Volume 145, Issue 3

The names Lubainis and Vanaenia recorded in inscriptions from Namur have long been proposed to preserve evidence that supports the reconstruction of the stem of the Germanic weak class-III verbs as originally featuring a diphthong *- ai- . Cognates of the Gothic weak class-III verb weihan ›to consecrate‹ have similarly been widely held to be preserved in two inscriptions rescued over a century ago from the Danish votive bogs. The attested forms wiju and wija suggest the development of a first-person singular present indicative ending - jǣ , much as would be expected of a weak class-III verb in Northwest Germanic. Gothic weihan ›to consecrate‹ is a factitive, however, and wiju and wija appear to have developed in a manner contrary to that assumed in recent accounts of the morphological origin of the weak class-III verbs.

This article focuses on the development of a punctation mark that has hardly been the focus of historical linguistics so far: the dash. On the basis of a corpus analysis of printed texts, an insight into the quantitative and qualitative development of the dash since the end of the 18 th century will be given. On the one hand, I argue that the dash has been used since the end of the 18 th century in contexts that also characterize it in contemporary German. On the other hand, I want to show that the read-controlling function of the dash, as assumed by Bredel (2002, 2008), already underlies some of its early uses.

The article illustrates and justifies the role of syllable weight for the MHG verse. It counters a 2021 paper by A. Estis, who fundamentally questions the relevance of syllable weight for MHG metrics. The argumentation of the riposte relies on text-analytical findings, methodological aspects (heuristics), the history of the German verse in late medieval and early modern times, last but not least on historical testimonies, namely by Heinrich von Hesler and Nikolaus von Jeroschin. The article concludes with a reformulation of basic analytical principles of MHG metrics, thus trying to forestall some misunderstandings possibly provoked by the traditional terminology of A. Heusler.

This medievalist review article arises from the publication in 2019 of two conceptually and materially very different handbooks on the topic of ›literature and economy‹: the ›Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics‹ and the de Gruyter ›Handbuch. Literatur & Ökonomie‹, the eighth volume of the series ›Handbücher zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Philologie‹. Focal points of my critical discussion are: 1. the Marxist foundations of ideology critique in Econo-literary Criticism, 2. the long history of the debate on the relation of text and context in literary studies, 3. the controversy surrounding the application of Joseph Vogl’s ›poetics of knowledge‹ to the economic domain, and 4. the ideological positioning of economic themes in pre-modern literature between the poles of ›Commercial economy‹ and ›Christian economics‹.