Die Chrétien- und Wolfram-Überlieferung des Perceval-/Parzival-Romans und ihre textkritische Erschließung

This paper discusses the manuscript transmission of Chrétien’s Roman de Perceval ou le Conte du Graal and Wolfram’s Parzival in terms of their textual tradition and editorial criticism. It shows that the most recent edition of the Old French Perceval (K. Busby 1993) can be viewed as a landmark of the art of conventional editing that appeared at the peak of the discussion of ‘New Philology’ and took its own position in this context. At the same time, the Perceval was subject of critical studies based on the principle of ‘unrooted trees’ that questioned the genealogical concept of traditional ‘Lachmannian’ stemmatology. Conversely, a new edition of Wolfram’s Parzival, based on all known manuscripts, remained a desideratum for decades in German studies. Specific research on the textual tradition played a rather marginal role for a long time, but has been reinforced in the recent years in the context of a new critical edition presenting the totality of manuscripts as well as different textual versions in electronic form. The concept of ‘unrooted trees’ visualizing relationships of manuscript readings can be integrated in this concept. The article gives an overview of these methods, presents examples of editorial techniques, and develops ideas on how to combine the research on the manuscript tradition of both the German text and its French counterpart.

Agat‘angełos

The Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle brings together the latest research in chronicle studies from a variety of disciplines and scholarly traditions. Chronicles are the history books written and read in educated circles throughout Europe and the Middle East in the Middle Ages. For the modern reader, they are important as sources for the history they tell, but equally they open windows on the preoccupations and self-perceptions of those who tell it. Interest in chronicles has grown steadily in recent decades, and the foundation of a Medieval Chronicle Society in 1999 is indicative of this. Indeed, in many ways the Encyclopedia has been inspired by the emergence of this Society as a focus of the interdisciplinary chronicle community. The Encyclopedia fills an important gap especially for historians, art historians and literary scholars. It is the first reference work on medieval chronicles to attempt this kind of coverage of works from Europe, North Africa and the Middle East over a period of twelve centuries. 2564 entries and 65 illustrations describe individual anonymous chronicles or the historical oeuvre of particular chroniclers, covering the widest possible selection of works written in Latin, English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Norse, Irish, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Syriac, Church Slavonic and other languages. Leading articles give overviews of genres and historiographical traditions, and thematic entries cover particular features of medieval chronicles and such general issues as authorship and patronage, as well as questions of art history. Textual transmission is emphasized, and a comprehensive manuscript index makes a useful contribution to the codicology of chronicles.

Social milieus and worldviews in Mamluk adab-encyclopedias: The example of poverty and wealth

The economic and cultural rise of parts of the ʿāmma due to the particular economic and infrastructural conditions of the Mamluk era fostered the emergence of new intermediate levels of literature that were situated between the literature of the elite and that of the utterly ignorant and unlettered populace, between the Arabic koiné (al-ʿarabīya al-fuṣḥā) and the local dialects (ʿāmmīya-s), between written and oral composition, performance and transmission. The paper proposes to analyze the composition of three Mamluk adab-encyclopedias and their treatment of poverty and wealth in light of the social milieus of their authors and publics.

Wie viele soll'ns sein? Gruppierung von Instrumentalwerken im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert

Die Anzahl der Werke, aus der gedruckte Sammlungen von Instrumentalwerken im 17.-18. Jh. zusammengestellt wurden sagt viel über die Wahrnehmung des einzelnen Werkes als einzigartig aus. Die Tendenz einer Verringerung und Normalisierung der Anzahl von Werken in einer Sammlung spricht zum einen für eine verstärkte Individuellisierung der Werke, zum anderen aber für eine Standardisierung der Verlagsstrategien.

Личните и географските имена в българския и сръбския превод на Стишния пролог (по материал от месец март)

The paper presents a comparative study of the personal and geographic names in the two complete Slavic translations of the Byzantine Versified Synaxarion, namely the Bulgarian and Serbian Prolog Stišnoj, which appeared around the first half of the 14 th century. On the basis of the March texts in seven South Slavic manuscripts, the differences in the rendering of the personal names are analysed on the level of phonetics, orthography, morphology and word formation. The data allow the following conclusions: 1) The differences in the forms of these names in the Bulgarian and Serbian Prolog Stišnoj give further arguments supporting their independent origin; 2) Several specific tendencies are noted which more or less differentiate them. The Bulgarian translation reproduces more accurately the graphics of the original names, allows dativus possessivus, often replaces the Greek anthroponyms and toponyms with adjectives, presents many local names in the plural, and sometimes retains Greek nominative endings in masculine personal names. The Serbian translation, on the other hand, follows more often the Byzantine pronunciation of the names, complies more strictly with their grammatical characteristics (case, number), separates more often the ending -ς from the stem, and incorporates the accusative ending -ν into the stem of certain anthroponyms several times. 3) The tendency towards Slavicisation of the personal names is nearly the same in both translations and cannot be viewed as peculiar of either of them.

New Philology and the Biogenetics of Texts

The discussion on the New Philology triggered by French and North American scholars in the last decade of the 20th century emphasized the material character of textual transmission inside and outside the written evidences of medieval manuscripts by downgrading the active role of the historical author. However, the reception of the ideas propagated by the New Philology adherents was rather divided. Some researchers considered it to be the result of an academic “crisis” (R.T. Pickens) or questioned its innovative status (K. Stackmann: “Neue Philologie?”); others appreciated the “new attitudes to the page” it had brought to mind (J. Bumke after R.H. and M.A, Rouse) or even saw a new era of the “powers of philology” evoked (H.-U. Gumbrecht). Besides the debates on the New Philology another concept of textual materiality strengthened in the last decade, maintaining that textual alterations somewhat relate to biogenetic mutations. In a matter of fact, phenomena such as genetic and textual variation, gene recombination and ‘contamination’ (the mixing of different exemplars in one manuscript text) share common features. The paper discusses to what extent the biogenetic concepts can be used for evaluating manifestations of textual production (as the approach of ‘critique génétique’ does) and of textual transmission (as the phylogenetic analysis of manuscript variation does). In this context yet the genealogical concept of stemmatology – the treelike representation of textual development abhorred by the New Philology adepts – might prove to be useful for describing the history of texts. The textual material to be analyzed will be drawn from the Parzival Project, which is currently preparing a new electronic edition of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival novel written shortly after 1200 and transmitted in numerous manuscripts up to the age of printing. Researches of the project have actually resulted in suggesting that the advanced knowledge of the manuscript transmission yields a more precise idea on the author’s own writing process.

Digital multitext editions from scratch to electronic performance. Transcription and collation routines transformed in a flexible database system

The poster demonstrates the preparatory steps of a digital multi-text edition that are abstracted from the experiences made in the Parzival Project, based at the University of Bern, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the University of Erlangen. This edition of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s German Grail novel, written shortly after 1200 and transmitted during several centuries in ca. hundred witnesses, has now been completed by more than a half of the textual corpus. As the text is transmitted in medieval manuscripts the witnesses have to be transcribed according to specific encoding rules. The transcriptions then are collated following certain ideas and concepts of how the transmission process could have developed. The transcriptions and collations finally have to be transferred to a digital edition that allows the users to explore the characteristics of single witnesses as well as the history of a text, which is delivered in variants and in different versions. A dynamically organized database offering various components and adapted to the needs of diverse user-profiles is nowadays the right tool for this purpose.

Chrétiens ›Roman de Perceval ou le Conte du Graal‹ und Wolframs ›Parzival‹. Ihre Überlieferung und textkritische Erschließung

This article discusses the manuscript transmission of Chrétien’s Roman de Perceval ou le Conte du Graal and Wolfram’s Parzival in terms of their textual tradition and editorial criticism. It shows that the most recent edition of the Old French Perceval (K. Busby 1993) can be viewed as a landmark of the art of conventional editing that appeared at the peak of the discussion of ‘New Philology’ and took its own position in this context. At the same time, the Perceval was subject of critical studies based on the principle of ‘unrooted trees’ that questioned the genealogical concept of traditional ‘Lachmannian’ stemmatology. Conversely, a new edition of Wolfram’s Parzival, based on all known manuscripts, remained a desideratum for decades in German studies. Specific research on the textual tradition played a rather marginal role for a long time, but has been reinforced in the recent years in the context of a new critical edition presenting the totality of manuscripts as well as different textual versions in electronic form. The concept of ‘unrooted trees’ visualizing relationships of manuscript readings can be integrated in this concept. The article gives an overview of these methods, presents examples of editorial techniques, and develops ideas on how to combine the research on the manuscript tradition of both the German text and its French counterpart.

Contrasts, Contacts, and Interconnections — Tel Kinrot as an Early Iron Age Key Site in the Northern Jordan Rift Valley at the Dawn of the 1st Millennium BCE

Ancient Kinneret (Tēl Kinrōt [Hebrew]; Tell el-ʿOrēme [Arabic]) is located on a steep limestone hill on the northwestern shores of the Sea of Galilee (2508.7529 [NIG]). The site, whose settlement history began sometime during the Pottery-Neolithic or the early Chalcolithic period, is emerging as one of the major sites for the study of urban life in the Southern Levant during the Early Iron Age (c. 1130–950 BCE). Its size, accessibility by major trade routes, and strategic location between different spheres of cultural and political influence make Tēl Kinrōt an ideal place for studying the interaction of various cultures on urban sites, as well as to approach questions of ethnicity and regionalism during one of the most debated periods in the history of the ancient Levant. The paper will briefly discuss the settlement history of the site during the Early Iron Age. However, the main focus will lie on the material culture of the late Iron Age IB city that rapidly evolved to a regional center during the transition from the 11th to the 10th century BCE. During this period, ancient Kinneret features a multitude of cultural influences that reach from Egypt via the Central Hill Country until the Northern parts of Syria and the Amuq region. While there are indisputably close ties with the ‘Aramaean’ realm, there are also strong indications that there were – at the same time – vivid socio-economic links with the West, i.e. the Southern and Northern Mediterranean coasts and their hinterland. It will be argued that the resulting ‘cultural blend’ is a typical characteristic of the material culture of the Northern Jordan Rift Valley in the advent of the emerging regional powers of the Iron Age II.

Who, When, and Why – Investigating Cultural Footprints at Early Iron Age Tel Kinrot

Ancient Kinneret (Tel Kinrot [Hebrew]; Tell el-‘Orēme [Arabic]) is located on a steep limestone hill on the northwestern shores of the Sea of Galilee (map ref. 2508.7529 [NIG]; 35.56/32.87 [WGS84]). The site, whose settlement history began sometime during the Pottery-Neolithic or the early Chalcolithic period, is emerging as one of the major sites for the study of urban life in the Southern Levant during the Early Iron Age (c. 1130–950 BCE). Its size, accessibility by major trade routes, and strategic location between different spheres of cultural and political influence make Tel Kinrot an ideal place for studying the interaction of various cultures on urban sites, as well as to approach questions of ethnicity and regionalism during one of the most debated periods in the history of the ancient Southern Levant.