Late Medieval German Research Articles

Stabreimende Wortpaare in der deutschen Lyrik des späten Mittelalters

Abstract A valuable collection of late medieval German poetry contains a number of known and new alliterating word-pairs, here surveyed and analyzed for the first time. While reaching beyond the medieval German period covered by earlier studies, it helps complete the survey of German literature approaching the mid-thirteenth century, and provides evidence up until circa 1500.

The Rise and Fall of Dynasties as Reflected in Late Medieval German Literature: Melusine, Fortunatus, and Huge Scheppel

The Rise and Fall of Dynasties as Reflected in Late Medieval German Literature: Melusine, Fortunatus, and Huge Scheppel

:Heresy and Citizenship: Persecution of Heresy in Late Medieval German Cities

:<i>Heresy and Citizenship: Persecution of Heresy in Late Medieval German Cities</i>

Heresy and Citizenship: Persecution of Heresy in Late Medieval German Cities by Eugene Smelyansky (review)

Heresy and Citizenship: Persecution of Heresy in Late Medieval German Cities by Eugene Smelyansky (review)

A New Focus on Cityscapes in Late Medieval German Literature: Rudolf von Ems and Heinrich Kaufringer

Historians have studied the medieval city from many different perspectives already, and even literary historians have endeavoured to identify the evidence in fictional texts pertaining to urban spaces and figures. In many cases, however, the cities as they emerge before our eyes are rather imaginary or dream-like, and lack in historical specificity. This situation changed, as this article demonstrates, with the case of Rudolf von Ems’s Der guote Gêrhart (ca. 1220) and the verse narratives by Heinrich Kaufringer (ca. 1400). This study examines the data we can cull from both sides and presents it as the crucial indicator for the emergence of a new literary discourse dedicated to the world of late medieval cities. We begin to discover, though not yet in any consistent way, the formation of urban protagonists and of narrative contexts that are predicated on urban settings.

Дитина і дитинство у німецькому місті XIV-XV ст.

The purpose of the article is to study the characteristic features and typologi- cal regularities of a child’s position and attitude to childhood in the bourgeois environment of German cities of the XIV-XV centuries. Th e methodological basis of the research is based on the principles of historicism and objectivity. Analytical, problem-chronological, comparative, and systemic methods have been used during the research. Th e scientifi c novelty is justifi ed by the comprehensive involvement of sources and historiography that highlight the situation of children and childhood in a German city of the XIV-XV centuries, as well as the need to supp- lement domestic research on this topic. Conclusions. During the late Middle Ages, changes in the perception of a child and childhood took place, particularly in the cities of Germany in the XIV-XV centuries. Such elements of previous centuries as the involvement of children in work before their physical maturity and the opportunity to master the profession of their own parents are still relevant for the German burgher community of the late Middle Ages. At the same time, German cities are beginning to introduce obstetric rules that regulate the acceptance of child- birth and control the process of childbirth. In the second half of the XV century, parents’ attitude towards their off spring changed: children are beginning to be seen as potential guardians of their parents in their old age, as well as helpers in their professional activities. Orphanages begin to appear in Augsburg, Esslingen, Munich, Nuremberg, etc. Conventional traditional division of the stages of childhood, which was widespread in late medieval Germany, in particular in cit- ies, consisted of three periods: the fi rst – from 6 to 7 years, the second – from 7 to 14 years, the third – from 14 years and older. Such terms denoted these stages as “infantia” (“childhood”), “pueritia” (“youth”), and “adolescentia” (“adolescence”), respectively. Illegitimate children had a special status in a late medieval German city: access to craft s was closed to them, as well as the possibility of obtaining a position in the city council. Th e period when a child could already be involved in work depended on general ideas about physical maturation. Usually, children’s capacity for work began at the age of 8, when they could partially engage in the same activities as adults. Th e age at which parents stop caring for their children is directly correlated with their off spring marrying or having their own children.

Heresy and Citizenship: Persecution of Heresy in Late Medieval German Cities. Eugene Smelyansky. Studies in Medieval History and Culture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. xii + 186 pp. $52.95.

Heresy and Citizenship: Persecution of Heresy in Late Medieval German Cities. Eugene Smelyansky. Studies in Medieval History and Culture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. xii + 186 pp. $52.95.

Magdalena’s gulden letanien

Abstract In contrast to the other works of the fifteenth-century mystic Magdalena of Freiburg, her Golden Litany was heavily copied in Germany and the Low Countries in the late Middle Ages. Despite its popularity, this meditative prayer on the Passion has not yet been studied. This article attempts to fill this gap. It offers a full survey of the transmitted manuscripts of the text and aims to provide insight into its distribution in the late medieval German and Dutch language areas. The prayer is discussed in the context of contemporaneous literary and religious traditions. In this way, the article attempts to explain why a southern German text was so popular in the Low Countries, especially in the circles of the Devotio Moderna.

A pan-European art trade in the late middle ages: Isotopic evidence on the master of Rimini enigma.

The identity of artists and localisation of workshops are rarely known with certainty before the mid-15th century. We investigated the material used by one of the most prolific and enigmatic medieval sculptors, the Master of the Rimini Altarpiece or Master of Rimini, active around 1420–40. The isotope fingerprints (Sr, S and O) of a representative corpus of masterpieces but also minor artworks, attributed to the Master of Rimini and his workshop, are virtually identical, demonstrating the unity of the corpus and a material evidence behind the stylistic and iconographic ascriptions. The material used is exclusively Franconian (N-Bavarian) alabaster, 600 km distant from the supposed zone of activity of the Master of Rimini workshop according to recent literature. The same material was later used by the prominent Late Medieval German carver Tilman Riemenschneider, active in Würzburg after 1483, whose small corpus of alabaster sculptures we have been able to characterize almost entirely. Based on these findings, we propose here an alternative to the prevailing hypothesis of a Flemish or N-French workshop being founded on similarities of the Rimini sculpture with motives in Flemish and French painting. Our scenario, returning to the initial proposal of a German localisation of the Master of Rimini workshop, assumes the migration of an artist, perhaps trained in the Low Countries or strongly inspired by the Flemish art, to Southern Germany where he founded a highly productive export workshop, well situated on the crossroads of medieval trade, with a pan-European radiance. This study sheds a spotlight on the on the trade networks of luxury goods, the raw material used for their production, and the high-end art market in Europe as well as on international migration of artists and styles, at the eve of the Renaissance.

Ulrich Bonerius - A Swiss-German Boccaccio?

The Dominican Priest from Bern, Ulrich Bonerius, composed his collection of fables, Der Edelstein, at exactly the same time when Boccaccio created his collection of tales, Decameron, 1350. Even though there is no direct evidence of any kind of personal contacts between these two poets, the strong similarities between both works in formal and conceptual terms prove to be striking. This article illustrates the reasons why we would be justified to call Bonerius, more than just playfully, a German-language Boccaccio, since he created the first major compilation of narratives (in verse), framed by a prologue and an epilogue, in the history of late medieval German literature. While Boccaccio has ten story-tellers entertain each other over ten days (ten stories per day = 100) reflecting on eroticism, love, adventures, or anti-clericalism, Bonerius offers one hundred didactic fables illustrating human failings, shortcomings, and vices. Both contemporaries thus aimed at criticizing and improving their society through surprisingly similar literary means. Bonerius thus emerges as one of the most important fourteenth-century poets in the German tongue who deserves to be placed close to Boccaccio.

Anachronism as a Means of Critical Pedagogy: Late Medieval German Verse Narratives as Tools of Social, Ethical, and Spiritual Investigations in Matters of Love

Throughout time, love, sexuality, and marriage have mattered centrally in all of literature, and hence all of&lt;br /&gt; human existence. Although there seems to be an endless number of relevant guidebooks, counselors, and advisors&lt;br /&gt; who promise to help us navigate through the world of love, the real learning process in that regard begins within&lt;br /&gt; ourselves in direct confrontation with society or other individuals. Love is always dialogic. Late medieval (German)&lt;br /&gt; literature proves to be one of the most useful strategies in dealing with those powerful issues, perhaps surprisingly&lt;br /&gt; and certainly refreshingly. As this article illustrates through a close analysis of a sample of texts by three meaningful&lt;br /&gt; but also unusual poets, the study of those poems makes available a significant body of messages about human&lt;br /&gt; nature, and thus about virtues and vices. Love can hardly be imagined without some pain, struggle, and a sense&lt;br /&gt; of utopia, and these German poets, in close parallel with their European contemporaries, can thus be recognized as&lt;br /&gt; great inspirators for continuing the discourse on love even today.

The Defense of the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century: Communication in the Literary Laboratory with a Focus on the Verse Narratives by Heinrich Kaufringer

Many times, even scholars in the Humanities do not know how to deal with literature because they work only in the field of language acquisition, linguistics, or other data-driven study areas. Not surprisingly, when the issue emerges how to explain and to defend the Humanities, the literary areas seem to be the first on the chopping block. On the one hand, we can certainly argue that there is a specific literary canon that provides the readers/students with a sense of cultural identity and history. On the other hand, it seems more significant and effective to consider literature from whatever period or written in whatever language as a kind of laboratory of human behavior. The fictional framework makes it possible to experiment with unique types of situations in human life, often in an extreme fashion, which facilitates, as any scientist working in a lab would confirm, the critical analysis without too many outside distractions. The present paper argues that we can learn much about human communication through the study of literary texts. This finds an excellent illustration in the works of the late medieval German poet Heinrich Kaufringer (ca. 1400), in whose verse narratives we encounter a plethora of various situations and conditions reflecting on ordinary cases in people’s lives, with all the shortcomings and potentials pertaining to the human language and the social community.

The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval German Prophecy. By Frances CourtneyKneupper. Pp. xii, 259. Oxford University Press, 2016. $78.00, £47.38.

The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval German Prophecy. By Frances CourtneyKneupper. Pp. xii, 259. Oxford University Press, 2016. $78.00, £47.38.

The Medieval Luther ed. by Christine Helmer

Reviewed by: The Medieval Luther ed. by Christine Helmer Mark Mattes The Medieval Luther. Edited by Christine Helmer. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020. xi + 301 pp. This volume of fifteen essays seeks to elucidate a “medieval Luther” as an alternative to the Luther envisioned by the Luther Renaissance which valued forensic justification, the primacy of the Word, and a “relational ontology” (9). Instead, Helmer seeks a Luther deeply indebted to Nominalist philosophy and to the late medieval German mysticism of Tauler. This research program highlights the continuity between the medieval and early modern eras. The book is divided into three main parts: Christology, Soteriology, and Ministry. It is not possible to comment on each essay and so I focus on those most apt to interest Lutheran Quarterly readers. In contrast to Reinhard Schwarz, David Luy shows that Luther’s Christology is no dynamic mixture between the divine and human in Christ, as opposed to a metaphysical, static approach. Instead, Luther’s view is continuous with the scholastic theory of suppositional carrying, which means that while most human natures subsist of themselves and do not depend on an alien suppositum, the humanity of Christ instead uniquely receives its concrete individual existence from the divine suppositum of the Word which carries it (16–17). In other words, Christ is a divine suppositum that also happens to carry a human nature. God the Son has always been simply a divine person but now he happens to sustain a human nature [End Page 356] through an extrinsic causal relation (19). For Luy, this view best accords with Luther’s late Christological disputations. Echoing Luy, Richard Cross draws out the implications of Luther’s view of suppositional union with respect to the assumption, namely, that Luther teaches divine possibility. He notes that Luther denies that Christ’s human sufferings can be ascribed to Christ’s divinity in some way distinct from that in which they are ascribed to his person (27): “Luther . . . explicitly denies that the properties of one nature can be attributed to the other. Indeed, the discussion presupposes that anything ascribed to the divinity here is ascribed to all three persons. So when Luther talks about attributing things to a nature, what he means is to talk about attributing things to a person in or under a nature” (33). Aaron Moldenhauer challenges the notion that Luther taught that words are efficacious in the modern sense of performative. Instead, Luther, similar to Aquinas, sees words as effective when they are spoken according to God’s command and in the person of Christ (49). Such efficacious words still signify the realities to which they refer. Counter to Zwingli, Luther sees words as effective in the sacraments by means of an act of God’s will or command (59). Also writing on the sacraments, the late Marilyn McCord Adams notes that, for Luther, since Christ’s humanity is united to God the Son in hypostatic union, then Christ’s humanity is wherever Christ’s divinity is. Since divinity is everywhere, so in God the Son Christ’s humanity can be everywhere. Even so, she sees Luther’s affirmation of the ubiquity of Christ’s body to be “overkill” (87), since, as medieval scholastics would have noted, Luther’s theory of ubiquity is not necessary for Christ to be really present at many altars wherever the sacrament is observed. Alice Chapman presents the medieval imagery of Christ as a physician and shows that Luther too affirmed that sin is a sickness and that Christ is the physician who heals us (123). Likewise, Candace Kohli shows that in his fight against the Antinomians, Luther advocated an increase in righteousness and a decrease in sin, indeed an active resistance to sin and a kind of purgation through which Christians establish a formal righteousness which begins to fulfill the law in the Spirit through good behavior (127). [End Page 357] Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen draws on the nuptial imagery prevalent in Luther’s bridal mysticism, the happy exchange between Christ and the believer which “means that humans are called to show love and serve in love, love of neighbor. Since God is nothing but love, pouring it abundantly into us...

German-Italian Literary Connections in the Late Middle Ages: Boccaccio’sThe Decameronin Light of Some Late Medieval German Narrative Precedents

AbstractComparative research focused on medieval literature continues to be characterized by many desiderata, especially with regard to the fruitful relationships between late medieval verse narratives,mæren, and the famous Italian storyteller Boccaccio and hisDecameron. This paper brings to light four significant Middle High German verse narratives from the 13thor early-14thcentury that demonstrate remarkable similarities with stories contained in Boccaccio’sDecameron. While the study of Boccaccio’s sources has traditionally been focused primarily on Old French (fabliaux) or Latin sources, here I introduce a number of texts that were composed just a few decades earlier and which express, in surprising parallel, strikingly similar themes that could be straight from the textbook the Italian poet might have drawn from. We have, of course, no specific evidence as to Boccaccio’s direct familiarity with late-medieval German literature, but the motif analysis reveals major parallels between the examples inThe Decameronand in thosemæren.

‘Hearing the Inner Word’: The Eckhartian Roots of Radical Dissent and ‘Enthusiasm’

ABSTRACT This paper will focus on the progenitorial influence of Meister Eckhart’s mystical thought and its theological and historiographical legacy vis-à-vis his own writings and those of his disciples, Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso, including the mystical treatises influenced by them, the Theologia Deutsch among them. It will contextualize the intrigue with late-medieval German mysticism among sixteenth-century ‘radical’ reformers, who ironically have been called the ‘unruly offspring of Luther.’ In particular, it will provide a succinct overview of how the constellation of mystical teachings integral to Eckhart’s theology of the Word were selectively appropriated by radicals and ‘Spiritualists’ like Thomas Müntzer, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Sebastian Franck, Valentin Weigel and others who reconceptualized and prioritized the authority of the Inner Word over the Outer Word. Because they confused the proper ordering of external and internal divine revelation, many of them were condemned and vilified by Luther as Schwärmer (‘enthusiasts’) ─as if ‘swarmed’ by bees.

СИНТАКСИЧЕСКИЕ ТРАНСФОРМАЦИИ В ПОЗДНЕСРЕДНЕВЕКОВЫХ НЕМЕЦКИХ ПЕРЕВОДАХ С ЛАТИНСКОГО ЯЗЫКА (Вильгельм из Сен-Тьерри и Бригитта Шведская)

СИНТАКСИЧЕСКИЕ ТРАНСФОРМАЦИИ В ПОЗДНЕСРЕДНЕВЕКОВЫХ НЕМЕЦКИХ ПЕРЕВОДАХ С ЛАТИНСКОГО ЯЗЫКА (Вильгельм из Сен-Тьерри и Бригитта Шведская)

Masculinity and Prostitution in Late Medieval German Literature

Masculinity and Prostitution in Late Medieval German Literature

Shipping Fools: Foucault’s Wandering Madman and Civic Responsibility in Late Medieval Germany

Abstract Few aspects of Michel Foucault’s seminal study The History of Madness have been more widely derided and debunked than Foucault’s assertion that medieval mad persons sailed the rivers of Europe as a kind of real-world counterpart to the literary and artistic trope of the ship of fools. But while Foucault was not correct in many of his assumptions, he also was not entirely wrong to draw attention to the river. Based on archival research in Nuremberg, Munich, and Frankfurt, this article offers a critical insight into how some medieval cities managed their problematic mad. In particular, it uncovers the widespread and little-understood practice of expelling the mad from late medieval German towns. It argues that the practice of expulsion was multilayered, ranging from relatively benign trips to convey a mad person back home, to official banishments of criminal mad men and women. It finds that most of the expelled mad, however, were simply sent away, out of the city walls and away from municipal responsibility. These expulsions appear frequently in fifteenth-century records and reveal that one particular kind of route was preferred by cities in Southern Germany: the river. In fact, municipal leaders routinely used the Danube, the Isar, and the Main rivers as the best way to rid their towns of difficult or friendless mad persons. While such river journeys did not take place on “ships of fools,” the river was thus a critical and meaningful part of the geographic and cultural landscapes of madness.

Contracting love versus courtly love: Jans Enikel’s “Friedrich von Auchenfurt,” the anonymous Mauritius von Craûn, and Dietrich von der Gletze’s “Der Borte”

A surprisingly large number of late medieval German verse narratives are deeply occupied with conflicts in love due to the commodifying nature of the relationship established by the male wooer or his beloved lady. Instead of pursuing love in accordance with the ideals and norms of courtly culture, in these texts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we observe that suddenly contracts are set up either to force the woman to grant her body to the wooer, or to block the lover from imposing himself upon the lady. Late medieval poets such as Jans Enikel, the anonymous author of Mauritius von Craun, or Dietrich von der Gletze/Glezze present increasingly problematic cases where love is substituted by contractual conditions, bartering, and exchange commercializing and perverting the erotic aspect altogether.