Volume 143, Issue 2

For some decades, the authenticity of the German inscriptions of the castle Wildenberg in the Odenwald was rejected repeatedly. If they were created around 1200, they would be among the oldest known inscriptions written in German. This study attempts to verify the widely accepted assumption, that the inscriptions were ›forgeries‹ of the 19 th  century, based on epigraphic and linguistic criteria. It becomes apparent that evidence for ›forgery‹ cannot be provided based on the forms of the letters. A comparison of the preserved word and name forms shows, however, that the doubts concerning the authenticity of the inscriptions at the gate tower of the castle can be substantiated linguistically, whereas the inscriptions of the palas fit into the tradition of Middle High German texts.

This article negotiates the immense poetical potential inherent in the rhetorical operation of the ›epische Realisierung‹ of tropes, which is paradigmatically used by Wolfram von Eschenbach in his ›Parzival‹. This technique not only presents prevalent literary topoi of courtly culture in an innovative way, but also provides the possibility to unfold the text’s metaphors, which are habitually restricted to a specific moment, within the entire narrative framework. Furthermore, Wolfram applies this technique, arguably, to connect text passages, which otherwise diverge widely from the linear of the narrative, by the virtue of their corresponding metaphorical or visual logic. Through these established ana- and cataphoric intratextual references, even distant episodes are brought into a dialogue that discloses both analogies and differences as well as new levels of meaning.

The ›Notes‹ deal with the Frauenlob edition and the Frauenlob dictionary as well as a number of text-critical problems.

The Protestant polemic of the 16 th  century against the Roman Church and especially the papacy is generally considered more as an aspect of theological affront than as a fundamental communicative mode of the Reformation movement. Using the example of Hans Sachs’s poem ›The Wittenberg Nightingale‹ of 1523, which has contributed significantly to the literarization and popularization of the figure of the reformer and his teachings, the present article discusses the connection between Protestant Luther stylization, anti-Roman invectives and the formation of the Reformation movement. Their key messages, in their confrontational exclusiveness to the alleged falsification of the Christian doctrine by the papacy, turn out to be central elements of a fundamentally invective communication that establishes the new, Protestant doctrine.