Lexicon Of The Mediaeval German Hunt

Study of hunting as it appears both in didactic texts, and epic and romance.

Jan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have already taught us to realize how important games and play have been for pre-modern civilization. Recent research has begun to acknowledge the fundamental importance of these aspects in cultural, religious, philosophical, and literary terms. This volume expands on the traditional approach still very much focused on the materiality of game (toys, cards, dice, falcons, dolls, etc.) and acknowledges that game constituted also a form of coming to terms with human existence in an unstable and volatile world determined by universal randomness and fortune. Whether considering blessings or horse fighting, falconry or card games, playing with dice or dolls, we can gain a much deeper understanding of medieval and early modern society when we consider how people pursued pleasure and how they structured their leisure time. The contributions examine a wide gamut of approaches to pleasure, considering health issues, eroticism, tournaments, playing music, reading and listening, drinking alcohol, gambling and throwing dice. This large issue was also relevant, of course, in non-Christian societies, and constitutes a critical concern both for the past and the present because we are all homines ludentes.

This book sheds light on the complexity of medieval German literary culture as it evolved in the course of the thirteenth century (c. 1220-1920) by analysing the attitudes of narrative poets towards the issue of authorship. It describes the various ways in which vernacular writers could address the theme of their own authorship within their literary works, and explores the tensions that arose between such authorial strategies on the one hand and their subsequent manuscript transmission on the other.

Hunting was a major economic and leisure activity throughout the European Middle Ages, and while aristocratic practices have featured in studies of romantic and narrative literature, hunting in its wider sense, across the social spectrum with attendant male and female roles, has larged been ignored by modern medieval historians. Richard Almond's study brings vividly to life the universality and centrality of hunting to medieval societies, both as an economic necessity and as an expression of medieval humanity's amost atavistic sense of oneness with nature. Medieval Hunting dispels some of the myths and misunderstandings about hunting, including the persistent view that it was exclusively an aristocratic pursuit and a male one at that. Using a wide variety of contemporary textual and art historical evidence, Richard Almond demonstrates convincingly that hunting, including fishing and all manner of poaching, was enjoyed by all classes, and by women as well as men.

First published in 2001, Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia provides a comprehensive guide to the German and Dutch-speaking world in the Middle Ages, from approximately C.E. 500 to 1500. It offers detailed accounts of a wide variety of aspects of medieval Germany, including language, literature, architecture, politics, warfare, medicine, philosophy and religion. In addition, this reference work includes bibliographies and citations to aid further study. This A-Z encyclopedia, featuring over 500 entries written by expert contributors, will be of key interest to students and scholars, as well as general readers.

The essays in this 1980 volume deal largely with medieval German heroic and epic poetry.