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Abstract
This article is a sequel to my contribution entitled “When words coalesce: chunking and morphophonemic extension” in the volume The Indo-European verb (ed. H. Craig Melchert, 2012: 87–104), and intends to document cases of preverb incorporation for Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Although preverbs occurred as free morphemes with finite verbs in PIE, they could also, under conditions to be specified, undergo a change of their morphemic status from free to bound. I discuss a number of such cases and the conditions under which preverbs could undergo destressing, phonologically regular or irregular reduction, and ultimately fuse with following verbal root morphemes.
Abstract
This study is concerned with the contribution of Jan de Vries (1890–1964), a controversial Dutch scholar of Germanic and Old Norse philology, folklore, and comparative religion, to the discipline of Celtic studies. First, therefore, his work is located within the context of De Vries’ biography and of his scholarly network of the post-war era, notably his correspondence with likeminded colleagues such as Dumézil, Höfler, Wikander, and Eliade. Subsequently, his theories of Celtic and Germanic ethnogenesis are examined, as well as his ideas about the connections between the Celtic and Germanic pre-Christian religions and traditions of heroic saga. Finally, the relatively limited impact of De Vries’s Celtic studies is elaborated on.
Abstract
This article establishes a connection between the decisions of the Fourth Lateran Council and Der Pfaffe Amis, a work by the Knitter. Doing so results in totally new perspectives on the work, which is therefore connected to anticlerical literature. Der Pfaffe Amis is not just a comedy, as researchers thought, but it stands in continuity with Latin poems like, e.g., the Hierapigra ad purgandos praelatos by Aegidius of Corbeil or the work Speculum prelatorum by an unknown author. The single episodes have a class-based structure in their composition, in which the last two mercurial episodes abandon the legal purview of the church, besides being highly criminal under the laws at the time, but because of the Council’s decisions, they would still lead to the eternal salvation of the priest’s soul.
Abstract
Although it proves to be a difficult task, we still can identify more literary texts from the Middle Ages addressing homoerotic love than we might have expected. Even when poets voiced severe criticism and radically condemned homosexuality, their comments serve us well to identify more specifically the actual discourse behind the official scene. Although legal and Church authorities consistently characterized ‘sodomy’ as one of the worst sins a Christian could commit, since late antiquity, and certainly throughout the Middle Ages, the phenomenon, a biological fact, existed, of course, and was also addressed in veiled or open language. This article examines a selection of relevant literary and didactic works that shed more light on this issue.
Abstract
This contribution tries to revitalize the mercantile class perspective in its socioliterary function for the interpretation of Rudolf’s presumed literary debut. In doing so, it is assumed to be a courtly poem, which is directed at an aristocratic audience with the pretension not only to follow literary traditions, but to bring these up to date with motives from a changing present. This shows Rudolf von Ems as a poetic witness to an overall social change, which is personified in the political ambitions of the young Staufer family member Heinrich (VII.). Just as spectacularly, the Good Gerhart succesfully completes a „subtle narrative experiment“, which centers around a merchant, which never proved worthy of the name, in such a way that it had to draw the attention of the entire cultural life at the arch duke’s court. In the figure of the merchant as a representative of urban patricians, a perspective of class emancipation is uncovered, and whose potential for conflict is made problematic in an epic elaboration, which contrasts with the aristocratic projection of discipline implicit in the voluntary subordination of the inferior classes. The verse epic is therefore interpreted as further proof of politicization in the courtly literary scene.