Trends in Medieval Philology

The studies in this volume shed light on phenomena of competition from late antiquity to the late Middle Ages from various medieval studies disciplines – from history and art history to Old German, English, and Latin. At the center is the question of their risky potential: to what extent do premodern agonal forms and practices put the orders that they produce on the line?

Medieval German narratives often link the problems associated with sovereignty and social order to the demonstration of rhetorical competence, presenting eloquence as a central condition of successful rule. This volume examines narrative stagings of political oratory using the example of Ulrich’s von Etzenbach Alexander Romance, Ottokar’s von Steiermark Steirischer Reimchronik (Styrian Rhymed Chronicle), and Heinrich Wittenwiler’s Ring.

Which means were employed in religious plays to convince audiences of their religious and political messages? This comparatist study makes use of an innovative methodology in order to examine how passion plays and eschatological plays in the German- and French-speaking worlds construed and perpetuated anti-Jewish and anti-protestant tropes and stereotypes, and utilized authority for the legitimation purposes.

By unfurling worlds, narratives also create orders. In addition, their narration has to be structured in an orderly way, so the concept of "order" can be applied to literary texts in two ways: as the order(s) of narration and as narrated order(s).

"Entangled Displacements" offers a new way of exploring medieval cultures through the refugees they create. The book examines lyrical texts, romances and epics from Western, Northern and Southern Europe of the ninth to the thirteenth centuries to uncover a literary discourse of displacement. Early medieval poetry in particular allows us to glimpse how individual refugees negotiated their place in textual and political communities. From their solitary efforts at belonging, the book moves to shared forms of displacement and queries the possibilities of being-in-common in exile. While bands of destitute outlaws experiment with alternative forms of communal life in isolation, exiled warlords develop imperial ambitions through aggressive conquests and crusades. Both individual and collective experiences imagined in medieval literature reveal how crucially displacement intersects with other critical interests such as authorship, textual form, gender, and postcolonial perspectives. As the book’s comparative, multilingual corpus shows, exile is not a marginal concern, but lies at the very heart of the medieval textual cultures we have reconstructed.

Monsters play a fascinating and multi-faceted role in medieval literature. Compared with their plot-related tasks as guardians, adversaries, messengers, helpers, or companions to the hero, their role in literary self-reflection has so far been neglected. This study analyzes that role, drawing on both medieval discourse and recent media theory.

This study examines the intense preoccupation with presenting medial processes evidenced in the love-and-adventure romances Reinfried von Braunschweig and Appolonius von Tyrland. Based on close attention to the emerging discourse on media theory and the narrative potential of medial narrative elements, the author examines how medial form can overcome spatial, temporal, and spherical obstacles between potential communication partners.

The study examines the link between father-daughter incest and emotions in medieval and early modern literature, a theme only marginally researched to date. By engaging in discourse about this taboo notion, it develops a set of theoretical and methodical tools that allow for the historically adequate and sophisticated literary analysis of emotions within and beyond the texts.

This study traces the poetics and narrative style of the Stricker’s epics back to the communicative pragmatics of their time. It analyzes depictions of counselling, dispute, and religious speech using approaches from communication theory, narratology, and the history of mediality. In this way, the study links a new interpretation of the Middle High German short story with ideas about the methods of literary theory.

While there is a long tradition of research into eddic poetry, including the poems classed as wisdom literature, much of this has approached the subject either as a primarily philological commentary or has addressed literary and thematic topics of individual or small groups of poems. This book offers a wide-ranging enquiry into the defining features of Old Norse wisdom, including the representation of wisdom in texts which cross traditional generic boundaries. It builds on recent advances in understanding of pre-Christian religion in Scandinavia, and calls on comparative and supporting work from several different disciplinary backgrounds (including literary theory, other medieval literatures and anthropology). Speaker and Authority interrogates important questions about the concept of knowledge, as well as its role in medieval Scandinavian society and its broader European cultural context.

This study conceives of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes (1410-1413) as an essentially performative text, one that expresses its awareness of the manuscript culture in which it is so firmly rooted. The openness of manuscripts is a recurring subject in the Regement and is not only expressed through mere descriptions of, but through complex references to this manuscript context.

Performances of manuscript culture manifest themselves in several aspects of the text. The first is the narrator persona, and especially the question of how persona and text are intertwined. The second is the constantly recurring interpretation of quotes from authoritative sources that pervades the Regement. This urge to interpret is expressed both in the tradition of adding marginal glosses and in the process of subjecting the text to an exegetical reading. The third aspect is the relation between text and images in the Regement’s manuscripts, which shows how mediality is performed and how the manuscript context is made the focus of this performance. In this monograph, all of these aspects are studied in a mindset that combines the concept of performativity with the postulations of Material Philology.

Recent years have witnessed growing interest in anger as a literary and societal phenomenon. Delving into this topic, this work examines the ways that 12^th century authors functionalized rage for their narratives of power and rule. An innovative aspect of the work is its cross-genre examination of texts that can be seen as key conceptualizations of early statehood.

Bodies and their role in cultural discourse have been a constant focus in the humanities and social sciences in recent years, but comparatively few studies exist about Old Norse-Icelandic or early Irish literature. This study aims to redress this imbalance and presents carefully contextualised close readings of medieval texts. The chapters focus on the role of bodies in mediality discourse in various contexts: that of identity in relation to ideas about self and other, of inscribed and marked skin and of natural bodily matters such as defecation, urination and menstruation. By carefully discussing the sources in their cultural contexts, it becomes apparent that medieval Scandinavian and early Irish texts present their very own ideas about bodies and their role in structuring the narrated worlds of the texts. The study presents one of the first systematic examinations of bodies in these two literary traditions in terms of body criticism and emphasises the ingenuity and complexity of medieval texts.

The importance of ambiguity has received little attention until now in the reception of medieval culture and literature or as a focus of research. These proceedings of an interdisciplinary conference evoke the broad range of discourses and intellectual contexts relevant to ambiguity. The authors examine phenomena of ambiguity and polysemy in their literary and cultural contexts to question the supposed absence of ambiguity in medieval culture.

Previous interpretations of the canonical texts of the Trecento adopted the perspectives of their male subjects. For the first time, this study presents a reading of the poetic figurations of female voices. In their songs, voices, and speeches, the protagonists Beatrice, Laura, and Catherine of Siena open their own perspective for interpretation. The study also makes a major contribution to the history of voice.

Far from being a modern invention, virtual space is a characteristic element of the courtly epic of the High Middle Ages. The performative act of narration engenders two virtual spaces, the narrative space and the space of the story, which only last as long as the literary communication and only exist for the participants. Literary space is thus closely intertwined with the act of narration, which is reflected in the stories themselves.

Hardly anything has been more influential in forming the modern era's definition of itself than its relation to the “pre-modern”. That is why medieval reception constitutes a central discursive space on the formation of cultural identity of individuals and cultural systems. Ranging from humanism to the present and from Jörg Wickram to Dan Brown, this volume considers basic questions on the forms and functions of the reception of the Middle Ages.

This volume presents contributions about laughter and silence as special forms of communication in medieval and early modern literature. Laughter and silence question what has been said or confirm it, frame or reflect it. This volume examines various dialogic strategies of laughter and silence, covering court romances and heroic epics as well as medieval short stories and travelogues.

Scientific and literary representations of a knowledge of desire, sex and bodies are characterized by a coincidence of speech and silence. This monograph studies the forms and effects of this coincidence which is captured in the term ‘(dis)articulation’. It is not a question of absolute silence or continuous speech, but rather a dialectical combination of refraining from speaking and speaking, which through the intention to remain silent brings forth a specific form of speaking ‑ (dis)articulation ‑ as silence effect.

Feelings not only determine our everyday life, they have also become a central theme of humanistic and scientific research. This volume offers exemplary insights into the methods of emotion research. Among other emotions, the presentation of anger, fear, fascination and laughter is explored in individual analyses, along with how emotions function in medieval literary texts. Taken together, the contributions provide important insights on the cultural modeling of feelings and into processes of historical transformation.

Religion is probably one of the most important themes in courtly narratives. The religious ideas in Parzival have often been studied, but not with respect to their narratological concept. This study seeks to explore how it is possible to refer to God at all in a medieval courtly text and to methodically elucidate the intersection of religion and literature as an important narrative element in Parzival.

This book examines the audiences and languages of Dominican sermons in late medieval Italy. It is a thorough analysis of how Latinate theological culture interacted with popular religious devotion. In particular it assesses the role of vernacular theology. Eliana Corbari defines vernacular theology as a form of theology that is based neither on a Latin scholastic model nor a monastic one. It is a “third dimension” of theology which was accessible to the laity, and in particular women, through their attendance at sermons and the reading of vernacular devotional works (in this case, medieval Italian treatises and sermons). Through painstaking manuscript work, Corbari makes an excellent contribution to sermon studies, gender studies, medieval theology, and codicology. She demonstrates that Dominican friars preached to an active contingent of laywomen, usually members of confraternities, who not only attended these sermons but re-read them and also disseminated them through book production to the wider Florentine community.

Shame and shamelessness are subject to different conditions for their enactment: While shame manifests bodily what the individual wants to hide, shamelessness by contrast appears as ostentation. However, both have in common the status of the staged and perceived boundary violation. From this action-oriented perspective, the essays in this interdisciplinary book explore the different forms of staging and functions of shame and shamelessness in literature, art, theater and the social communication of the Early Modern Age.

A disputation is an academic debate with fixed rules. Both in oral and written form it was a characteristic feature of university life of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. As genre and interaction model, it had an impact even outside the universities. The articles in this book illuminate different aspects of the disputation in the period between 1200 and 1800.
This book examines the developmental lines and features of the genre, its knowledge-conveying, social and denominational-political functions as well as its relationship to other media: to the German dialogue- and narrative literature of the Middle Ages, academic humorous speeches, Latin textbooks or German-French disputes of the Early Modern Age.

Narratology has experienced a boom in the past two decades. Narratologists have developed a differentiated set of instruments to describe narrative techniques and forms in modern and contemporary literature. This book explores whether this set of instruments can also be used to analyze older texts, using examples from medieval German literature.

The volume assesses performative structures within a variety of medieval forms of textuality, from vernacular literature to records of parliamentary proceedings, from prayer books to musical composition. Three issues are central to the volume: the role of ritual speech acts; the way in which authorship can be seen as created within medieval texts rather than as a given category; finally, phenomena of voice, created and situated between citation and repetition, especially in forms which appropriate and transform literary tradition. The volume encompasses articles by historians and musicologists as well as literary scholars. It spans European literature from the West (French, German, Italian) to the East (Church Slavonic), vernacular and Latin; it contrasts modes of liturgical meditation in the Western and Eastern Church with secular plays and songs, and it brings together studies on the character of ‛voice’ in major medieval authors such as Dante with examples of Dante-reception in the early twentieth century.

This study explores the very topical subject of intergenerational relationships in four heroic epics ("Kudrun" "The Great Rose Garden", "Biterolf and Dietleib", "Hürnen Seyfrid"), which make reference to the Nibelungenlied [Song of the Nibelungs] written around 1200, in particular to the figure of Kriemhild. The analysis covers aspects of family history and also genealogical and gender-specific aspects. The intertextual relationship of these four epics to the Nibelungenlied is also elucidated from a text generation perspective.

The volume is devoted to the relations, interrelations and interferences between narrative and lyric texts. Firstly it contains literary theory chapters on the possibilities of analysing lyric poetry from a narratological perspective, and then it presents and discusses historical case studies from medieval European literature which give a practical demonstration of the paradoxical interrelationships between narrative structure and lyrical quality.

The study takes German and French texts to examine the development of the Philomela myth in the vernacular from the 12th to the 16th centuries. For this, it also considers Ovid's Philomela and its after-life in its medieval adaptations. Working from the individual literary studies, content nodes of the myth are analysed and their variance presented comparatively. Particular weight is attached here to the motif of weaving, as this is accorded central significance within the Philomela myth.

Ritualised action – the use of gestures and ceremonial processes – were a central means of creating and expressing social order in pre-modern societies in particular. The present volume is divided into the three core areas of liturgy, law and politics and presents an interdisciplinary view of selected aspects of the arrangement and effect of rituals. An introductory section uses exemplars to present fundamental methodological questions from the perspectives of art history, theatre history and historiology.

Despite some tendencies in more recent research, there is still a need for a close linking of research in the history of emotionality with questions in media theory. This is the starting point for the present volume, which enquires into the effects on contemporary concepts of love of the "scriptorality" of European culture in the period from the 11th to 15th centuries. The various papers on medieval Latin, German and Italian literature focus not only on the materiality and pragmatics of the medium, but also the concept of mediality and the written tradition.

The concept of the aesthetic is a modern one, not however the phenomenon of the aesthetic. Thus the collected papers in this volume set out to discover important dimensions of the aesthetic in medieval literature. In this endeavour they inquire into the relationship of aesthetics and religion as well as into that between aesthetics and rhetoric, and they search for relevant concepts and modes of presentation in the literary texts themselves. These various components combine to form an ‘aesthetics of alterity’.

The religious plays found in many European cultures from the Middle Ages up until the modern age are closely related to devout practices and draw their subjects from worship, the bible and legends. The contributions to this interdisciplinary anthology take a look at religious plays as cultural performances and as part of a multimedia devout practice. The articles investigate the position of these plays within the culture of medieval daily life and festivity, the relationship between the spiritual and the secular, and the staging of cultural structural models in the plays.

This volume is devoted to an historical lexical and conceptual analysis of poetological expressions in German medieval literature, expressions such as schrift (‛script’, ‛writing’), rede (‛speech’), buoch (‛book’), tihtaere (‛poet’), vindaere (‛purveyor’ [‛of wild tales’]), hœren (‛hear’), lesen (‛read’), erniuwen (‛renew’), voltihten (‛compose’), etc. Despite individual studies, these terms, which are of central importance in medieval texts, yet are only vaguely defined in them, have largely been neglected by researchers and have hardly ever been presented as a connected system. However, these terms do open the way to an understanding of central aspects of medieval views of literature and of the historical conception of works and authors.

The volume presents a collection of papers by renowned medievalists on key terms and items in medieval poetics and historical semantics.

This study critically examines previous approaches to textual criticism and editorship, and using the "Parzival" ms. Cgm 19 and the "Tristan" ms. Cgm51 develops the argument that every medieval version of a text possesses inherent value and represents the cultural knowledge of its age and that this can only be appreciated if divergent mss. are not simply seen as deficient variants of an 'original text'. Through an analysis of the historical contexts of text function, Baisch defines the origins, status, and function of textual variation in the medieval vernacular transmission of texts and provides a methodology for joining edition and interpretation. He sees textual criticism as a functional history of the transmission of medieval texts. The study makes an important contribution to the present lively debate on the principles of modern editorship and the medieval concept of text.

The study provides a foundation for cultural anthropologists researching the representation of grief in German medieval literature. It examines how the phenomenon of grief in fictional texts can be defined in terms of the theory of emotions and then operationalised; it combines the theory of emotions with performative categories, i.e., with our modern knowledge of ritual and public life in the Middle Ages. The setting and function of grief are closely examined in Wolfram's 'Willehalm', Hartmann's 'Erec' and Gottfried's 'Tristan'. This is a seminal study, combining cultural studies with textual analysis. It provides a usable methodological foundation for all future work on representations of grief in medieval literature.

The volume presents a collection of papers by noted German and British medievalists, who join the discussion on the concept of text in German Medieval Studies. This topic has been intensively discussed in recent years, as new insights from editorial philology, narratology, and media theory have led to 'medieval text' becoming an open and methodologically elusive concept. The contributors weigh the theoretical arguments and apply the methodological outcome to text exemplars from the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages.

This volume offers a comprehensive account and documentation of the way the Middle Ages have been presented in the medium of film. It is arranged as a compendium, contains a comprehensive introduction, and treats all aspects of cinematic images of medieval times (myths, heroes, materials, the presentation of violence, the image of women etc.). It thus documents a particularly important source of our popular contemporary view of the Middle Ages. A comprehensive filmography assembles all the important films on the Middle Ages.

In medieval and early modern times, scribes, painters, illustrators, translators and authors obviously had specific ideas of what was meant by fidelity to the original; the modern observer frequently regards their transfers as imprecise and wilful. It would, however, be too simple to speak of a 'typically medieval' manner of reproduction.

The papers in this volume show that the only sensible approach is to differentiate between the various forms and concepts of reproduction in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age. The interdisciplinarity of this volume results in a complex picture that brings out the different nature of medieval 'transfers' because it considers the particularity of each case. The volume sees itself as a contribution to a cultural history of artistic reproduction.

The volume presents a collection of studies by internationally acknowledged medievalists on the phenomenon of laughter and its literary, social and emotional functions in the Middle Ages. The papers investigate the forms and representations of laughter in medieval literature and society and inquire into its role in the creation of communities and the depiction of figures in fictional texts.

The reader of an artistic description (ecphrasis) is subjected to a constant oscillation between the text and the image. Using various examples, the present study examines the insights which medieval literary works open up to their readers by continually inserting descriptions of pictures and architecture into the linear flow of narrative texts. Wandhoff attempts to reconstruct a history of ecphrasis, which extends from the epics of antiquity to the post-classic courtly romance at the end of the 13th century.

The argumentation is led by three principal concepts - the analysis of literary descriptions as memorial pictures, as reflections of the visual in the verbal or the macro-narrative in the micro-narrative, or as a virtual display.

The volume presents papers on the subject of "Myths in the Middle Ages", and harnesses the theoretical discussions on the concept of myth for German medieval studies. It is divided into three sections, which stand for various methodological approaches: I. Myth and Christianity, II. Myth and Narrative, III. Myth and Presence. The outcome is that the Middle Ages developed (narrative) strategies on different levels for dealing with mythical material.

Historical research into emotionality is at present generally enjoying an heightened level of interest. This bilingual volume documents the proceedings of an international conference, discussing current paradigms and perspectives in historical literary research into emotions and heightening awareness of the mediality of cultures of emotion in historical change. The discussion of methodological questions opens up avenues for interdisciplinary research.

Open-Access-Transformationspaket 2026

Wie lassen sich Konzepte des ‚Helden‘ in narrativen Texten identifizieren? Anders als bisherige Forschungen geht der vorliegende Band dieser Frage nicht mit Blick auf Figurentypen oder auf das ‚Heroische‘ nach, sondern mit der Differenzierung basaler Unterscheidungslogiken: Welche Unterscheidung zwischen dem Helden und ‚den Anderen‘ macht ein Text? 

Auf der abstraktesten Ebene ist die Unterscheidung zwischen Inkommensurabilität und Vergleichbarkeit anzusiedeln. Deren spezifisch vormoderne Ausprägung ist die Unterscheidung zwischen ‚radikalem Anderssein‘ und Exemplarizität, verstanden als verstanden als Supererogation (Übererfüllung einer Norm). Erzählende Texte können gerade auch von der spannungsvollen Gleichzeitigkeit beider Logiken geprägt sein. Diese Spannung entfaltet sich insbesondere an Figuren ‚schwieriger Heilbringer‘ – und zwar sowohl in weltlichen als auch in religiösen Texten. 

Die Beiträge untersuchen derartige Widerspruchsstrukturen sowie die Möglichkeiten, die das Erzählen von schwierigen Heilbringern eröffnet, vornehmlich an vormodernen weltlichen (Schwanenrittertexte, Johan ûz dem virgiere, Rennewart, Frauendienst) und legendarischen Texten (Gregorius, Pelagius- und Franziskuslegende). Die abschließenden Beiträge führen sowohl über den literarischen Diskurs als auch über vormoderne Literatur hinaus (Verbrechensberichte der frühen Neuzeit; Konstruktionen Jesu als Held; Lutz Seiler, Kruso).