Volume 140, Issue 2

Rather than presenting the so-called ›Wessobrunner Gebet‹ under its manuscript ›title‹ De poeta , today’s critics usually refer to the text as ›Wessobrunner Gebet‹ or ›Wessobrunner Schöpfungsgedicht‹. Both titles are misleading. However, regardless of its reception history, it is worthwhile analyzing the text in light of the form and genre traditions implicated by its modern titles. This essay offers a new perspective on the poetic, generic, and conceptual location of the ›Wessobrunner Gebet‹ in Old High German literary history.

The poetical theory of Konrad von Würzburg very often is regarded as a medieval anticipation of modern aesthetics. The article, however, tries to describe in an analysis of the ›Goldene Schmiede‹ and the ›Trojanerkrieg‹ how Konrad in fact goes beyond the poetics and rhetorics of his time, but that he still presupposes that aesthetic values are inferior to religious and moral norms.

Not only the postmodern era is characterized by manifold, contradictory, and hybrid temporalities. Earlier epochs were already marked by temporal and medial pluralities. Examining these pluralities expands both our knowledge of the past and of the present. The 15 th and 16 th centuries are particularly suitable for this. This period sees not only spatial expansion, religious diversification and media restructuring. It also sees temporal changes: a growing presence of measured time, rigorous time management, and the formation of a notion of time independent from the Aristotelian tradition. In particular, literature and the arts – in new media forms – explore the whole range of temporal semantics and dynamics, and play their part in pluralizing and hybridizing the idea of time, largely shaped by Christian models of salvation history.

Editing Middle High German texts today is led much more by the ventilation of practical necessities than by theoretical consideration. Especially lacking discussions of a basic concept of ›text‹ raises the risk of developing blind spots. The article will try to identify these blind spots as places where the traditional strategy of editing texts on the basis of the faulty-replication model persists. This will be illustrated by new editions of the ›Wunderer‹ and the ›Rosengarten‹. Furthermore, the article evolves a semiotic model of the philological praxis of editing Middle High German heroic epics.