Volume 133, Issue 1

The twelve names from 827 to 957 with umlaut of OHG /u/, /ō/ and /ū/ (ten place names, one river name and one brook name) which are dealt with in the article prove that umlaut of vowels other than OHG /a/ existed long before the end of the 10th century (Notker). Nine of these names are found in original documents, among them the two oldest and most important, the place names Puirron 827 and Puillacha 828. Both testify to the existence of the phonemes // and /ü/ in Old High German as early as the third decade of the 9th century. A detailed investigation of the oldest names together with the fact that the primary umlaut of /a/ is documented from around 750 leads to the conclusion that in Old High German in the 8th century, particularly in the first half, a process of palatalization of all velar vowels and diphthongs before i, ī, j in the following syllable was in progress.

Modern German is a language with relatively ›free‹ word order, i. e.: the serialization of constituents is dependent not only on syntactic requirements, but determined also by information structural or cognitive factors. As the same is true for Proto-Indoeuropean, it is tempting to assume that German perpetuates the PIE word order freedom. A corpus study of the relative order of accusative and dative object, using several Early New High German texts from the time between 1350 and 1550, stemming from 4 different dialect areas, shows that this assumption is wrong: German underwent a period of strictly syntactically governed constituent order (dative object before accusative object) which began before the Old High German period and lasted into the 16th century. Information structural or cognitive factors do not play a role for serializastion in this period. The relative position of the objects must be separated from the question of ›scrambling‹ in the sense that material is moved to the left of the subject, as we find examples of constituent order dative object before subject early on.

In Kudrun , the narrative of the dangerous bridal quest is presented in an elaborate yet typical way in the so-called Hilde-section. The ›bridal-quest‹ in the Kudrun-section is, however, just as essential for the plot. This essay will show that in the Kudrun-section the treatment of the bridal quest is not limited to variations and repetitions of this narrative sequence, but rather the central premises, basic rules and elements, such as the emphasis on long-distance romance and the premise that the best man wins the most beautiful wife, are challenged by complicating the narrative with three different suitors for a single bride. In this way the text replaces the principle tenets of the literary scheme with pragmatic arguments, which reflect contemporary politics. Although one would expect Siegfried, the most powerful of the three, or Hartmut, who most closely fulfils the expectations of the scheme, to win Kudrun's hand, it is Herwig, the aggressive and socially inferior neighbour, who is pacified by winning the bride.

A new edition of ›Wartburgkrieg‹ being prepared under the direction of Beate Kellner and Peter Strohschneider strictly concentrates on the texts of single manuscripts. The following study outlines the plan of a different edition, an edition that tries to show for each of the poems the complete manuscript tradition combining synoptic print with apparatus criticus, calling special attention to the most meaningful text by typographical means and, whereever necessary, cautiously going back behind the leading manuscript not necessarily to an original, but at least to a more meaningful text. For the ›Rätselspiel‹, the most complicated part of ›Wartburgkrieg‹, the study goes into more details and presents samples of an edition with commentary.

In this article the catalogue entries of Petrarch's ›Secretum‹ manuscripts in England, France, the German area – including Bohemia – and Spain are examined in order to find clues about the work's audience. It becomes apparent that it is not possible to distinguish (as has occasionally been done) between a monastic and a humanistic audience of Petrarch's Latin oeuvre. The ›Secretum‹ was often read in the cloister and the author explores the causes of this interest. She argues that Petrarch begins this work by evoking conventions of monastic literature, only to subvert them in the following dialogue, and thus present a new model of spiritual life.