Volume 134, Issue 3

The Germanic accent shift led to the formation of new ablauts in reduplicating verbs with vocalic initials in North and West Germanic languages. These new ablauts then spread over the subclasses to which these verbs belonged on account of the inseparable relation between ablauts and stem forms. Based on reinterpretation of the relation between the newer monosyllabic and the older disyllabic past stems further ablauts were formed analogically by omitting the former root initials and contraction in the other subclasses. The differences of new ablauts among the languages are mainly due to the ablaut ē 1 / ō of verba pura, vowel changes before and after contraction and analogical leveling.

Title PLS 30 is concerned with four (Latin) insults for men, one for women ( meretrix ), and a defamation. In MS C6/H/D, the insult Lt. cinitus is glossed by a word for the female sexual organ ( quinte ), partly in a particular vocative form (in *-ō ). – Another gloss appears in two additional paragraphs, though referring to a masculine form in one case ( falsator ) and to a feminine form in the other case ( meretrix ). Apparently, the word is related to modern German Strafe ; its meaning seems to be close to ›accusation‹. – Another title dealing with insults is PLS 64 concerning witches. In this case, the central word is hereburgium , which might have originally stood for ›son of a witch‹.

Medieval authorship is characterized by parameters fundamentally different from early modern or modern parameters. On the basis of the popular matter of Alexander, this article investigates into the different ideas that individual authors connected with their writing activity, into how they thought about themselves and what image they created of themselves, and into what traditions they positioned themselves in. This paper considers the Latin text of Archipresbyter Leo of Naples and that of Walter of Châtillon, as well as Lamprecht’s and Rudolf von Ems’s Middle High German Alexander verses.

Saints’ lives occupy a fluctuating position between cult and art which challenges their claim to be a devout and unpretentious ‘simple form’. The following contribution traces the interplay in the genre between scepticism toward rhetoric on the one hand and fascination with it on the other. The greater the importance that attaches to a surplus of rhetoric and narration, the more contradictory the narrative order mandated by the genre becomes, and the more testing the conditions under which saints’ lives are narrated. The specific interference of religious and literary modes of speaking is illustrated from examples of narrative saints’ lives from the late middle ages. What tensions does the genre’s ambivalent attitude to rhetoric give rise to when telling stories about saints through the act of narratively transforming the miraculous?