The Problematic Nature of Periodization and the Alleged Paradigm Shifts: Courtly Love Poetry (Minnesang), Petrarch’s Sonnets, Goethe’s Erotic Compositions, and Brecht’s Dreams of Love

This study raises the scepter regarding the heuristic value of literary periodization and hence also of the concept of the paradigm shift. Undoubtedly, throughout time, changes in the cultural epochs took place, and we can easily determine larger cultural, material, technical, political, and religious transformations Hence the genre of literary histories that inform us in a concise and authoritative manner about that phenomenon. By the same token, however, we might be forced to realize that many of those changes taking place from period to period affected more the form and the text-external references and less the idealistic concern by the individual poets. To illustrate this phenomenon, here I trace a long-term discourse on love from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century to identify a fundamental trope that resisted all paradigm shifts and proved to have a universal staying power beyond all measures. Although value systems and social-economic conditions underwent profound changes from the past to the present, the human dimension itself was apparently quite resistant to those transitions, as the topic of love confirms from the earliest time until today

The Quest for Happiness: From Boethius to Marie de France and Heinrich Kaufringer The Meaning of the Humanities Today and in the Future

As much as money has always seemed to rule world, in reality many other criteria have really determined human life providing meaning, guidance, and relevance, such as the quest for happiness. Happiness can be expressed in many different ways and finds expression in a myriad of ways, including through literature. Hence, we need to differentiate between spiritual and material happiness, and thus can establish significant concepts about the various layers of the meaning of life. Only a Humanities-based study program can offer relevant perspectives, as we need the teachings from the past in order to cope with the issues of today and tomorrow. This paper draws on a selection of major literary and philosophical contributions from late antiquity to the fifteenth century to illustrate this most important insight, which redirects our attention to the Humanities as one of the most central study areas in the academy today. As evanescent as the quest for happiness might be, ultimately there proves to be no other more important topic in all of human existence

Ulrich Bonerius - A Swiss-German Boccaccio? Fourteenth-century literary synergies

The Dominican Priest from Bern, Ulrich Bonerius, composed his collection of fables, Der Edelstein, at exactly the same time when Boccaccio created his collection of tales, Decameron, 1350. Even though there is no direct evidence of any kind of personal contacts between these two poets, the strong similarities between both works in formal and conceptual terms prove to be striking. This article illustrates the reasons why we would be justified to call Bonerius, more than just playfully, a German-language Boccaccio, since he created the first major compilation of narratives (in verse), framed by a prologue and an epilogue, in the history of late medieval German literature. While Boccaccio has ten story-tellers entertain each other over ten days (ten stories per day = 100) reflecting on eroticism, love, adventures, or anti-clericalism, Bonerius offers one hundred didactic fables illustrating human failings, shortcomings, and vices. Both contemporaries thus aimed at criticizing and improving their society through surprisingly similar literary means. Bonerius thus emerges as one of the most important fourteenth-century poets in the German tongue who deserves to be placed close to Boccaccio

Werner Bergengruen (d. 1964) in Conversation with the Middle Ages: Significant Contributions to Twentieth-Century Medievalism

Medievalism has experienced an enormous popularity in the last decades, if not century, but the specific contributions by the Baltic German author Werner Bergengruen have not yet received full attention. In light of a selection of his novellas, we can identify him as a meaningful respondent to medieval themes, ideas, concepts, and values which he dealt with rather creatively, employing them for his own ethical, religious, or spiritual musings. Studying Bergengruen’s novellas makes it possible not only to familiarize ourselves once again with one of the most popular German authors from the mid-twentieth century who has unfairly lost in popular appeal maybe since ca. 1970. Through his novellas we also gain intriguing keys to open innovative perspectives toward a variety of literary and didactic texts from the Middle Ages, which are not simply imitated here, but emerge as critical catalysts or sources for Bergengruen’s own reflections on timeless human issues

El papel de las Humanidades en el pasado y en el presente: perspectivas futuras fundadas sobre ideas antiguas. Reflexiones de un medievalista

This study outlines how we might be able to explain and defend the supremely important role of the humanities, perhaps surprisingly, by resorting to medieval literature. While there are many good reasons even today, if not especially in the present, to promote the teaching of the humanities, many critics tend to undermine all cultural and historical investigations of the premodern world and subscribe to presentism. However, as medievalist perspectives can tell us, the very opposite is the case since both poets and philosophers from the past have preserved for us fundamental ideals and values, ethical concepts, and religious and cultural concepts about the interrelationshp between self and the world, between the material and the metaphysical dimension.Este estudio pone de relieve que debemos ser capaces de explicar y defender el enorme papel que desempeñan las humanidades, quizás incluso de un modo sorprendente al recurrir a la literatura medieval. A pesar de que en la actualidad siguen habiendo muchas buenas razones para promover la enseñanza de las humanidades, muchos críticos tienden a menospreciar las investigaciones culturales e históricas del mundo premoderno y se aferran al presentismo. No obstante, como las perspectivas medievalistas nos señalan, realmente se trata de todo lo contrario, ya que tanto poetas como filósofos del pasado nos han preservado ideales y valores fundamentales, conceptos éticos, e ideas religiosas y culturales acerca de la interrelación entre el ser y el mundo, así como entre lo material y lo metafísico

Weather and Natural Catastrophes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Storms, Floods, Fires, Earthquakes, and Pandemics

Ecocriticism and Medieval Natural Catastrophes Literary Evidence? Ecocriticism in the Humanities has alerted us in the last few years to the considerable potentials of building significant bridges between the Sciences (Meteorology, Atmospheric Sciences, Vulcanism, etc.), on the one hand, and Literary and Historical Studies on the other, and to draw insights from both sides of the equation for an increased understanding of universal phenomena of great importance for all human societies.[1] Climate change, for instance, is not something we can understand today by simply looking at samples or data reflecting current conditions, as if our current situation had emerged only in the last fifty or so years. Major changes in our natural environment are mostly the result of long-term forces impacting our material and cultural world, and weather patterns and significant disruptions have had a huge impact on human society throughout time. Nevertheless, we can probably agree that the current situation of our physical conditions have dramatically deteriorated over the last decades because of human-made factors, if we consider the daunting global warming affecting us all right now in the twenty-first century as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the modern consume society which endangers the survival of our world (Anthropocene). Long-term and short-term processes and phenomena must be taken into account when we want to pursue cultural-historical ecocriticism, especially within a medieval context. It has thus become mandatory to examine, for instance, the history of the forest or the history of water through a variety of lenses, one of which can be fruitfully provided by chronicles, especially those dating not only from the twentieth or nineteenth centuries, but also those which shed light on medieval and early modern conditions and events. [2] In fact, medieval approaches to ecocriticism prove to be eye-opening for the latest scientific investigations and can lay the foundation for a better understanding of the relationship between humans and their environment, and this already thousand and more years ago. [3] Both weather and natural catastrophes have always been highly impactful on human history and culture, but it continues to be a huge challenge to establish the concrete correlations, such as between the rise of the Gothic age or the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century with the Medieval Warming Period. A late medieval example, however, might shed some light on this phenomenon, though I will not examine it here at great length. On July 2, 1505, when Martin Luther, the later famous founder of the Protestant Church, returned from his home in Mansfeld to Erfurt, where he was enrolled as a student of law at the university, he was surprised by a major thunderstorm in the hamlet of Stotternheim (a short distance north of Erfurt), which frightened him so deeply that he immediately changed his entire outlook toward life. He begged St. Anne to save him from the lightening, and since that was then the case, he fulfilled his pledge and turned into a monk, joining the Augustinians in Erfurt.  As a monk, however, he began to recognize the evils of the Catholic Church and began with his efforts to reform it from within. This study will attempt to bring to light some parallel cases in the early and the high Middle Ages

Global Middle Ages: Eastern Wisdom (Buddhistic) Teachings in Medieval European Literature. With a Focus on Barlaam and Josaphat

In contrast to many recent attempts to establish concepts and platforms to study global literature, and this also in the pre-modern world, this article claims to present much more concrete examples to confirm that a certain degree of globalism existed already in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. While numerous scholars/editors have simply invited many more voices from all over the world to the same ‘table,’ i.e., literary histories, which has not really provided more substance to the notion of ‘global,’ the study of translated texts, such as those dealing with Barlaam and Josaphat, clearly confirms that some core Indian ideas and values, as originally developed by Buddha, had migrated through many stages of translations, to high medieval literature in Europe

The Crisis of Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages: From the Twelfth Century to the Protestant Reformation; with an Emphasis on the Reformatio Sigismundi (1439)

The Protestant Reformation was not as previous scholars have already pointed out numerous times a sudden and unexpected development Instead it represented the outcome of a long-term paradigm shift This paper examines the larger literary framework and then focuses on one of the crucial texts from the late Middle Ages where most of the ideas as formulated by Luther in 1517 and later were already expressed in more or less the same way The loss of spirituality is commonly identified as one of the central concerns both already in the high Middle Ages and here in the Reformatio Sigismund