Volume 140, Issue 1

On the threshold of the sixteenth century, publishers met the demands of a ready market: They provided a selection of German prose novels and adapted their publications to a broader, less homogeneous readership. Against this backdrop, the article discusses the still evolving system of segmentation (primarily punctuation). When punctuation was inserted into a text, it might have been the typesetter’s task to work out a system of usage. The typesetters reacted to this new challenge by using several, even contradicting principles in a bottom-up-process of bricolage : They separated prosodic, semantic, syntactic or memory units while simultaneously considering aesthetic demands (justification).

Apart from a few exceptions, abridged versions of courtly epics have not yet been of great interest to mainstream research. Yet, they represent a historical literary phenomenon that documents an independent type of courtly narrative from the very beginnings of the genre. The simultaneous narrative schemes they feature can be traced to contemporary Latin poetics, in which the expansion ( amplificatio ) and abridging ( abbreviatio ) of material are described as two basic techniques used in the process of adapting narrative texts. This article presents some initial observations on the elaboration of brevitas poetics, which could offer a complete overview of the courtly epic of the 13 th century.

The article discusses a number of Middle High German versions of Bertold of Regensburg's sermon on the mass as specifically vernacular adaptations of his Latin, authorised sermons. The adaptations in the miscellaneous manuscript Stadtbibliothek Mainz, HS I 221, Annaberg-Buchholz, St Anna 329 and in the fragment 221 of the StB Berlin are compared with the rendering in the corpus represented by the manuscript ÖNB Vienna, Codex 2829. The analysis of the textual variants and the different layout shows how the versions are adapted for specific use: as private reading matter, as instruction to meditate on the passion of Christ, or as rhymed catechetical lesson on the mass.

This article presents a manuscript that was transferred from the Hamburg Franciscan monastery to the Hamburg Beguin convent around the year 1500. The manuscript connects treatises, meditations and prayers of the late medieval Ars moriendi by using cross references, rubrics and intentionally arranged textgroups. The article contextualizes the Middle Low German treatises within the tradition of the ›Speculum artis bene moriendi‹, the ›Bilder Ars‹ and Jean Gersons ›Opus tripartitum‹. It reconstructs how the interplay of didactic and performative texts creates a sense of danger in the face of death while simultaneously providing strategies for securing salvation.