Bøger af Albrecht Classen

Criticism of the Court and the Evil King in the Middle Ages: Literary-Historical Analyses, identifies and discusses the discourse focused on the criticism of the court, specifically of the king, across medieval Europe. Tracing its development from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries, chapters examine Icelandic sagas, Old Spanish heroic epic poetry, courtly romances, early modern French and German prose novels, and late medieval short verse and prose narratives as well as the work of medieval critics such as John of Salisbury and Marsilius of Padua. Albrecht Classen explores how the writers used their craft creatively and covertly to voice harsh criticism of the ruling class and unearths a deep distrust of kings and other authority figures during the Middle Ages.

The study of pre-modern anthropology requires the close examination of the relationship between nature and human society, which has been both precarious and threatening as well as productive, soothing, inviting, and pleasurable. Much depends on the specific circumstances, as the works by philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, and medical practitioners have regularly demonstrated. It would not be good enough, as previous scholarship has commonly done, to examine simply what the various writers or artists had to say about nature. While modern scientists consider just the hard-core data of the objective world, cultural historians and literary scholars endeavor to comprehend the deeper meaning of the concept of nature presented by countless writers and artists. Only when we have a good grasp of the interactions between people and their natural environment, are we in a position to identify and interpret mental structures, social and economic relationships, medical and scientific concepts of human health, and the messages about all existence as depicted in major art works. In light of the current conditions threatening to bring upon us a global crisis, it matters centrally to take into consideration pre-modern discourses on nature and its enormous powers to understand the topoi and tropes determining the concepts through which we perceive nature. Nature thus proves to be a force far beyond all human comprehensibility, being both material and spiritual depending on our critical approaches.

Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.

Translation and detailed commentary of a fourteenth-century Low-German work about the Near and Middle East.

A follow-up publication to the Handbook of Medieval Studies, this new reference work turns to a different focus: medieval culture. Medieval research has grown tremendously in depth and breadth over the last decades. Particularly our understanding of medieval culture, of the basic living conditions, and the specific value system prevalent at that time has considerably expanded, to a point where we are in danger of no longer seeing the proverbial forest for the trees. The present, innovative handbook offers compact articles on essential topics, ideals, specific knowledge, and concepts defining the medieval world as comprehensively as possible. The topics covered in this new handbook pertain to issues such as love and marriage, belief in God, hell, and the devil, education, lordship and servitude, Christianity versus Judaism and Islam, health, medicine, the rural world, the rise of the urban class, travel, roads and bridges, entertainment, games, and sport activities, numbers, measuring, the education system, the papacy, saints, the senses, death, and money.

Literature serves many purposes, and one of them certainly proves to be to convey messages, wisdom, and instruction, and this across languages, religions, and cultures. Beyond that, as the contributors to this volume underscore, people have always endeavored to reach out to their community members, that is, to build community, to learn from each other, and to teach. Hence, this volume explores the meaning of communication, translation, and community building based on the medium of language. While all these aspects have already been discussed in many different venues, the contributors endeavor to explore a host of heretofore less considered historical, religious, literary, political, and linguistic sources. While the dominant focus tends to rest on conflicts, hostility, and animosity in the pre-modern age, here the emphasis rests on communication with its myriad of challenges and potentials for establishing a community. As the various studies illustrate, a close reading of communicative issues opens profound perspectives regarding human relationships and hence the social context. This understanding invites intensive collaboration between medical historians, literary scholars, translation experts, and specialists on religious conflicts and discourses. We also learn how much language carries tremendous cultural and social meaning and determines in a most sensitive manner the interactions among people in a communicative and community-based fashion.

Bi- and multilingualism are of great interest for contemporary linguists since this phenomenon deeply reflects on language acquisition, language use, and sociolinguistic conditions in many different circumstances all over the world. Multilingualism was, however, certainly rather common already, if not especially, in the premodern world. For some time now, research has started to explore this issue through a number of specialized studies. The present volume continues with the investigation of multilingualism through a collection of case studies focusing on important examples in medieval and early modern societies, that is, in linguistic and cultural contact zones, such as England, Spain, the Holy Land, but also the New World. As all contributors confirm, the numerous cases of multilingualism discussed here indicate strongly that the premodern period knew considerably less barriers between people of different social classes, cultural background, and religious orientation. But we also have to acknowledge that already then human communication could fail because of linguistic hurdles which prevented mutual understanding in religious and cultural terms.

The Secret in Medieval Literature: Alternative Worlds in the Middle Ages explores the many strange phenomena, both in the Middle Ages and today, that do not find any good rational explanations. Those do not pertain to magic or to religion in the traditional sense of the word; they are secrets of an epistemological kind and tend to defy human rationality, without being marginal or irrelevant. At first sight, we might believe that we face elements from fairy tales, but the medieval cases discussed here go far beyond such a simplistic approach to the mysterious dimension of secrets. In fact, as this book argues, medieval poets commonly engaged with alternative forces and described their workings within the human context (both in the Latin West and in the East), without being able to come to terms with them critically. Those mysteries appear both in heroic epics and courtly romances, among other genres, and they figure more frequently than we might have assumed. On the one hand, we could conceive of those secrets as the product of literary liberties and imagination; on the other, those secrets prove to be rather serious agents intervening in the lives of the fictional protagonists. By the same token, our modern world is not all rationality and material conditions either. The study of secrets in the Middle Ages thus opens the pathway toward a new epistemology both for the people in the pre-modern age and us today.

The Middle Ages were not only times of military conflicts, the formation of nations, and the rise of the Catholic Church, but also an era defined by profound exploration of what is magnificent and sublime in all aspects of life, including spirituality, aesthetics, architecture, ethics, religion, and philosophy. Rather than focusing extensively on historical events, as is done in many traditional textbooks on the Middle Ages, Medieval Answers to Modern Problems instead focuses on critical issues that have concerned people throughout time, and illustrates how studying the Middle Ages from an interdisciplinary perspective can shed light on contemporary efforts to deal with these issues. Topics covered in this book include the mind-body dichotomy, the relevance of the divine in material existence, interpretations of death and how to cope with death constructively, the pursuit of love in spiritual and earthly terms, and the ideals of honor. Initially the Middle Ages seem completely alien to modern ways of thinking, yet they still speak deeply to our need for both human and divine values, and inner growth. The broad range of documents presented in the book will challenge readers, provoke thought, and demonstrate just how much can be learned from the past. Dr. Albrecht Classen is a university distinguished professor of German studies at the University of Arizona, where he teaches and researches medieval and early modern European literature, culture, and art history. He has published close to ninety scholarly monographs, editions, translations, critical volumes, and textbooks, and more than 600 articles. Most recently he published Sexual Violence and Rape in the Middle Ages (2011); Sex im Mittelalter (in German, 2011); War and Piece: Critical Issues in European Societies 800-1800 (2011); Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age (2011); Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age (2014); The Forest in Medieval German Literature (2015); and Reading European Medieval Women Writers (2016). In 2010, he published the standard-setting three volume Handbook of Medieval Studies, followed by the Handbook of Medieval Cultures (2015). He serves as editor of the journals Mediaevistik and Humanities. He has received numerous teaching and research awards, most notably the Bundesverdienstkreuz am Band (Order of Merit) from the German government in 2004 and the 2012 Arizona Professor of the Year in 2014.

This study discusses medieval texts that contain profound statements determined by wisdom. These continue to be of timeless relevance, such as fables, verse narratives, and didactic tales. Using the lens of 'wisdom,' this book brings to light the enormous value of medieval literature for the modern quest for truth and the meaning of life.

This is an anthology of literary, religious, and philosophical texts from the entire Middle Ages and the early modern age that address already quite explicitly religious toleration and even tolerance.

The Codex Buranus, compiled, in all likelihood, in South Tyrol in the first half of the thirteenth century, has fascinated modern scholars and performers ever since its rediscovery in 1803. Its diverse range of texts (some famously featuring in Carl Orff's Carmina Burana) and music gives testimony to the intensely vibrant, plurilingual, and multicultural milieu in which the Codex Buranus was compiled, but poses a challenge to modern users. Perhaps more so than many other medieval manuscripts, it is an artefact which demands, and benefits from, an interdisciplinary approach. The chapters here, from scholars in a variety of fields, enable the less well-known aspects of the Codex Buranus; textual, musical, and artistic; to receive greater scrutiny, and bring new perspectives to bear on the more thoroughly explored parts of the manuscript. Making accessible existing discourse and encouraging fresh debates on the codex, the essays advocate fresh modes of engagement with its contents, contexts, and composition. They also examine questions of its reception history and audience. TRISTAN E. FRANKLINOS is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, and a Junior Research Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. HENRY HOPE has taught at the universities of Oxford and Bern; his research centres on the musical aspects of Minnesang. Contributors: Gundela Bobeth, Charles E. Brewer, Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann, Albrecht Classen, Johann Drumbl, Tristan E. Franklinos, Peter Godman, Henry Hope, Racha Kirakosian, Heike Sigrid Lammers-Harlander, Jonathan Seelye Martin, Michael Stolz, David A. Traill, Kirsten Yri.

Drawing upon the most current methodologies, the essays in this book pursue the multifarious functions of end-times in medieval German texts.

The study takes the received view among scholars that women in the Middle Ages were faced with sustained misogyny and that their voices were seldom heard in public and subjects it to a critical analysis. The ten chapters deal with various aspects of the question, and the voices of a variety of authors - both female and male - are heard. The study opens with an enquiry into violence against women, including in texts by male writers (Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach) which indeed describe instances of violence, but adopt an extremely critical stance towards them. It then proceeds to show how women were able to develop an independent identity in various genres and could present themselves as authorities in the public eye. Mystic texts by Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France and Margery Kempe, the medieval conduct poem known as Die Winsbeckin, the Devout Books of Sisters composed in convents in South-West Germany, but also quasi-historical documents such as the memoirs of Helene Kottaner or Anna Weckerin's cookery book, demonstrate that far more women were in the public gaze than had hitherto been assumed and that they possessed the self-confidence to establish their positions with their intellectual and their literary achievements.

Medieval historians and literary scholars have not ignored the topic of sexual violence and rape, but the primary focus has regularly rested on English, French, or Italian documents. Here we have the first book-length study that investigates the treatment of sexual crimes in medieval and early modern German and Latin literature, making great efforts to shed light on often ignored scenes and episodes even in some of the classical' works such as Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival or the anonymous Nibelungenlied. As this monograph reveals, many times we face situations where we cannot easily determine whether rape has occurred or not. Consequently, we recognize an important discourse in these literary examples concerning the question of how to view and deal with sexual violence, which could also involve men as victims. This critical examination extends toward sixteenth-century jest narratives (Schwanke) where the issue of rape continued to occupy the authors' minds. Moreover, as numerous side glances to contemporary European literature indicate, the theme of sexual violence was of universal concern and critical importance during the entire premodern era.

Using an interdisciplinary approach and incorporating sources from across the entire European continent dating from the early Middle Ages to the sixteenth century, this book examines the phenomenon of prostitution in a variety of contexts and highlights the extent to which the institution mattered for both the higher and the lower classes.

Up-to-date criticism and commentary on the greatest of the German courtly epics.

A survey of critical attention devoted to Arthurian matters.

This book uncovers the tremendous importance of water for European medieval literature, focusing on a large number of writers and poets. Water proves to be highly meaningful in religious, literary, and factual narratives insofar as it emerges as a central catalyst to bring about epiphany and epistemological and spiritual illumination.

This book offers the first complete English translation of the poems by the late-medieval German (Tyrolean) Oswald von Wolkenstein (1376/1377-1445). German scholarship and musicologists have long recognized the extraordinary strength and power of Oswald s Middle High German songs, both in terms of his poetic imagery and his musical performance.

By pursuing an ecocritical reading, The Forest in Medieval German Literature examines passages in medieval German texts where protagonists operated in the forest and found themselves either in conflictual situations or in refuge. By probing the way the individual authors dealt with the forest, illustrating how their characters fared in this sylvan space, the role of the forest proved to be of supreme importance in understanding the fundamental relationship between humans and nature. The medieval forest almost always introduced an epistemological challenge: how to cope in life, or how to find one's way in this natural maze. By approaching these narratives through modern ecocritical issues that are paired with premodern perspectives, we gain a solid and far-reaching understanding of how medieval concepts can aid in a better understanding of human society and nature in its historical context. This book revisits some of the best and lesser known examples of medieval German literature, and the critical approach used here will allow us to recognize the importance of medieval literature for a profound reassessment of our modern existence with respect to our own forests.

The history of the United States has been deeply determined by Germans throughout time, but hardly anyone has noticed that this was the case in the Southwest as well, known as Arizona/Sonora today, in the eighteenth century as Pimera Alta. This was the area where the Jesuits operated all by themselves, and many of them, at least since the 1730s, originated from the Holy Roman Empire, hence were identified as Germans (including Swiss, Austrians, Bohemians, Croats, Alsatians, and Poles). Most of them were highly devout and dedicated, hard working and very intelligent people, achieving wonders in terms of settling the native population, teaching and converting them to Christianity. However, because of complex political processes and the effects of the ';black legend' all Jesuit missionaries were expelled from the Americas in 1767, and the order was banned globally in 1773. As this book illustrates, a surprisingly large number of these German Jesuits composed extensive reports and even encyclopedias, not to forget letters, about the Sonoran Desert and its people. Much of what we know about that world derives from their writing, which proves to be fascinating, lively, and highly informative reading material.

Examines the lure of mountains in German literature, philosophy, film, music, and culture from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century.