Andere Ästhetik – Studien

Open-Access-Transformationspaket 2026

The study examines the relationship between historical rites of passage (knighting, coronation, marriage) and 12th- and 13th-century courtly narrative traditions. It analyzes how French and German courtly romances render these transitional rituals in narrative form, reflect upon them, and subject them to critical inquiry. In doing so, it uncovers the ritual logics that are essential for understanding the romances in their historical context.

This literary study examines texts written in the context of the witch hunts of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. It investigates the extent to which demonological treatises took up narrative devices and literary forms. It also outlines how the knowledge from such treatises found its way into literary texts and how they unlocked its aesthetic potential.

Textuality, mediality, and performativity are central parameters in the exploration of medieval poetry. This volume unites them as measures of “aesthetic energy,” building on a term coined by Annette Gerok-Reiter to mark her 60th birthday. In nuanced analyses, Susanne Köbele, Almut Suerbaum, Franz-Josef Holznagel, and Alexander Rudolph / Tristan Marquardt inquire into the aesthetic energy of medieval poetry.

This study examines the reciprocal relationship between allegorical printmaking cycles and the Netherlands’ Early Modern festive culture by looking at Maarten van Heemskerck’s "Cycle of Human Existence." These kinds of series creatively appropriated the reality-generating function of performative acts, serving as socio-culturally effective worldviews whose structure was aesthetically reconstituted in the handling of the prints.

For both Judaism and Christianity, the Menorah is an iconic artefact. It played a crucial role as an implement of the Tabernacle in the desert and the Temple in Jerusalem. After the destruction of the Temple and the eventual loss of the Menorah, it became the quintessential symbol of the Jewish people. It also figures prominently in Christian thought and imagery. Especially Christian monumental seven-branched candelabra raise questions about their spatial aesthetics as well as their liturgical and performative functions.

This volume offers interdisciplinary reflections on the Menorah in both Jewish and Christian traditions, and thus contributes not only to a better understanding of their cultural entanglement in pre-modern times, but also to a more differentiated view of their specific and contextualaesthetic qualities.

This study delves into discourses and practices of translation in the Fruitbearing Society. Specifically, it focuses on the translation work of Prince Ludwig von Anhalt-Köthen, using his Petrarch translation as a case study to analyze the processes and mechanisms behind his productive engagement with texts of foreign linguistic or cultural origin, which was aimed at "elevating the mother tongue."

This study analyzes the linguistic characteristics of private letters written in French in the seventeenth century. It delves into documents previously overlooked in scholarly research that were penned by members of a wide range of social groups – including those outside the courtly literary circles of the linguistic purism debate. In this way, it paints a nuanced picture of the linguistic reality of that epoch.

The illusio daemoniaca played a central role in debates about magic and witchcraft in the Early Modern period. This volume analyzes demonological treatises, narratives, and plays from Germany, France, England, and Spain to show how in these texts demonic deception transforms into aesthetic illusion, bringing to light a "different" genealogy of the aesthetic concepts of appearance and illusion.

This study examines the co-creative relationship between speakers, hearers, and God in poetry and prose by George Herbert and John Donne. Through analyses of communicative situations, communicative interactions, and reflections on communication, models of communication are established that underlie the texts selected. In particular, the activity of hearing is shown to be considered essential to the constitution of a meaningful utterance. In this way, a key function of communication becomes apparent: it can yield a range of creative products – from the conversation itself to a literary artefact and its extratextual effects.

This study thus offers a new reading of the texts of George Herbert and John Donne, and provides a clear perspective on how early modern religious texts regarded communication and co-creativity as connected concepts.

This edited volume qualitatively and quantitatively inquires into the vocabulary with which premodern texts seek to transport and shape their origins and the contexts of their composition. The volume’s focus lies on a historically and semantically broad range of sources, which includes texts for practical use. Studies focusing on methodology reflect on how approaches from the digital humanities can advance the study of aesthetic vocabulary.

This the first volume to extensively examine and contextualize the multifaceted connections between music and early modern spa cultures. The analysis of text and music sources offers new insights into the musical aspects of spa life, from social practices to theoretical reflections. This approach makes it possible to better understand the function and aesthetic significance of spa and therapeutic music in their historical context.

In the spa context, music is made and heard, valued and shunned. Its use between applied dietetics, artistic practice, social communication, and theoretical reflection ranges from entertainment to therapy, spiritual health to associations with vanitas. The snapshots in this book examine forms, genres, and institutional manifestations of, as well as artistic reflections on, spa and therapeutic music from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.

What are the limits of freedom? What is the meaning of phrases like "aesthetic autonomy" and "aesthetics of autonomy," which are currently omnipresent in art, scholarship, and the media? Taking the praxeological approach of SFB 1391, this study provides answers to questions such as these by carrying out a thorough historical and systematic examination of the concept of "aesthetic autonomy" and critically inquiring into its contemporary relevance.

This study makes an important contribution to research on personification in German literature from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. It examines the genres of Sangspruch and Totenklage to show that personification can be identified as such through human-like actions. It demonstrates how personification opens up opportunities to explore and negotiate diverse discourses – including those of an aesthetic nature

This volume, based on an online exhibition, takes an archaeological and art-historical perspective to delve into the diverse strategies used to visualize, transform, and creatively appropriate North Alpine antiquities in Early Modern printmaking. It focuses on the reciprocal relationship between identity building and artistic practice, which established the cultural significance of the works as carriers of aesthetic discourse and knowledge.

The study analyzes differentiated concepts of truth in Dutch prints of the 16th and 17th centuries. Against the backdrop of religious and political crises of the time, it elaborates on how copperplate engravings and etchings not only represent veritas but, by problematizing their own medial status, reflect on visual forms of evidence generation and art’s specific capacity for truth.

This study develops the theory that the practice of retelling reflected in the poetologies of German-language chivalric romance (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) must be understood not just as artificial poiesis but also as a practice of imitation and dispute. The study derives these two dimensions of the retelling historically from Horace’s Ars poetica and describes them conceptually using the concepts of artificiality and agon.

This interdisciplinary volume examines a practice that was common in the early modern north Alpine region, namely the making of new edition prints, and argues that it was a complex aesthetic strategy of creative appropriation. It focuses on the socioeconomic factors involved in the production and reception of print (re-)inventions and considers their relevance as a space of cultural articulation and a medium of artistic (self-)reflection.

Despite various poststructuralist rejections of the idea of a singular author-genius, the question of a textual archetype that can be assigned to a named author is still a common scholarly phantasm. The Romantic idea that an author created a text or even a work autonomously is transferred even to pre-modern literature today. This ignores the fact that the transmission of medieval and early modern literature creates variances that could not be justified by means of singular authorships. The present volume offers new theoretical approaches from English, German, and Scandinavian studies to provide a historically more adequate approach to the question of authorship in premodern literary cultures. Authorship is no longer equated with an extra-textual entity, but is instead considered a narratological, inner- and intertextual function that can be recognized in the retrospectively established beginnings of literature as well as in the medial transformation of texts during the early days of printing. The volume is aimed at interested scholars of all philologies, especially those dealing with the Middle Ages or Early Modern Period.