TEAMS Medieval German Texts in Bilingual Editions

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  Neidhart: Selected Songs from the Riedegg Manuscript: Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, mgf 1062

  Kathryn Starkey and Edith Wenzel

  The medieval German poet called Neidhart is one of the most important poets of his time. Set in the village among peasant maidens and their boorish male counterparts, Neidhart's satirical songs stand in marked contrast to courtly love song and enrich our understanding of medieval literary culture. This book presents for the first time annotated English translations of a substantial collection of songs attributed to this prolific poet. Its source is the thirteenth-century Riedegg manuscript, the oldest extensive collection of songs attributed to Neidhart. This book presents a representative survey of the songs in order to make this material accessible to a broad audience of students and scholars of medieval studies.

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  Ladies, Whores, and Holy Women: A Sourcebook in Courtly, Religious, and Urban Cultures of Late Medieval Germany

  Ann Marie Rasmussen and Sarah Westphal-Wihl

  This sourcebook presents editions and translations of seven fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts that advance our understanding of gender, sexuality, and class in the late medieval German-speaking world. Three of the translated texts are fiction. Additionally, there is a religious treatise, a religious legend, an inventory of books, and a legal document. While each of these texts is instructive in and of itself, they gain in complexity when brought into dialogue with one another.

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  Der Welsche Gast (The Italian Guest)

  Marion Gibbs

  Friedrich Neumann described Thomasin's Der Welsche Gast as a linguistic phenomenon without comparison within the corpus of German literature of the Hohenstaufen period. In the didactic literature of the time, Der Welsche Gast does indeed occupy a unique position. . . . [It] betrays the heavy hand of the clerical moralist who moves from providing the younger members of his audience with a primer for proper social etiquette in his early verses to a meticulous analysis of what he clearly viewed as the appropriate ethical code for the nobility of his time, often presented against the backdrop of a thundering condemnation of the state of contemporary affairs. . . . [T]he work remains a remarkable product of an important period in German literature and indeed in medieval European culture; it may be argued with considerable justification that Der Welsche Gast is the most significant didactic work of the German High Middle Ages. Unique in its own time, yet apparently valued by Thomasin's contemporaries and immediately succeeding generations, it belongs very much to its own age, yet, like so much of the literature of the German Middle Ages, it touches chords in the modern reader which cannot and should not be ignored.

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  History as Literature

  Graeme Dunphy

  This volume presents excerpts and translations of three thirteenth-century South German verse chronicles: Rudolf von Ems's Weltchronik, the anonymous Christherre-Chronik, and the Weltchronik of Jans Enikel. These three works are close in language, in date, and in conception, yet they also differ significantly, representing the perspectives of three distinct sections of medieval society: courtly, monastic, and urban. The excerpts have been chosen from the beginning of Rudolf's chronicle, the middle of the Christherre-Chronik and the end of Enikel, so that taken together they give something of an impression of the chroniclers' arrangement of material in a continuum from the beginning to the end of history.

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  Ava's New Testament Narratives: "When the Old Law Passed Away"

  James A. Rushing Jr.

  Ava is the first woman whose name we know who wrote in German. She wrote her poem - or poems - on the lives of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ sometime early in the twelfth century, no later than 1127. It seems certain that she was a layperson, and her work reflects a level of learning that raises all sorts of interesting questions about the education of the laity, especially the education of lay woman, and about the nature of authorship in the Middle Ages, generally and particularly in medieval Germany.

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  Sovereignty and Salvation in the Vernacular, 1050-1150: Das Ezzolied, Das Annolied, Die Kaiserchronik, vv. 247-667, Das Lob Salomons, Historia Judith

  James A. Schultz

  These texts will be of interest because they represent a kind of writing - at the intersection of ecclesiastical and secular power, drawing on the whole range of medieval Latin learning, yet written in vernacular verse - that is not found elsewhere in the European Middle Ages. In addition, they may be of use in teaching since, although relatively short, they illustrate a great number of characteristic medieval ways of writing and can be linked to a number of quite remarkable historical figures.