Medieval Literacy And Textuality In Middle High German

This study addresses the topics of literacy and texuality in order to develop a new line of interpretation for a landmark of Middle High German literature. Albrecht's Der jüngere Titurel is an intellectually ambitious narrative written ca. 1270 as a prequel and sequel to the more famous Arthurian texts by Wolfram von Eschenbach.

This study addresses the topics of literacy and texuality in order to develop a new line of interpretation for a landmark of Middle High German literature. Albrecht's Der jüngere Titurel is an intellectually ambitious narrative written ca. 1270 as a prequel and sequel to the more famous Arthurian texts by Wolfram von Eschenbach.

The Daughter Zion allegory represents a particular narrative articulation of the paradigm of bridal mysticism deriving from the Song of Songs, the core element of which is the quest of Daughter Zion for a worthy object of love. Examining medieval German religious writing (verse and prose) and Dutch prose works, Annette Volfing shows that this storyline provides an excellent springboard for investigating key aspects of medieval religious and literary culture. In particular, she argues, the allegory lends itself to an exploration of the medieval sense of self; of the scope of human agency within the mystical encounter; of the gendering of the religious subject; of conceptions of space and enclosure; and of fantasies of violence and aggression. Volfing suggests that Daughter Zion adaptations increasingly tended to empower the religious subject to seek a more immediate relationship with the divine and to embrace a wider range of emotions: the mediating personifications are gradually eliminated in favour of a model of religious experience in which the human subject engages directly with Christ. Overall, the development of the allegory from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries marks the striving towards a greater sense of equality and affective reciprocity with the divine, within the context of an erotic union.

Drastic changes in lay religiosity during the High Middle Ages spurred anxiety about women forsaking their secular roles as wives and mothers for religious ones as nuns and beguines. This anxiety and the subsequent need to model an ideal of feminine behavior for the laity is particularly expressed in the German versions of Latin and French narratives. Using thirteenth-century penitentials, monastic exempla, and sermons, Karina Marie Ash clarifies how secular wifehood was recast as a quasi-religious role and, in German epics and romances from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, how female characters are adapted to promote the salvific nature of worldly love in ways that echo the pastoral reevaluation of women at that time. Then she argues that mid and late thirteenth-century German literature not only reflects this impulse to idealize women's roles in lay society but also to promote an alternative model of femininity that deploys ways of privileging secular roles for women over religious ones. These continuously evolving readaptations of female protagonists across cultures and across centuries reflect fictive solutions for real historical concerns about women that not only complement contemporary pastoral and legal reforms but are also unique to medieval German literature.

The most important part of the title of this book is the word 'and'. These words form the memorable conclusion to D.H. Green's study Medieval Listening and Reading; they encapsulate how, in the Middle Ages, orality and literacy are not to be considered as two separate and largely unrelated cultures or modes of textual transmission, but as elements in a mutual interplay and interpenetration. In this volume, scholars from Britain, Germany and North America follow Green's insistence on the conjunction of medieval orality and literacy, and show how this approach can open up new areas for investigation as well as help to reformulate old problems. The languages and literatures covered include English, Latin, French, Occitan and German, and the essays span the whole of the period from the early Middle Ages through to the fifteenth century.

This volume takes Dante's rich and multifaceted discourse of desire, from the Vita Nova to the Commedia, as a point of departure in investigating medieval concepts of desire in all their multiplicity, fragmentation and interrelation. As well as offering several original contributions on this fundamental aspect of Dante's work, it seeks to situate the Florentine more effectively within the broader spectrum of medieval culture and to establish greater intellectual exchange between Dante scholars and those from other disciplines. The volume is also notable for its openness to diverse critical and methodological approaches. In considering the extent to which modern theoretical paradigms can be used to shed light upon the Middle Ages, it will interest those engaged with questions of critical theory as well as medieval culture.

The first monograph in English on the German Lohengrin, offering a new response to the challenges posed by the text.

The articles in this volume focus upon Boethius's extant works: his De arithmetica and a fragmentary De musica, his translations and commentaries on logic, his five theological texts, and, of course, his Consolation of Philosophy. They examine the effects that Boethian thought has exercised upon the learning of later generations of scholars.