Studia Augustana

Can words be danced? Can dance be written down? What inspires choreographers? How do dancers write? This volume delves into questions like these and presents manifold points of contact between French literature and dance. It both looks at texts in which authors deal with elements of dance and sheds light on the way that choreographers and dancers engage with literature.

This study deals with the topic of the willingness to sacrifice oneself and become a martyr within the context of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century ecclesiastical reform efforts. It makes use of case studies dealing with renowned representatives of late medieval scholarship to link two topic areas that have largely been viewed as separate in previous research into the late Middle Ages.

The volume examines for the first time the intersection of genres between Purim plays and Shrovetide plays. The approximate temporal coincidence of the Jewish Purim festival and Christian Shrovetide in the liturgical calendar as well as the common enactment of a world turned upside-down suggest the possibility of mutual influences. The interdisciplinary essays are intended to stimulate further research.

You can certainly love Mozart, but can you truly "understand" or describe him? Giants of literary and cultural history have tried incessantly to discover the secrets of his genius, and this discussion is still ongoing. In this volume, scholars from different disciplines present a valuable trove of thought on this question.

The collection fills a gap in research on the Melker Reform in the Augusburg Monasteries of St. Ulrich and Afra, and also examines general issues of monastic reform in Benedictine and Augustine canons in South Germany and Austria. Theologians, musicologists, historians, and art historians take the examples of Tegernsee and Augsburg to explore the aspirations and realities of Church reform in the Late Middle Ages.

Hans Fugger (1531-1598) wrote over 4,800 letters to correspondents in a Europe-wide network. These letters give an insight into domains of the life of the Fuggers and are at the same time valuable documents for the history of communication in the Early Modern Age. Thanks to his outstanding communicative abilities, Fugger built up and maintained a highly effective information network and network of contacts serving the interests at one and the same time of the trading organisation and the young aristocratic Fugger family and making Fugger a key figure in transmitting up-to-date information and establishing indispensable social contacts.

This study is the first to undertake a detailed appreciation of the much-lauded printing language employed at Günther Zainer's Augsburg printing shop. The new findings are the result of an unprecedented excerpting method that takes account of the hitherto neglected role played by the sequence of different typesetters. A comparison with other contemporaneous written idioms in Augsburg gives even greater definition to the account of the early stages of the printing idiom in Augsburg. This approach provides a potential model for similar investigations at other printing locations.

This volume, the second one dealing with the library of Augsburg's town clerk and humanist Konrad Peutinger (1465-1547), continues the reconstruction of what is probably the largest scholarly library of its time north of the Alps. The volume details the section of his library specifically related to the law. It corresponds in its conception to the form and arrangement of the first volume. The reconstruction is based on the two catalogues written by Peutinger himself. The volume not only catalogues and describes those printed books and manuscripts, which are still available; it also reconstructs the works in his collection that have been lost. The books inventoried here were used by Peutinger for his various everyday duties as a jurist and political adviser. By making his reconstructed library accessible to scholars, this volume enables a systematic study of Peutinger's legal activities.

The facsimile of the Augsburg manuscript (1554) acquaints readers with the oldest known version of the texts and the melodies assembled in Adam Reißner's hymn book. As such, it is also the version that most closely reflects the author's intentions. The commentary on the 64 hymns takes a paradigmatic view of Reißner's hymn corpus, indicating how the traditions governing the various types of hymn and the melodies to which they were set (including medieval traditions, the Tenorlied, and the Bohemian Brothers) were transmitted by the Schwenckfeld hymn book. With reference to parallel corpora and individual instances of transmission, the commentary also traces the reception accorded to the texts and melodies of these 64 hymns as far as the 18th century.

With some 10,000 individual titles in nearly 2,200 volumes, including 200 manuscripts, the library of the Augsburg town clerk and humanist Konrad Peutinger (1465-1547) was almost certainly the largest scholarly library of its era north of the Alps. The span of time covered by the publications ranged across the entire century from Gutenberg to Peutinger's death. Alongside substantial sections on grammar, literature, geography, philosophy, and theology the main body of the library was given over to works on history, rhetoric, and medicine, with a major section devoted to specialist legal writings and set up separately. Although the library was disbanded in the 18th century, the original holdings can be reconstructed almost in their entirety thanks to a new approach that, instead of restricting itself to lists of books still known to be in existence, proceeds on the basis of the historical catalogs that have come down to us. The detailed documentation of a library unique both in its size and in its range provides new insights into the working methods and the organization of knowledge employed by one of the key personalities of German humanism.

The South German Benedictine monastery of St. Mang in Füssen (diocese of Augsburg) is examined here with reference to the connections discernible between the monastery's espousal of the reform of the order and the books added to its library in the second half of the 15th century. Analysis of the content of the new acquisitions reveals that they are by no means invariably related to the reform, but rather reflect a variety of (partly conflicting) interests. Though small in number, the books written in the vernacular turn out to be a nucleus of German-language writing in an area otherwise clearly dominated by Latin.

The study discusses the history and the contents of the former library of the Cistercian convent in Kirchheim am Ries (near Nördlingen, Bavaria). Research at the Oettingen-Wallerstein Library of the University of Augsburg into which the Kirchheim library was incorporated in 1831 has enabled the author to reconstruct 69% of the library stocks at the disposal of the convent. Part Two of the study lists these stocks in the form of a catalogue. Part One combines a statistical record of the library stock (manuscripts and prints from the 15th to the 18th centuries) with a description of its historical development from the foundation of the convent (1270) to its disbanding in the course of the secularization process (1802).

In the 15th and 16th centuries Augsburg was a commercial centre of European standing. The infrastructure there (capital market, communications and road connections) quickly made Augsburg into a leading printing and publishing location, playing a major role particularly in the Reformation. The present volume is the first to present a comprehensive overview of Augsburg's place in the history of printing and the book trade from the earliest beginnings to the Peace of Augsburg.

Der Band dokumentiert ein Kolloquium, das unter der Leitung der Herausgeber an der Universität Augsburg stattgefunden hat. Die Beiträge liefern erstmals eine zusammenhängende Grundlegung für eine Literaturgeschichte der Stadt Augsburg im ausgehenden Spätmittelalter. Dabei wird über die Darstellung signifikanter Gattungsbereiche hinaus auch nach den institutionellen und organisatorischen Aspekten des literarischen Lebens gefragt. Die Fülle der schriftlichen Überlieferung erlaubt facettenreiche Einblicke in die Möglichkeiten literarischen Lebens in spätmittelalterlichen Städten von der Bedeutung Augsburgs. Die hier versammelten Forschungsergebnisse sind damit zugleich ein grundlegender Beitrag zur städtischen Literaturgeschichte im 15. Jahrhundert.

The study looks first at the political measures of the Council vis-à-vis the guilds and the local 'mercantile aristocracy', the stance taken by the Council on problems of domestic policy and its evaluation of the behaviour of the (craft) guilds, which in its turn determined the political action it took. The perspective then changes to the political attitudes and notions of those citizens not represented in the chronicles of the time - the craftsmen making up the membership of the guilds.

Does the rhythmic musicality of a text sound different to an author than to those who want to set it to music or dance it? Or do the bodily movements carried out to play a piece of music have potential for dance? Rhythm, narration, and the body come into focus as connecting elements between literature, dance, and music, making manifold forms of interplay between all three art forms visible.

Even though it did not have a university, the history of medicine in the imperial town of Augsburg is important. Alongside renowned Augsburg doctors and apothecaries, attention must be paid to the role played by dissemination in print. This volume provides a systematic overview of the history of medicine in Augsburg from the Middle Ages to modern times, considering local actors’ European networks, which had largely been overlooked until now.