but with the wording largely copied with little consideration of its content. The studies in this collection are therefore concerned not only with the relationship between text and picture but primarily with the quality of the text and the editorial task of the “thoughtful scribe” which has as yet been very inadequately researched.
This work is the first to comprehensively examine the German mystical "lied" of the 14th and 15th centuries as a genre/type of text. One part is dedicated to analysis, concentrating primarily on the handwriting and places in which the mystical verse had its "social setting", the different forms in which it was handed down, and its themes and motives. This text genre is outlined as a new field of research using previously unpublished texts and an extensive reference work, the repertory of mystical verse.
Key features:
- First comprehensive study of this genre
- Presents over 100 songs and their places of composition
- Repertorium opening up the genre as a research field
Literary historians, paleographers and historians use case studies to discuss ways in which an approach based on the history of transmission can be expanded using aspects from the history of reception and from intermediality to penetrate the literary and cultural relief of a landscape, its ‘cultural topography’. The studies are based primarily on extant manuscripts and their life in various historical and institutional contexts in the south-west German language area in the 14th century.
Key features:
- first comprehensive study of this genre
- Presents over 100 songs and their places of composition
- Repertorium opening up the genre as a research field
