1,720,977 research outputs found
Weltinnenräume. Literarische Erkundungen zwischen Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit (am Beispiel des 'Fortunatus'-Romans und der 'Geschichtklitterung' von Johann Fischart)
No full textAgenda, Einfluss, Reichweiten: Buchdruck und Frömmigkeit in Lübeck um 1500: Agenda, impact, reach: printing and religious practice in Lübeck around 1500
Get PDFGutenberg’s invention of printing with movable type was an innovation in many respects. However, its impact, particularly in the early years, has not been comprehensively investigated. Hardly any example is better suited to answer this question than Lübeck early print production. In 1474 Lübeck, as the economic and cultural centre of the Hanseatic region, became the first printing city in northern Germany. Its production is characterised by an exceptionally high proportion of religious writing and an equally high proportion of literature in the Middle Low German vernacular. These works were aimed at a steadily expanding audience, especially a pious lay public, which at that time was increasingly striving for religious participation. Based on Lübeck, its print production and current discourses on religious practice, this study addresses two questions: the interaction between printed text and its context, as well as the role the printers played in this relationship.
Using five representative literary examples, the author first identifies the printers’ self-formulated agenda and examines their scope for action, then traces the reciprocal influence of printed literature and current trends in religious practice - namely the rosary and Mary's compassion -, and concludes by asking about the geographical and social reaches of early printed literature. Her holistic approach, including all levels of the printed book from the text to the edition to the individual copy, allows for a meticulous tracing of the interactions between early print production and contemporary developments at the intersection of materiality and mediality. With its combined historical-literary approach the thesis not only offers a contribution to Middle Low German literary history and a new perspective on the Hanseatic region as a cultural network, but reveals the impact of early printing with the printers as agents on the threshold between the Middle Ages and Early Modern times
Schneident mir beid oren ab: the comic potential of corporal punishment in sixteenth-century "Schwankbücher"
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To be a pilgrim: a comparative study of late medieval accounts of pilgrimage from Germany and England to the Holy Land
No full textAs a large-scale international cultural phenomenon, the Jerusalem pilgrimage must be approached comparatively. This project compares the pilgrimage accounts of two Germans and two Englishmen who travelled to Jerusalem in the second half of the long fifteenth century. The texts are those of William Wey, (written c.1470), Bernhard von Breydenbach (printed 1486), Arnold von Harff (written 1499) and the Pylgrymage of Sir Richard Guylforde, composed by his anonymous chaplain (printed 1511). Each chapter focuses on a pilgrim, and one of four thematic topics: genre, the religious other, curiosity and print. This project treats these works as literary texts which can be approached from the perspective of cultural history, rather than as historical sources. The project, therefore, is more a consideration of how the pilgrimage is represented than it is about the events of each pilgrimage, and so it looks at the pilgrimages created in writing. Pilgrimage writings tend to focus on Jerusalem's spiritual significance, rather than its worldly position. In this sense, textual representations of travel to Jerusalem represent something of a disconnect with travel to other physical destinations, and the conceptual space of pilgrimage will be of key significance to this thesis. This has implications for practice as well as writing, and therefore the thesis will address how the writers consider their journeys, as well as the idea of virtual pilgrimage. The thesis engages with questions of identity, and how it is presented, as well as the authors' relationship with their audiences. This necessitates analysing collective identity, as well as the different audiences for printed and manuscript texts. The most important research question, bringing together these issues, considers whether the authors’ different geographical origins affect their self-presentation and understanding of pilgrimage. This leads to my central contention: that pilgrimage must be portrayed as a single, unified experience
Mirrors and violence in the works of Neidhart and Wittenwiler
Get PDFThe paper examines the association of Neidhart’s mirrors with various forms of violence, as well as considering
the extent to which these configurations are continued in the Wittenwiler’s Ring, a narrative which stands in a
complex intertextual relationship with Neidhart’s songs. The paper considers not only literal (and specifically
sexual) violence, but also symbolic violence, in the sense proposed by Bourdieu to describe the way in which
under-privileged or marginalised groups are made to internalise the hostile discourses of the dominant. Whilst
literal violence is implicit in the motif of the broken mirror, symbolic violence is associated with satire as a literary
mode and with the motif of the satiric mirror. Andersen’s fairy-tale The Snow Queen fuses these two motifs in a
way which provides a helpful foil for the medieval texts. The analysis of Neidhart will focus partly on the broken
(or stolen) mirror of Vriderune, and partly on the deployment of the satiric mirror, both by an
individual dörper within Winterlied 16, and by Neidhart himself. The discussion of Wittenwiler’s
Ring foregrounds deliberate discontinuities: Wittenwiler’s Neithart is no Minnesänger, the narration of rape no
longer requires any symbolic euphemism, and the breaking of the mirror does not matter because nobody in
Lappenhausen is capable of literary reflection. Whilst the hostility towards the peasant world in the Ring is even stronger than in Neidhart’s songs, Wittenwiler’s narrator holds himself aloof from it, unlike Neidhart’s persona
who, in true satiric mode, is deeply implicated in the world which he is mocking
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