Volume 143, Issue 4

This paper studies perfect auxiliary selection of the verb stehen ›to stand‹ in 17 th and 18 th  century corpora as well as in dialect and newspaper corpora of contemporary German. Being restricted to the auxiliary haben ›have‹ in central and northern German varieties, stative verbs denoting the maintenance of a physical body’s position such as stehen are well known to allow both haben ›have‹ and sein ›be‹ in southern German varieties. Our study reveals that this variability was even more widespread in historical stages of German. We witness a preponderance of sein in the 17 th  century. Over the course of the 18 th  century, haben usages increased at the expense of sein. Strikingly, only central-eastern varieties tended to prefer haben over all periods under scrutiny. In addition to region, the polysemy of the verb stehen contributed to the choice of the auxiliary in that non-literal or idiomatic usages tended to prefer haben .

In a broad overview, this article examines the virtue test scenarios (›Tugendproben‹) in Arthurian romances and short narratives of the 13th and 14th centuries as well as in late medieval chivalric romance and Shrovetide plays. While literary research has mainly focused on didactic and comic moments of only two texts so far, the article aims at an underlying social structure formed by public control, rank representation, and concern for the cohesion of Arthurian society. This constellation, I argue, reflects the problem of reconciling two contradictory principles of courtly socialization: agonal competition and an assertion of virtual equality.

This essay deals with the illustrated Leiden codex of Wirnt von Grafenberg’s Arthurian novel ›Wigalois‹ (Leiden, University Library, Ltk 537). We will show that, in the interplay of text and picture, the codex is meant to privilege a certain interpretation of the novel text, which is a salvatory reading of ›Wigalois‹. We base our examination on the two illustrated pages opening the codex, which shape the visual language of the entire illustration cycle. In addition, this illustration cycle has the function of further emphasising some of the novel’s central scenes and clarifying their potential of meaning. The last illustrated page of the codex integrates the Dukes of Braunschweig-Grubenhagen as patrons of the manuscript into the illustration programme, and provides a back reference ranging from the history of salvation to world history as well as local history.