Volume 139, Issue 2

Ulrich’s von Zatzikhoven ›Lanzelet‹ seems to be the only medieval version of the Lancelot myth without the adulterous love between the hero and the king’s wife or any other rivalry between King Arthur and the best knight of the Round Table. There are two possible explanations for that issue: Either the version of Ulrich’s romance is prior to the version represented by Chrétien’s de Troyes ›Chevalier de la Charrette‹ and the ›Prose Lancelot‹, or Ulrich’s romance avoids the adultery story on purpose. The present article argues for the second explanation, analysing the ›Lanzelet‹ as an intertextual play with the Lancelot myth, a play which does not simply cut the conflict out, but keeps alluding to it and re-narrates it on different levels (as a kind of ›Schattengeschichte‹). In doing so, the romance reveals the essentials of each Lancelot story as well as the narrative conditions under which the adultery story appears evitable or inevitable.

This paper reexamines the textual structure and the principles behind the illustrations of Thomasin’s von Zerklaere ›Der Welsche Gast‹. It argues that the book’s discontinuous, digressive, and seemingly unstructured mode of presentation results from an effort to reconfigure and recombine smaller didactic entities, or nuclei, that are shaped by the mediality of the text between literacy, semi-literacy, and orality, Thomasin’s didactic intentions, and the character of the text as a work-in-progress. By comparing the ›Welscher Gast‹ with other illustrated didactic poems, such as the late antique ›Psychomachia‹ and Hugo’s von Trimberg ›Der Renner‹, I provide evidence that the text and image cycle in the ›Welscher Gast‹ are merely a loose conceptual arrangement, and I challenge the widespread notion that both were created under Thomasin’s direction.

After a few grammatical remarks, the essay comments on several dark passages of Sachsenheim’s ›Mörin‹.

In this study, the strong connection existing between the High German and the Low German transmission of Heinrich Seuse’s ›Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit‹ is shown on the basis of the codices 235 and 1389 of the Stiftsbibliothek Melk, which have been written by Lienhart Peuger, as well as on the basis of codex 55 of the same library, which Peuger has edited. Both Melk 235 and Melk 1389 contain extensive enlargements of the text of the ›Büchlein‹ that have their origin in a German version of Seuse’s ›Horologium sapientiae‹ as well as in Saying 203 of the ›Buch der Vollkommenheit‹ of Pseudo-Engelhart von Ebrach; moreover, Peuger integrated these enlargements into the codex Melk 55 that was written by another hand. The same enlargements can also be found in a group of manuscripts of Low and Middle German provenance. That the High German transmission of the ›Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit‹ has been influenced by the Low German one, or vice versa, is furthermore proven by two other groups of manuscripts which are near to each other in the textual versions they transmit. These are, on the one hand, a group of Low German manuscripts which integrate to a great extent passages of the ›Horologium sapientiae‹ into the ›Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit‹, and, on the other hand, a group of High German manuscripts which have readings in common with the group named before, but which do not transmit the insertions contained in them. The redaction of the ›Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit‹ used by Lienhart Peuger for the copying of the codices Melk 235 and Melk 1389 was already in the 14th century so popular in the Low German and in the High German regions that Peuger even corrected an older version of the ›Büchlein‹ according to this redaction. Neither the edited versions, nor the textual connection between the Low German and the High German transmission can be inferred from Karl Bihlmeyer’s publication of the ›Büchlein‹ from 1907. Therefore, a new edition of the ›Büchlein‹ is necessary.