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Middle High German literature quite frequently combines moments in which time, space and self become insignificant with the experience of minne. Time and again, these moments are situated in a context which underlines that neglecting one's self is inseparably linked with neglecting the courtly community. By contrast, in Heinrichs von dem Türlin's Crone, the court of Arthur is united in forgetting (meal)time, space and oneself/one another in expectation of aventiure, which subsequently arrives in the form of an epiphany - either as the adventure itself or as its representation. This article tries to interpret the premodern concept of absorption in its relation to obliviousness as the loss of self-awareness on the one hand and anticipation as preparation of (and for) an adventure on the other hand as a secular example of .
This paper seeks to introduce the codex 1066 of the Abbey Library of St. Gall which contains a version of the Meister Eckhart sermon "Misit dominus manum suam" (Quint 53). This text was known until now through the Nuremberg manuscript Cod. Cent. VI 58 that proved to be the prototype of the St. Gall copy. With regard to the material philological aspects of the single manuscript this study focuses on the cultural context which provided the background to the genesis of the St. Gall manuscript Cod. 1066 and to the reception of the newly identified copy of the sermon version mentioned above.
When Jan-Dirk Muller puts 'performative' in the title of a much cited essay on Minnesang, he uses the word as an adjective derived from 'performance': a "performativer Selbstwiderspruch" is a contradiction that arises in performance.(1) When Margreth Egidi places the same word in the title of an essay on Sangspruchdichtung, she understands that it has a special meaning in speech-act theory. She calls Marner's invocation of the Trinity in one of his songs a "performative[r] [...] Sprechakt"(2) because, in saying something, the speaker actually does something: he is not describing but is actually making an invocation. While scholars have paid a great deal of attention to the 'performative' aspects of Minnesang in the sense that Muller uses the term, that is to the fact that these songs were created in order to be performed, they have had little to say about the 'performative' in the sense that Egidi uses the term, in the more specialized meanings that originate in speech-act theory. I am convinced, however, that important things can be learned about Minnesang by distinguishing carefully between the two and analyzing their relationship.(3)
The aim of this paper is to furnish a critical evaluation of the idea that the hallmark of mediaeval culture is metonymic thinking. It shows that we had better not describe the historical change of such modes of thinking in terms of disintegration. It seeks to clarify that metonymical ways of talking and acting should be understood with respect to the particular cultural contexts in which they arise and hold sway.
Going back to a period in History and to a field of communicative phenomena which, through the work of M. McLuhan, had been at the center of Western intellectual discussion during the nineteen sixties and seventies, this article advocates the integration of a new perspective into the praxis of literary history, which, strange as it may seem, has never been the literary historians' concern. For almost two centuries, they have been dedicating their whole attention to semantics and forms of contents, leaving behind — or just ‘looking through’ — the changing media of communication as a constitutive element for the structures, the articulation and the circulation of meaning. A survey of the history of several genres in Castilian literature at the age of the Catholic Kings is developed in order to demonstrate the profound impact which the changing media do not only exercise on meaning and its forms, but also on the functions of communicative processes and on the mentality of those who are involved in them.