Volume 141, Issue 1

Middle Low German (MLG) underwent Jespersen’s Cycle, a change in the expression of sentential negation, whereby a preverbal marker ni (stage I) was adjoined by an adverbial niht (stage II) in the transition towards MLG, and was eventually replaced by it (stage III). In this article, I argue that the single preverbal particle ne / en in MLG became a marker of negation which is located syntactically higher, i. e. above the clause boundary, than the clause in which ne / en appears. This analysis is based on a corpus study investigating MLG exceptive clauses (English unless -clauses). Both on semantic and syntactic grounds, it is shown that these clauses can be explained as being complements of an operator that subtracts the proposition in the exceptive clause from the modal domain of a universal quantifier.

Up until now, the Early Middle High German text ›Anegenge‹ has been discredited in academic research for various different reasons, including claims that it is merely a bad didactic poem, whose sole purpose is to portray the complete history of salvation. This paper aims to illustrate that the main topic of the poem is not, as has been the common consensus thus far, the history of salvation, but, instead, the Holy Trinity. This allows for a reevaluation of the text.

This paper explores variations in portrayals of cooperation and friendship in legends of martyrs, focussing on the ›The Legend of Saints Protus and Hyacinth‹ in different historical contexts. When adapting the legend in the fifteenth-century, the compiler and copyist Sister Regula amended the standard ›Legenda Aurea‹ version by introducing an additional plot line recounting cooperation between two female martyrs. In turn, in the nineteenth century, the Swiss author Gottfried Keller dismissed the notion of spiritual friendship altogether and replaced it with the ideal of a hierarchical relationship between spouses.

The article explores scenes of violence in Sibote’s ›der vrouwen zuht‹ and ›La Dame escoillee‹, arguing that the texts do not stage male dominance as a natural order (as one might assume), but rather illustrate a shift from violent acts ( violentia ) to a staging of potential violence that constitutes power ( potentia ). Whereas acts of violence are immediately visible, the staging of power is more complex, demanding indirect and symbolic forms of force that suggest an unlimited potential for violence. Both texts show these scenes to be effective, attesting to male dominance and thus affirming contemporary gender discourses; at the same time, they uncover just how constructed and staged this position of male power is, thus exposing an artificial rather than a natural order of genders.