German-speaking Lands Research Articles

Пикельгеринг: маска и образ (трансформация на разных национальных сценах XVII века)

In this study, for the first time, an appeal is made to the topic of the way to transform a buffoon’s persona formed in the traveling troupes of English comedians (Englische Komödianten) — Pickelhäring (Pickelhering). After the forced migration of English troupes to the mainland and ‘settlement’ in Germany, it was the jester who helped to find ways for actors and audiences who spoke different languages to communicate. This is how Pickelhäring transformed from a verbal into a non-verbal character, acquiring the meaning of a theatrical mask. Over time, the character’s verbality returned, marking the return to his original image, but with the advancement of theatre troupes to the East, the newfound verbality was again discarded, relegating the character back to the status of a mask. Pickelhäring’s persona became so popular that he was one of the characters in the first performances in the theatre at the court of Aleksei Mikhailovich. Such radical metamorphoses contributed to the character’s fairly rapid and successful establishment on various national stages. It was his adaptability by changing his own essence that ensured his incredible success and public admiration throughout the 17th century. This article also gives the names of the most famous performers of this role among all troupes of English comedians (Englische Komödianten) in the German-speaking lands.

‘Very Full of Details and Excellently Executed’: Materiality and Medicine in Hans Rottenhammer’s Painted Bodies

Abstract This article explores the relationship between skin, materiality and medicine in the early modern German-speaking lands. It focuses on the understudied artwork of the Munich-born artist Johann Rottenhammer (1564–1625), demonstrating that his painted bodies were related to medical understandings of skin. Skin was a mediating boundary between inside and outside: the colour and texture of skin carried meanings about the internal state of the body. In this period, ‘exploration’ beyond Europe was destabilizing the definition of ‘good’ or ‘normative’ skin. The appearance of healthy or unhealthy skin was expressed in contemporary northern European artistic theory, for example in Karel van Mander’s Book on Painting. This article contributes to the growing literature on materiality and medicine by demonstrating their indelible impact on the artist’s project. Medical histories of the sixteenth century have traditionally positioned the Galenic and Paracelsian medical traditions as diametrically opposed. This article observes, however, key areas of similarity—the origin of curative materials, and the relationship between the internal body and the external natural world—and considers how they were present in early modern German understandings of skin.

Anachronism or Cultural Transfer? Latin Journals in the Public Sphere of the Hungarian Kingdom in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Latin journalism in Europe flourished between 1600 and 1750. However, in the peripheral regions east of the German-speaking lands, including Hungary, periodicals began to appear in greater numbers only from the early eighteenth century. By that time, Latin journalism was losing its popularity in the central regions of Europe due to the widespread establishment of the vernacular press and the standardization of native languages. Yet, the editors of the newly established periodicals in Hungary could not follow this pattern due to several reasons. One solution to their problems was to develop the Latin-language press. This paper attempts to reconceptualize the role of late Latin journalism from the perspective of specific peripheral cultural circumstances, with a special focus on the periodical genre of ‘ephemerides’. The focus of the analysis is on Ephemerides Statistico-Politicae / Posonienses (1804–38), a popular and significant nineteenth-century Latin journal, and its supplementary annexes.

Language Plurality and Practices of Translation in Sigmund Freud's Work: Another Chapter in the History of Multilingualism in the German-Speaking Lands

abstract: By bringing together various examples of multilingualism in Freud's work, this article addresses the question of how experiences of linguistic diversity and translation might have affected the development of psychoanalytic language thinking. In a historical perspective, by conceiving of humans as essentially polyphonic and every language as ambiguous, Freud's theory stands in remarkable opposition to the romantic conception of a unique mother tongue and the long-standing cultural devaluation of multilingualism in the German-speaking lands. It therefore deserves to be reassessed and integrated into current research on the history of cultural and literary forms of multilingualism.

The Idea of Deafness as Disability in Renaissance Germany.

This essay assesses the degree to which the deaf were regarded as a disabled population in medical, religious, and legal thought during the Renaissance, chronologically identified with the period between approximately 1500 and 1650. The primary geographic focus rests on the German-speaking lands of central Europe. Analysis shows that the idea of deafness as a disability here was composite one, making connections between inability to hear and intellectual impairment, moral deficiency, and disease. This contrasts with recent findings elsewhere in Europe, where intellectuals were more focused on sign languages as a means of integrating the deaf into hearing society.

Redeploying a Saint: The Black Maurice and the Shifting Iconography of Blackness in Post-Reformation Germany and the Baltics

Abstract Due to the religious restrictions on imagery introduced by the Reformation, depictions of the Black African incarnation of Saint Maurice were sharply reduced and transformed in the German-speaking lands after 1530. This essay looks in detail at developments in several Saxon cities and also in the Baltic cities of Tallinn (Reval) and Riga. In Magdeburg and Halle, the focus is on secularized images of Maurice, while in Halle a little-known but vast painting replaced the Black Maurice with other Black characters more closely tied to the Bible. In the Baltic cities, the Black Maurice was in a complicated relationship with the heraldry of the Black Heads merchant guilds; only in the last few centuries has a secular version of the Black Maurice fully reappeared.

Medieval Manuscripts at Loyola University Chicago

Abstract: This article provides a summary overview of the collection of pre-1600 western European manuscripts in Loyola University Chicago Archives & Special Collections. The collection presently comprises four manuscript codices, at least thirty-eight fragments, and four documents. The codices are a thirteenth-century book of hours from German-speaking lands; a fifteenth-century Dutch prayer book; a preacher's compilation written probably in southern Germany in the 1440s; and two fifteenth-century Italian humanist booklets, bound together since the nineteenth century, transmitting Donatus's commentary on the Eunuchus (incomplete) and an anthology of theological excerpts, respectively. The fragments consist of thirteen leaves from books dismembered by modern booksellers (most are from fifteenth-century books of hours) and a larger number of binding fragments, all but two of which remain in situ. These represent the remains of ten manuscript books: four Latin liturgical books, two texts of Roman civil law, one large-format thirteenth-century Italian Bible, one thirteenth-century copy of Ptolemy's Almagest in the translation of Gerard of Cremona, one late fourteenth-century copy of the Ockhamist Tractatus de principiis theologiae , and one fifteenth-century Dutch book of hours in the translation of Geert Grote. Many of these materials have remained unidentified until now.

Introduction: sacralisation in early modern Europe

ABSTRACT Did early modern European states make themselves sacred? The historian Paolo Prodi insisted that they did, whereas for the philosopher Giorgio Agamben sacred and secular power were so indistinguishable that the question was moot. This group of articles seeks to explain and explore the approaches of these two accomplished Italian scholars to the problem of early modern sacralisation. This introduction reviews the context in which Prodi and Agamben worked, sketches brief biographies, and describes the arguments that they advanced which are most relevant to early modern history. Their work emerged from the debate on secularisation in the German-speaking lands, the confessionalisation thesis as it was advanced by German historians of Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Catholic Reform, and twentieth-century Catholic thought about the relationship between religion and totalitarian states. Both Prodi and Agamben belonged to traditions that sat at an angle to the liberalism that underpins historical and philosophical thought in the English-speaking world.

Premodern Germany and the teleology of economic history

Premodern Germany and the teleology of economic history

Charlemagne in Medieval German and Dutch Literature

Charlemagne in Medieval German and Dutch Literature

Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, by Kira Thurman

<i>Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms</i>, by Kira Thurman

K otázce vývoje a rozšíření pokliček a tzv. pokliček-misek v keramických okruzích střední Evropy ve středověku / Zur Frage der Entwicklung und Verbreitung von Deckeln und sogenannten Deckeln-Schüsseln in den mitteleuropäischen Keramikkreisen im Mittelalter

On the Issue of the Development and Spread of Lids and “Lid-Bowls” in the Pottery Circles of Medieval Central Europe&lt;/strong&gt; The emergence and development of lids in the Czech lands in the 12th–14th century was part of the transformation of central European pottery. At the beginning of this process was a vessel with domestic origins and for which on the general level we cannot rule out a dual function – the “lid/bowl”. A variety of types of lids are encountered during the 13th century and their origins can be traced to the neighbouring German-speaking lands. The basic types of lids took shape in the 10th–12th century in south Germany, from where they spread around Bohemian-Moravian territory, where they arrived during the 13th century from neighbouring lands. In outlying areas (Austria, Saxony), the number of types was reduced to one or two main forms, which were also used the most in the Czech lands. It appears that lids emerged from the need to improve the process of food preparation. In several border areas and trade centres inclusive Prague, the transformation led from the late 12th century to the beginning of the 13th century to the advent of a specific habit and hybrid identity in the population that was also reflected in some components of material culture, including ceramics. Innovation in the field of ceramics took two main forms, and, among other things, the end of the transformation process in ceramics in the 14th century led to the predominance of bell-shaped lids throughout Bohemia and Moravia.

A musical farewell in bi-confessional early modern Austria

Abstract Music of the Protestant Reformation continues to be of enduring interest to scholars and performers, and recent research has drawn attention to the complex bi-and tri-confessional landscape of German-speaking lands in the 16th and 17th centuries. However, the topic of music and Protestantism in early modern Austrian lands has remained little researched. This article examines the funeral motet for the nobleman Ludwig II von Polheim from 1608, in the context of printed Lutheran funeral sermons and the anti-Catholic propaganda of the large-scale fresco at Parz Castle in Upper Austria. A close reading of the motet suggests music’s key role in the expression of religious doctrine, the negotiation of denominational identity, and the battle for souls in bi-confessional early modern Austria.

Exploring the Rebirth of a Chronicle: Why Robert the Monk's Historia Iherosolimitana Gained New Life in the Fifteenth Century

The chronicle of Robert the Monk is a well-known source for the First Crusade and the most copied First Crusade narrative in the Middle Ages. Though the number of copies decreased after the twelfth century, it increased in the fifteenth, with most of these later copies either being preserved in German-speaking lands or originating from there. It is possible that a First Crusade narrative was needed in fifteenth-century German-speaking lands because of their proximity to the struggle against the Ottomans, and the chronicle of Robert the Monk was the only one widely available for copying.

Inventer l’acteur. Émotions et spectacle dans l’Europe des lumières by Laurence Marie

Reviewed by: Inventer l’acteur. Émotions et spectacle dans l’Europe des lumières by Laurence Marie Jeffrey S. Ravel Laurence Marie, Inventer l’acteur. Émotions et spectacle dans l’Europe des lumières (Paris: Sorbonne université presses, 2019). Pp 477; 25 color illus. €26 paper. This admirable book provides a panoramic view of changes in acting theory in western and central Europe from the mid-eighteenth century into the early-nineteenth century. Laurence Marie focuses primarily on printed treatises on acting theory during this period, supplemented by contemporary assessments [End Page 406] of celebrity actors. The major strength of this work, particularly in the context of increasingly transnational approaches to Enlightenment Studies, is that it does not focus exclusively on one national context. English and French-language texts and English and French-speaking actors play the leads in the story Marie tells, but there is also important material from the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire, from the Italian peninsula, and, to a lesser extent, from Spain. Juxtaposing developments in these various areas over two generations suggests new perspectives on the stages of the Enlightenment and the Revolutionary period at the end of the century. Marie’s tale begins around 1750, when new assessments of acting styles began to appear in several European languages. These texts shared a common, innovative insight: critics and audiences were increasingly attentive to the physical aspects of stage representation, as opposed to the oratorical and declamatory styles of acting they had previously valued. In other words, pantomime, tableaux, and the embodiment of the dramatic text by stage performers were now appreciated as much or more than the recitation of printed theatrical texts. These issues famously led to debates among French theorists and critics about the nature of theatrical representation. Did actors truly experience the emotions they portrayed on stage, or did they coolly, rationally simulate them? In other words, were they faking it, and if so, was that desirable from a moral and technical point of view? Marie demonstrates that theorists in England and across the continent considered this issue, often drawing their examples from the performances of leading players in London, Paris, Berlin, Venice, and elsewhere. Furthermore, performers such as David Garrick, Henri Lekain, Michel Sticotti, and Conrad Eckhof traveled broadly during the period. They performed in many public, private, and courtly venues across the continent, engaging with authors, audiences, and critics in ways that led to evolution in acting styles. In a second phase of her story, beginning roughly in the 1780s and continuing into the first decades of the 1800s, theorists and performers moved beyond earlier questions of corporality on the stage to assess the ability of actors to evoke notions of beauty based in nature. Some critics advocated for the “beautiful,” or beau idéal, over a “truthful” replication of reality, while others looked to painting, sculpture, or music for representational techniques that might be adapted to the stage. Some even urged a return to the oratorical model of the pre-1750 period, wagering that words themselves were still sufficiently evocative to sustain the theatrical illusion. Throughout, Marie insists that there was no single, triumphant mode of theatrical representation that satisfied all audiences and critics, nor should there have been for an art form as closely allied with lived experience as the stage. Different modes emerged at different times and places in a dynamic, dialectical process that suited the most widespread form of public entertainment in the eighteenth century. In her conclusion, Marie sums up her investigation by reminding us of the general movement from theatrical imitation to artistic expression. It was a trend that increasingly shifted emphasis from the author to the player, and from the reader to the spectator. In this newly emerging performative space, players became celebrities, as Antoine Lilti has demonstrated elsewhere, and paying spectators with particular political, social, and cultural agendas became more important arbiters of nightly performances.1 In a coda, Marie provocatively asserts that modern debates about the merits of realism versus illusion in the theater, and about acting techniques, first took shape in the period she has studied. This book, as important as it is in advancing our transnational understanding...

Elucidating the Nexus between the Gospels, Exegesis, and the Visitatio sepulchri in the German-Speaking Lands

In the German-speaking lands, the Easter Sunday liturgy and the Gospels of the Resurrection inspired two distinct traditions of the Visitatio sepulchri (The Visit of the Sepulcher). In this fully sung rite, commonly referred to as a liturgical drama, clerics or monastics reenacted the Marys’ visit to Christ’s abandoned tomb at Easter Sunday Matins. This article demonstrates how the differences among the four evangelists’ Resurrection accounts posed hermeneutic challenges for medieval Christians and affected the development of the Visitatio sepulchri in the German-speaking lands. I argue that the creators of type-one German Visitationes skillfully compiled preexisting liturgical chants with texts that quoted Matthew’s and Mark’s accounts to create Resurrection narratives that complemented the Resurrection account read at Easter Sunday Matins. By contrast, type-two Visitationes employed mostly newly composed chants with texts that drew together details, wording, and events from the four Resurrection accounts into one unified narrative. Type-two Visitationes began circulating in the twelfth century, the period when Hugh of St. Victor was imploring exegetes and students to scrutinize the historical details of scripture. This renewed interest in the literal, rather than the allegorical meaning of scripture, made the differences among the Gospels all the more apparent. I propose that the creator of the type-two Visitatio sepulchri adopted techniques from Gospel Harmonies, pedagogical works that drew together the four Gospels into one narrative, to prove that the four accounts agreed.

Zeitenwende. Notker der Deutsche (†1022). Sommerausstellung Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen 8. März bis 6. November 2022, ed. Andreas Nievergelt. Basel: Schwabe Verlag and St. Gallen: Verlag am Klosterhof, 2022, 109 pp., 31 colored images.

Abstract A brief edited volume produced for the summer exhibit of the Stiftsbibliothek St. Gall, Zeitenwende provides an introduction, two chapters Notker’s life and works, seven chapters on various topics (the cloister school, the septem artes liberales in Notker’s works, Old High German works on the former, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and Notker’s reception of the text, his Aristotelian writings, lost works, and his psalter and psalm commentaries), and a postscript on Notker’s elevation of the German lan­guage, followed by endnotes and a manuscript catalogue. The exhibit of manuscripts commemorates the millennium anniversary of Notker’s death and seeks to contextualize his contributions to local, areal (the German-speaking lands), and European thought and learning at the nexus of the vernacular and Latin, particularly from the perspectives of translation, didacticism, and commentary. Thirty-one unnumbered, full-color figures depict manuscript leaves throughout the text, most of which are printed clearly, but one, on p. 21, is illegibly blurry.

Die Erfindung der Aufklärung

Compared to movements elsewhere in Western Europe, the German Enlightenment is considered a latecomer and a fairly non-combative one at that. Using methods from the historiography of concepts, images, and metaphors, this article shows that a conception of Aufklärung as a form of intellectual improvement and a combative reform process emerged in the Germanspeaking lands shortly after 1700. It was decisive for the attractiveness of aufklären and Aufklärung that they found their origin in meteorological vocabulary; since the original meaning derives from the sun breaking through the clouds, the new cognitive meaning evoked visual associations that suggested an irresistible natural power of the desired reforms and a bright future. The study of the semantics and pragmatics of aufklären and Aufklärung spans from the early 17th to the mid-18th century. It is flanked by archive-supported investigations into the genesis of Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, the major lexicon of historical concepts conceived and co-edited by Reinhart Koselleck. Against Koselleck’s thesis that history can only be understood in terms of concepts, this article works with a broader basis of sources, including pre-terminological and metaphorical language use as well as programmatic images. It also inquires into influences from other languages (French, English, Latin). Finally, the reported findings are compared with Dan Edelstein’s and Antoine Lilti’s interpretations of the Enlightenment.

Translation as Conversion: Richard Wilhelm’s Bekehrung and the Bekehrter

Translation as Conversion: Richard Wilhelm’s <i>Bekehrung</i> and the <i>Bekehrter</i>

Interconfessional Implications: Printed Plainchant in the Wake of the Reformation

Abstract This article investigates the retention, reformation, and revision of plainchant in liturgical books printed in German-speaking lands during the early Reformation. Previous scholarship often considered chant in confessional and linguistic isolation, which has obscured both its importance in Protestant worship and its connections with contemporary Catholic musical trends. Writings of reformers and their followers, including Luther, Müntzer, and Spangenberg, indicate that they valued plainchant because it provided continuity, functioned pedagogically, and increased congregational unity. However, chant was subject to modification. An examination of reformed sources connected to Allstedt, Erfurt, and Nordhausen demonstrates how plainchant was adopted and adapted to reflect shifting priorities. Analyses of modified alleluia chants in Protestant and Catholic books reveal similarities and differences in techniques of revision. The formation of new musical traditions is delineated, as well as their intertwined relationships with the musical past, present, and future. These interconfessional findings provide new perspectives on early modern chant and liturgies.