Browsing by Subject "Middle High German"
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Item The Intentional Curation of Short Verse Narratives in a Compilation Manuscript for a Medieval Audience(2022-07) Groepper, EmilyThis dissertation investigates a compilation manuscript of short verse texts from the fourteenth century, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (ÖNB), Cod. 2885. It examines the organizational structures in order to demonstrate that it is a purposefully curated collection. By analyzing individual stories and clusters of texts according to their stylistic, thematic, and linguistic features, I demonstrate that the collection is carefully constructed with a specific audience in mind. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the codex that contributes to a more detailed description of its audience. This includes an analysis of the manuscript in comparison to similar contemporary manuscripts, and it considers the inclusion of paratextual features and narrative structures. Additional focus is given to the characters within the narratives as well as the emotions expressed by those characters. This points toward how various emotions were valued or devalued and helps to build a more robust profile of the intended audience. These multiple, overlapping layers demonstrate that the manuscript’s audience consisted of both men and women with a relatively high social standing. They most likely lived in an urban environment and were familiar with biblical, Latin, and medieval German literatures. Though they may not have been part of a formal, royal court, they still aspired to hold on to the lofty ideals propagated by courtly literature. While this is a case study, it has the potential to be mapped onto other compilation manuscripts. This approach contributes to the reconstruction of the medieval reception of short verse narratives and a closer understanding of how, why, and for whom such manuscripts were produced.Item The style and structure of Minnesang.(2012-05) Oberlin, AdamThe Style and Structure of Minnesang approaches a broad corpus of the medieval German love lyric from the perspective of historical phraseology and formulaicity. Overturning previous concerns of prosodic restriction in verse and the misapplication of contemporary notions of fixity, the dissertation provides an overview of the types of phraseological units in Middle High German verse literature while distinguishing norms and deviations within the context of compositional strategies, poetic ideolects, semantics, and syntax. Alongside chapters on historical phraseology and its application in Middle High German are a comparison of the German lyric to the Old Occitan and Latin traditions as well as phraseological studies of proverbial syntactic frames and non-verbal phrasemes expressing emotion (kinnegrams). Turning to literature, in particular verse, has both countered a trend in previous scholarship by opening a new area of research and provided evidence for the different uses of phrasemes in literary contexts. The wider importance of phraseological research in Middle High German literature lies in three facets of the studies presented in this dissertation: 1) the lexical inventory and compositional strategies of Middle High German verse are inextricably tied to the phraseological elements of general formulaicity, rhetoric, and poetics, even if they are not always reflective of speech; 2) insofar as one can identify and answer questions of socio-pragmatic, non-verbal, and contextual meaning in dead languages, corpus-based phraseological analysis provides greater supporting evidence for interpretive positions than analyzing individual passages; and 3) the availability of large parsed and unparsed corpora, in conjunction with advanced search functions, provides not only frequency data and the range of variations for any given phraseme but also a more nuanced picture of the thematic and intertextual connections between genres and individual texts.