The subject of the volume is the Jena Manuscript, created around 1350 and restored in 2008, the most important manuscript for the transmission of German Sangspruchdichtung and its melodies. The volume contains contributions on the restoration itself, on questions of the location of the manuscript in linguistic and literary history, on the arrangement of the codex and it notation practice. In addition, it documents those manuscript fragments which research has connected with the history of the genesis of the Jena Manuscript on the basis of the stage of their linguistic development and the texts they contain.

This volume assembles the findings of the 14th Anglo-German colloquium on German medieval literature. The 22 contributions all revolve around the subject of "Author and Authorship," a theme very much in the foreground of discussion in present-day medieval literary studies. Most of the articles are case studies and draw on texts from the whole gamut of German medieval literature to discuss such issues as the relation between performance, textuality and authorship, the functional status of author's names and author's pictures in manuscript traditions, a historically adequate concept of authorship, the various roles played by authors and the specific profiles these roles display in different genres.