Volume 147, Issue 2

The traditional view that Old High German – like all old West Germania – has two paradigmatized synthetic tense forms, present and past, as well as syntactic constructions with pre-auxiliaries ›have‹ and ›be‹ as – not yet paradigmatized – archetypes of analytical tense forms of the perfect and pluperfect, have been partially relativized in recent research. The tense periphrases are said to have a higher degree of grammaticality than previously assumed. The article primarily deals with the question of the criteria of grammaticality of tense periphrases, which are largely redefined, taking into account their functional performance in the narrative and descriptive-evaluative discourse mode in comparison to New High German. It is shown that the Old High German evidence demonstrates an overall high level of systematic use of tense periphrases in both event time and reference time readings and can therefore be classified in the periphrastic part of the tense paradigm. Further evidence of this is the full verb selection, which already in Old High German goes far beyond a genuine possessive relation of the syntactic archetype.

Courtly romance is a book-derived genre, and certain romances stand out because they claim that their story matter is distributed over multiple books in more than one language. In these ‘romances with bibliography’, books are present as a field of transmission from which narration issues. This essay describes the imaginative and conceptual configurations which organize the representation of the field in German romances from the late twelfth to the middle of the fourteenth century; taken together, these configurations reveal the variety of ways in which romance authors situated their work of narration in relation to books in a vernacular textual culture where the literary word was poised between the written medium of its composition and transmission and the spoken or sung aurality of its performance.

A tabula de universo , attributed to John of Gmunden, is said to have been a text and image ensemble in St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna that depicts and describes the spherical structure of the universe. Today, it only exists in manuscripts. This article describes how the Latin text found its way into the manuscript tradition, and then shows how a newly discovered witness integrates the spherical model, both text and image, into a German-language prose world-chronicle. The Berlin Ms. germ. fol. 595 thus reveals modular textual practices that suggest that a translation of Honorius Augustodunensis’ ›Imago mundi‹ may well have been produced by the chronicler himself in and for this specific context.

The article deals with Karl Stackmann’s essay “Mittelalterliche Texte als Aufgabe” (1964), which played a decisive role in turning away from the reconstructive edition and implementing the base manuscript principle for Middle High German literature. The supposed proof that ‘Lachmann’s method’ is not applicable here, however, fails to comprehend Lachmann’s own editorial practice and is subject to a serious misunderstanding of the genealogical method in general. Hermann Paul provided a thorough description of it as early as 1891. One of its central points is that the stemmatic analysis must operate with assumptions about the probability of coincidental matches between unrelated manuscripts.