The medieval court, whether that of a king, prince or bishop, and the monastery are focal points for the production of vernacular literature in the period 800-1500. The studies collected here discuss a wide range of topics, drawing also on Latin literature and the history of art, and present a conspectus of the most influential approaches to the study of medieval literature in German.

In the last few decades manuscripts have become a central object of research in all historical disciplines with an interest in the Middle Ages. Manuscripts are not only vehicles for texts and pictures, their concrete presence as objects from the past has also moved to the forefront of scholarly interest. The culture of the age of the manuscript is illuminated from a wide variety of perspectives in this volume. The spectrum encompasses restoration and archivization, representation and presence, reform programs and types of manuscript, history of music from the transmission of fragments, piety and manuscript, programmatics of picture and text, history of manuscript collections and collection profiles.

The articles assembled here discuss humanism as a concept and phenomenon in the literature of the Middle Ages and the early modern age. With reference to authors, genres, and various reception phenomena, the authors set out to identify a humanistic matrix in 15th and 16th century German literature with a view to confirming or problematizing the concept as a signature of the epoch. The suitability of the term humanism as an epistemic category is subjected to searching scrutiny and discussed against the background of a broad literary spectrum with consistent reference to interrelations with the Romance cultures and the cultural touchstone represented by Latin.

The examination of the context of medieval sermons essayed in this volume focuses on a variety of aspects: the dominant intra- and extra-literary influences, the use of literary forms and types, the adaptation of theological subject matter for proclamation from the pulpit, the influence of liturgy and audience (congregations), the interaction between word, writing and image, and not least the tensions operative in the relation between sermons in practice and their subsequent written forms. The Devotio moderna and sermons in Latin figure prominently in the overall layout. The volume also contains seven hitherto unpublished sermons, some of them in critical editions.

Paradisus anime intelligentis is the Latin name of one of the most important late medieval collections of German sermons, about half of which comprises sermons by Meister Eckhart. The studies deal with the theological programme of the sermons, the manuscripts, their transmission and processing, together with selected individual texts. The volume is completed by a study of a contiguous collection, the KAlner Klosterpredigten [Cologne Monastic Sermons].

This collective volume documents the German reception of the last novella of Boccaccio's Decameron. It is about Griselda, a poor daughter of a peasant, whom the Marquis Gualtieri marries and subsequently repudiates and humiliates in an inhumane way. Finally, after being subjected to numerous trials which she endures patiently, she is reinstated as wife and marchioness. The book explores the German reception of the Griselda figuration as gender paradigm from the Middle Ages up to the Modern Age in a European context.

The focus on inner space unites two topical areas of cultural anthropology: space as a structural paradigm, and the focal differentiation between the categories of a oeinnera and a oeoutera . The literature of medieval Germany, in staging such interior space in a variety of ways, poses questions about difference, liminality, and transgression, and thus allows abstract concepts and processes to be articulated: in a culture otherwise dominated by that which is present and visible, inner space conveys notions of psychological, cosmological or textual order.

This volume contains papers by Germanists, historians, and art historians from Germany, Austria, the United States and Canada on visual and conceptual aspects of early modern city culture ranging from representations of the city to urban spatial and social practices. The essays focus on some of the culturally most vibrant cities in early modern Europe, with special emphasis on German-speaking countries: Nuremberg, Cologne, Vienna, Ghent, Munich, Amsterdam, Florence, and Rome. The topics include the dissemination and control of city images, carnivalizing performances of social/religious dissent, narrative constraints in fifteenth-century urban historiography, Christian humanism and the controversy over Jewish books, the Carthusian influence on the spiritual topography of a city, the humanist agenda in imperial entries, the evolution of three-dimensional city models, transposing Renaissance Italian song models into a transalpine city context, and the emergence of the city views known as vedute.

Der deutschsprachige Raum verfügt über eine volkssprachliche Predigtüberlieferung, wie sie sich vor der Reformation in keinem anderen europäischen Land findet. Die in ca. 10.000 Handschriften erhaltenen Predigten in deutscher Sprache sind als ein entscheidender Faktor für den Erfolg der Reformation im deutschsprachigen Raum anzusehen. Als einziges Massenmedium des Mittelalters prägte die Predigt den 'Mindset' von Ordensgemeinschaften, religiösen Gruppierungen und vor allem auch der städtischen Gesellschaften. Hans-Jochen Schiewer zeigt mit den hier versammelten Aufsätzen, wie die volkssprachliche Predigt des Mittelalters und ihre Überlieferung zur Analyse von Wirkmechanismen von Religiosität, Spiritualität und Frömmigkeit in der Wechselwirkung mit anderen sektoralen Bereichen der Gesellschaft und somit auch zum Verständnis von Vergangenheit und Gegenwart beitragen können.