In the Middle Ages and far into the Early Modern Age, "Literature" as understood by literary scholars principally functions and is characterised with reference to and in distinction from religious communication and practice. These complex relations, which change over time, are illuminated here with studies from German Medieval and Early Modern Studies and from English Studies, History, Art History, Romance Studies, Sociology, History of Theology and Church History which contribute to establishing the present-day position of cultural and literary studies.

The volume assembles articles taking an interdisciplinary perspective on problems of medieval studies research into the concept of memoria, the humanist culture of memoria, and remembrance as thematized in recent and contemporary literature. The studies focus first on two major topics: a) the problem of what is meant by 'cultural memory', how it ties in with identity, and the way this concept has changed through the ages; and b) fictionality. The rest of the volume is given over to a discussion of the relation between remembrance and apperception, a subject only given marginal attention in the recent research literature.

These case studies from early modern literaturea ' mainly Germana ' are dealing with larger-scale narrative forms of the novel/romance and chronicle variety and with farcical tales. They enquire into how in the 16th century as a time of profound change in society, religion and media Germanophone literature is involved in the processes of pluralisation and authorisation of knowledge, and how the manifold changes in knowledge are reflected in literature.

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.

"Vorn ein Loewe, hinten Schlange und Ziege inmitten", so beschreibt Homer die Chimare. Das Mischwesen tritt als komposite Figur in Erscheinung, die als liminales monstrum die Grenzen zwischen engem Regelsystem und imaginativer Freiheit uberwindet. Aus ihr entwickelt die Philosophie das Prinzip topisch-dialektischen Kombinierens, das sich auch in der Poetik mittelalterlicher Texte zeigt. Die Arbeit setzt den Begriff des Chimarischen von "hybrid", "fantastisch" und "grotesk" ab und fuhrt die Differenzierung mittels einer Analyse exemplarischer monstra aus den Artusromanen Parzival, Wigalois und Diu Crone fort. Schliesslich enthullt eine komparatistische Interpretation Gaweins das widerspruchsvolle Konzept des scheinbar idealen Ritters, der damit zum wichtigsten Agenten der chimarischen Denkfigur wird.