Von Gaben mit Stil erzählen

Abstract

Abstract This article connects the concept of ›give and take‹ in medieval societies with detailed analyses of the rhetorical figures chiasmus and parallelism. It suggests that the structure of ›give and take‹ can be seen as reflected in the text structure. Three Middle-High-German narratives are analyzed: ›Lanzelet‹, ›Willehalm‹ and ›Straßburger Alexander‹, representatives of the trois matières. The article shows that the stylistic devices with which gifts are negotiated differ in detail from text to text, but also that figures of syntactic and semantic similarity and mirroring are used consistently across the texts.