Volume 140, Issue 3

Reliability issues emerge when investigating initials in transcriptions of ENHG manuscripts. Our goal is to demonstrate how a methodological framework of reliability classes affects and facilitates the evaluation of annotated corpus data based on existing text editions. We hypothesize that deviant measurements in the capitalization of sentence-internal word tokens occur when reliability classes and the representativeness of allographs are accounted for. Our data, derived from SIGS project annotations, shows that the capitalization mapped per part of speech can be represented by the size of a set of allographs, thus pointing out the importance of the letter as discrete factor for each text of the corpus.

With respect to the new edition of the ›Virginal‹ and looking back on recent philological practice in the field of Medieval German studies, the article discusses the paradigm of the ›überlieferungsgeschichtliche Edition‹. It is argued that the potential and the value of an ›überlieferungsgeschichtliche Edition‹ vary substantially, depending on the research interest of the user/reader as well as on the characteristics of the transmission of the text. Generally speaking, the ›überlieferungsgeschichtliche Edition‹ should by no means be regarded as the philological joker as which it is commonly seen. The consequences which arise from the ›Gestalt‹ of an edition for literary history are reflected with regards to the text family usually referred to as ›aventiurehafte Dietrichepik‹.

The article considers the lyric part of the so-called Liederbuch der Clara Hätzlerin from several, closely connected perspectives. Taking their typical metaphorical responsiveness as a starting point, I seek to obtain a more substantial insight into this class of internal relationship between the texts. The insight thus acquired allows us to draw cogent conclusions about the shaping of Clara’s song collection as well as the poetic practices preceding it. Furthermore, I seek to reappraise the poetic features of the late medieval secular songbook-lyrics as a genre. For it is notably the observation of the important characterization of specific phenomena of association that might well prompt us to reconsider this poetic type as it clearly fails to be fixed by the conventional categories of author and his work. What needs to take the place of our thinking in terms of these categories is an approach that is based on the significant notion of productive reception and that pays due attention to the phenomenon of sociability.