Department of Modern Languages

Nr. 15, August/September 2002

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Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We are pleased to inform you of the five sessions on "New Research in Medieval German Studies" granted to SMGS for the 39th International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2003. It is our hope that the "New Books Round Table" will again provide an interesting evening program to discuss a new contribution to our field. This coming year's book will be announced in the February/March edition of the Newsletter. Something New: SMGS goes to Leeds! At the Business Meeting in May, members decided to offer three SMGS sessions at the International Medieval Congress
"Power and Authority," to be held at the University of Leeds, 14-17 July, 2003.

Call for Papers for SMGS Sessions at Kalamazoo 2003

Submission of Abstracts

We encourage electronic submission of abstracts to Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand: alexandrsh@goshen.edu

Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand, Associate Professor of German and Chair

Department of Modern and Classical Languages

Goshen College

1700 South Main St.

Goshen, Indiana 46526

Call for Papers for SMGS Sessions at Leeds 2003

Submission of Abstracts

We encourage electronic submission of abstracts to Ernst Ralf Hintz: ehintz@truman.edu

Ernst Ralf Hintz, Associate Professor of German, Chair

Department of Modern Languages

Fort Hays State University

600 Park St.

Hays, Kansas 67601-4099

Deadline for submissions

Both for Kalamazoo and for Leeds is Monday, 23 September 2001.

Table of Contents

New Books Round Table: Interview and Discussion

On behalf of SMGS and all our colleagues who attended the New Books Round Table at Kalamazoo 20002, we wish to thank Frank Tobin (University of Nevada) and Kim Vivian (Augustana College), for eloquently presenting their recent translations and commentaries of: The Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue, trans. & commentaries by Frank Tobin, Kim Vivian, and Richard H. Lawson, University Park: Penn State Press, 2001, ISBN 0-271-02112-8 available in paper and cloth. The presentation and ensuing discussion made for a memorable evening for all present.

Robert G. Sullivan (University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who will talk about his recent book: Justice and the Social Context of Early Middle High German Literature," New York & London: Routledge, 2001. 1-186. ISBN 0-415-93685-3.

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New Contributions to the Field by SMGS Members

Albrecht Classen (University of Arizona) has a recent book: Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages: Xenological Approaches to Medieval Phenomena, ed. Albrecht Classen (University of Arizona), New York-London: Routledge, 2002.
He has also contributed an article, "Die Mutter spricht zu ihrer Tochter: Literarhistorische Betrachtungen zu einem feministischen Thema," to The German Quarterly, Winter 2002, Vol. 75.1, 71 ­ 86.

Editions-Projekt zur Frauenmystik des Mittelalters:

Im DFG-Sachmittelprojekt "Texteditionen lateinischer Mystik aus dem Kloster Helfta" wird unter der Leitung von Prof. Dr. Ernst Hellgardt (LMU München) und Dr. Margarete Hubrath (TU Chemnitz) seit Mai 2000 an der LMU München die Neuedition von Mechthilds von Ha(c)keborn "Liber specialis gratiae" und der lateinischen Fassung von Mechthilds von Magdeburg "Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit" mit dem Titel "Lux divinitatis" vorbereitet. Beide Werke enstanden gegen Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts im Umkreis des Frauenklosters Helfta. Der "lux divinitatis" soll ihre frühneuhochdeutsche (Rück-)übersetzung "Das liecht der gotheit, dem "liber specialis gratiae" eine gegenwartsdeutsche neuübersetzung in synoptischem Druck zur Seite gestellt werden.
For further information contact: Elke Senne: elke.Senne@t-online.de

Ernst Ralf Hintz (Fort Hays State University) has a recent article: "The Psychology of Paradox in Konrad von Würzburg's Partonopier und Meliûr," appearing in Monatshefte, Summer 2002, Vol. 94, No. 2. 153 ­ 64. He also reviewed a new book by Ruth Finckh, "Minor mundus homo":Studien zur Mikrokosmos-Idee in der mittelalterlichen Literatur," for Speculum, Vol. 77, No. 3, July 2002.

Kathryn Starkey (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) has recently published an article: "Traversing the Boundaries of Language: Multilingualism and Linguistic Difference in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Willehalm," in The German Quarterly 75. 1 (Winter 2002), 20 ­ 34.

Christoph Steppich has recent article: "Geoffrey's Historia Regum Britanniae and Wace's Brut: Secondary Sources for Hartmann's Erec?" appearing in Monatshefte, Summer 2002, Vol. 94, No. 2. 165-88.

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SMGS Review

The next SMGS Review will appear in the February/March edition 2003.

Glenn Ehrstine (University of Iowa) will review: The German Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. John M. Jeep, New York: Routledge (2001).

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Selected Recent Titles of Interest for Medieval German Studies

The following annotated bibliography makes no attempt at being comprehensive. It strives simply to offer a selection of recent academic books that may be of interest to teacher-scholars in medieval German literature, art and cultural history. The books are listed alphabetically according to author(s) or editor(s). The summaries included here are taken from a variety of journals specializing in book reviews including Choice, a monthly magazine for acquisitions librarians published by the Association of College and Research Libraries, and Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, H-Net Reviews in the Humanities & Sociology (www.h-net.msu.edu), and Monatshefte as indicated.

Hans-Werner Goetz, Moderne Mediävistik: Stand und Perspektiven der Mittelalterforschung. Darmstadt: Primus, 1999. Pp. iv, 412.

As one can see from the bibliographical notes in the chapter on the state of medieval studies (pp. 12 ­ 20), some kind of "taking stock" of our field has become quite fashionable in the past few years-on both sides of the Atlantic. The Hamburg professor's aim in this book was to do such an exercise mainly, but not exclusively, for Germany. In part 1 he gives an overview of medieval studies, their definition, history, recent developments (under the heading "Change of Perspective"), and organization (primarily in Germany). In part 2 single fields are surveyed under the heading "New Approaches, Subjects, and Methods," beginning with Quellenkunde and continuing through political, social, and economic history to the emergence of historical anthropology and discussion about history as a "cultural science" (Kulturwissenschaft), whatever that should mean. He closes with a review of problems of writing history, apropos the recent debate between Johannes Fried and Gerd Althoff about style and presentation of medieval narratives.

Let me first state that, in spite of its title, this book does not embrace medieval studies in the true interdisciplinary sense (as even the German Mediävistenverband, more or less modeled after our Academy, understands it) but is instead about medieval history, even if in its wider sense. Hardly anything is said about art, literature, archaeology, or architecture, to say nothing about such "minor" fields as music or medieval Latin. It is also remarkable that the examples of studies almost totally disregard Byzantium, central and eastern Europe, and Scandinavia, as well as the Islamic Mediterranean. I would propose that these "gaps" neatly reflect the limitation of German practitioners of medieval history, who need to be reminded of the "pluralism" of the medieval world (as was done in a roundtable at the German historians' congress in 2000).

Having said all this, let me underline that the survey of new approaches is most informative and, I may say, at times exciting. Part 1 seems to be somewhat hybrid, though: occasionally one does not quite know for whom it is written. Rehearsing the discussion about periodization and the attitude to the Middle Ages in past centuries is hardly necessary for those who wish to read about highly professional debates on memoria or the social-scientific approaches to our field. Still, the brief survey of German historiography (including chapters, rather carefully formulated, on the fate of the discipline under Nazi and Soviet-Marxist control) is useful. Similarly, the critical situation of our disciplines in German universities, however alarming, is well presented. In part 2 those chapters are of particular interest where the author or his invited contributors, mostly young colleagues, have an axe to grind, usually because they have worked on the subject themselves. There is no space to list but the most important ones, especially those in which German contributions (and their problems) are significant. Such are the discussions on the medieval "state" and that elusive German term Herrschaft, the emergence of nations (especially Germany), research of conflicts (by Steffen Patzold) and their real and symbolic solutions, recent approaches to hagiography (by Jan-Marci Sawilla), the development of social history and its facets including that of "everyday life," new views on early-medieval landed property (Grundherrschaft and the revision of much that Otto Brunner argued), and many more. In the conclusion ("Quo vadis Mediaevista?" pp. 381-89), the author attempts to sketch a trend-a word society, whence to its constituting elements, the people, and finally to their "culture." He is well aware of the fact that all these notions need particular discussions in themselves, but those would hardly fit into one volume written by one person, or a few.

The indices of names and subjects are very helpful.

János M. Bak (Central European University) Speculum July 2002

Albrecht Hausmann, Reinmar der Alte als Autor: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung und zur programmatischen Identität. (Bibliotheca Germanica, 40.) Tübingen and Basil: Francke, 1999. Pp. ix, 371; tables and black-and-white figures.

This study of thirteenth-century German lyrical poetry grounds the quest for the identity of the poet in manuscript research. Hausmann links central concerns of the "New Philology," the close study of medieval manuscript traditions and the inquiry into medieval authorship, to derive his perception of the medieval author from the rediscovery of the medieval text. Variances in the text rendition and the identity of the poet's voice figure primarily as matters of the reception of this poetry. This approach both denies and establishes Reinmar as the author of Minnesang. The well-known poet, said to have been Walther von der Vogelweide's rival at the court of Vienna, vanishes into a mere name, signifying the scribes' attribution of texts in their manuscripts. In Hausmann's reckoning the name no more than the picture, which introduces the collection of songs, authenticates an "original" author. Rather, these texts reproduce the scribes' and collectors' reception, which creates textual constructs of Reinmar's songs beyond the poet's control. Variations in wording and length in four key manuscripts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (A,B, C, E) represent the editor's reading of Reinmar's poetry. Scribes do not strictly copy their sources; they shape their history. Hausmann assumes that scribes used written texts for the manuscripts that survive and rejects the effect of performances on the text renditions as too speculative. Yet the exclusion of the oral tradition impoverishes our vision of medieval poetry.

Assigning to the scribes the decisive role in determining the text tradition challenges the prevailing view of Reinmar scholars (Günther Schweikle, Helmut Tervooren) that the poet changes his own texts. Hausmann suggests a direct analogue between the medieval Reinmar reception and his own scholarship. The schribes' texts reproduce historical phrases of the medieval Reinmar discourse. The scholarly reader constructs the author as spiritus rector of his oeuvre. Hausmann extrapolates "a programmatic identity" from his reading of core texts in the key manuscripts. The scholarly reception of Minnesang circumscribes the parameter of authorship, represented in medieval lyrical poetry. Opposing the categorical denial of medieval authorship (Bernard Cerquiglini) and the established view of Reinmar's generically "open textual corpus," Hausmann argues for an author whom the recipient locates on a "transtextual Konkretisationsebene" by means of a conceptual context which unifies the poetry.

A chain of receptions from reader to reader transmits images of the author. Hausmann's search for Reinmar's identity as author reaches beyond an implicit authorial role emerging from the conflation of all the texts ascribed to him. Instead, Hausmann discovers the image of the author in the deep structure of a poetic program that underlies every genre of Reinmar's songs. Minne expresses the author's striving to balance social integration with personal sovereignty, to achieve the ideal of a socialized sovereignty. Loyalty and service integrate the Minnesänger into the hierarchy of feudal norms. In the gender relationship of Minne, personal sovereignty means a hard-won self-discipline, the mastery of an aporia of sexual desire and moral consciousness. Female virtue, crowned by chastity, arouses desire, which destroys its object when fulfilled. Hausmann traces the author in the programmatic preoccupation with this aporia, which typifies courtly Minne. The socialized sovereignty, the willing, even joyful acceptance of the insoluble contradictions of the aporia, celebrates this victory of virtue. A courtly utopia of order invites the reader to identify with this ideal. Mediating this poetic vision of an exemplary Minne, the texts signify the author.

This argument builds on the variances within the textual corpus, handed down in four major manuscripts. Hausmann sees two principal receptions reacting to Reinmar's poetic devotion to the aporia. Briefer renditions (in A, B) relate to an early tradition of uncomplicating the conflict situation, longer versions of the songs to a later interest in this psychological strife (in C,E).

Relating the textual variances to modes of reception by scribes concludes Hartmann's systematic argumentation. His case proceeds from establishing core texts and placing them in the contemporary Minnesang tradition to tracing the conceptual coherence of the specific genre types. His keen awareness of the medieval sources registers the scribe's authority and reconstructs the author's identity.

This study offers a comprehensive, knowledgeable, and thoughtful discussin of the selected texts, using historical relevance and generic differences (Tagelied, Wechsel, Manneslied, Frauenlied, crusade song) to demonstrate the unifying programmatic dimension of the poet's oeuvre. While the wealth of detail at times tries the reader's patience, it does not obscure the thread of the argument.

Hausmann's concept of the author accords with Max Wehrli's definition (in Das Subjekt der Dichtung: Festschrift für Gerhard Kaiser [Würzburg, 1990]: "Beziehungsmitte der im Text erfolgenden Aussagen oder Festlegungen." But Hausmann's argument for a closely knit, cohesive oeuvre fails to convince this reader of its adequacy as a description even of his own small selection of songs. The concept seems rather too tight a fit for medieval poetry. Minnesang was also meant to entertain: a performance-oriented playfulness accounts for a wide range of authoriial expressions. Characteristic aspects of this poetry, the poignant elegiac style of the aporia and the cerebral rhetorical weighing of alternatives, appeal to significantly different reactions.

The affirmation of the medieval author as the reader's "Autorkonkretisation" (Roman Ingarden) strikes a persuasive balance between the denial of the concept of authorship in medieval literature and its affirmation in almost modern terms. Relying on texts as the source for the author image replaces biographical speculations, such as the Walther-Reinmar "feud" or Reinmar's presumed role as court poet. However, it is a particular style that expresses poetic creativity in verse, rhyme, image. Whatever the scribes may have changed, the texts, which they handed down, speak a distinctive poetic idiom, which should also figure in the reader's vision of the author.

Of equal importance methodologically is the distinction between types of readers and receptions. While the substitution of the reader-to-reader relationship for the direct reader-text puzzle draws an important consequence from the reception theory, time and the nature of their concerns differentiate recipients. Medieval scribes and compilers, for example, transmit poetic texts; a medievalist of the late twentieth century identifies their author on the "transtextuelle Konkretisationsebene." Skills, resources, interests constitute different groups of readers and types of receptions.

Hausmann uses deconstruction rather too loosely, and his reliance on Johathan Culler should have saved him from adopting the conventional right/wrong alternative in evaluating text interpretations. Indeed his own approach premises a multiplicity of meaning that he does not fully practice.

Overall the study clarifies the complex history of the texts that manuscripts hand down under Reinmar's name. Hausmann's rendering of the numerous scribes' versions allows the reader to assess the poetic significance of the variations in relation to authorial roles. The extensive interpretations of individual songs offer many new insights, the best example being the reading of the Witwenklage.

The challenge at hand is to construct a history of medieval peotic literature that builds on both the more recent insights into the historical conditions of medieval authorship and the texts recently reestablished from manuscript research. A genre-oriented model of medieval literature, set in a cultural context of discourses, avoids the false precision of chronology and the cyclical vision of poetic creativity which underlies conventional periodization. A history of the poetic discourse on Minne more tellingly situates the poets and poetic creativity among the discourses of the culture. Literary history constructed as part of the medieval memoria culture integrates poetic texts into this mosaic of medieval tradition.

Jutta Goheen (Carleton University) Speculum, July 2002

Jan-Dirk Müller, Spielregeln für den Untergang: Die Welt des Nibelungenliedes. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1998. Pp. vi, 494.

This booki is a major achievement. It is both theoretically sophisticated and accountable to the vast Nibelungenlied critical tradition. Its analysis of the Nibelungenlied text is absorbing. Since Müller's methodology of close attention to the text, or better, to its internal dissonances, means stripping away assumptions about what and how the story can mean, his book is as much about our praxis as readers as it is about the written work in the distant past.

With forty-three pages, the introduction is a theoretical statement with implications for medieval literary studies far beyond the Nibelungenlied. It is not a literature review in the classic sense, although Müller covers 150 yeaers of criticism with masterly strokes. Instead Müller exposes the deep assumptions that have driven research whose surface themes are very diverse. He is harsh with reading strategies that produce identity, that is, textual coherence and a message or an appeal at the price of suppressing contradictory textual evidence (p.11). With great acumen Müller demonstrates that the commonsense readings of recent years, even when they take on only discrete topics such as what drives Kriemhilt's vengeance, propagate the same textual hermeneutics as readings from earlier decades of the twentieth century. Müller acknowledges that "message" criticism has been countered, in recent years, with a profoundly skeptical view that would abandon interpretation entirely and settle for the text as a failed attempt to paste together saga traditions or as a plurality of not wholly successful written redactions. Müller is equally harsh with these skeptics and shows that their claims are merely two sides of a single coin. "Message" and "no message" boil down to identical assumptions about what a text is and does. The aesthetic implications of the second trend, which sees the Nibelungenlied as a failure, are that, in the utter radicality of its "Verfahren" or "rules of procedure," the Nibelungenlied is one of the greatest masterpieces of the Middle Ages (p. 455).

One must appreciate what Müller means by "rules of procedure" in order to understand the achievement of his Spielregeln für den Untergang, or "game rules for the end of the world." Game theory per se is not intended. Game rules refer, on the one hand, to the contingencies beyond the text according to which the events of the text unfold. They are the working of the normal world out of which the extraordinary story grows. Yet the world beyond the text is not posited in a simple way. Müller is concerned with the historicity of a virtual world that is itself textually mediated and knowable through comparisons with other heroic epics and among the various versions of the Nibelungenlied itself (p. 45). Game rules refer to the implicit cultural knowledge demanded by this text specifically and which may be largely obscured by our own cultural givens (pp. 39-40). Here Müller moves beyond his own earlier work, which takes a more straightforward view of the social or historical determination of the Nibelungenlied. This first notion of game rules is adopted from cultural anthropology, specially Clilfford Geertz's theory of anthropological phenomena as a system of signs, and at various points in the book Müller refers to his project as an anthropology (esp. pp. 39-45).

On the other hand, Müller is establishing the "internal" game rules of narration in the Nibelungenlied text itself. This part of his project rests on his distinctive grasp of the text as always inconsistent with itself-and therefore always subject to being pressed to produce a tendentious message when one kind of evidence is favored to the exclusion of another. Inconsistency is, according to Müller, a feature of any literary masterpiece, but it is particularly symptomatic of the Nibelungenlied in which written media, and written traces of oral media, are continuously played off against each other. Expressed in thematic terms, Müller investigates such elements as how Hagen's or Sivrit's loyalty can also be betrayal; how oaths, the "means of securing what is just, become the instrument of injustice" (p. 366); how Kriemhilt's restitution as Etzel's queen is really no restitution at all; and hundreds more such contradictions, some seemingly trivial and some belonging to the timeless questions of Nibelungenlied research. These contradictions are not written off as deficient assimilation of saga tradition-that would be a flight from the text-nor are they interpreted away in the name of coherence. How Kriemhilt is transformed from a lady into a she-devil is precisely the wrong question. Rather it is the regularity of the movement from one pole to the other, the "schleichender Prozeß" by which alternatives extinguish each other in the temporality of the narrative as "Zeitgeist," that interests him (p. 445). The goal of this movement is not Lösung (explanation), but Auflösung (dissolution). It is "eine Bewegung von Setzung und Aufhebung, die erst zu Ruhe kommt, wenn es nicht mehr zu setzen und aufzuheben gibt" (p. 454).

Müller terms his understanding of the self-extinguishing text as deconstruction. He does not mean the endless and open play of signifiers but something more terminal: "eine im Text sich vollziehende Bewegung . . . in der die Voraussetzungen, auf denen der Text aufbaut, die Welt, die er erzählend entwirft, und die Werte und Normen, die er propagiert, in unaufhebbare Aporien geführt, subvertiert und der Zerstörung preisgegeben werden" (p. 436). The "end of the world" is not only the final catastrophe but also the little destructions that occur throughout. The end itself does not "mean" but rather confronts the reader with an aporia that refuses interpretation. The "game" is neither a courtly critique of heroic ethos nor a heroic critique of courtly optimism but a play of contradictions whose validity is never questioned. In sum: "Die Spielregeln funktionieren, doch sind es Spielregeln für den Untergang" (p. 453).

The book proceeds "topisch," that is, "topic by topic." The topics taken up chapter by chapter represent the game rules in the first sense, or what constitutes normalcy in the virtual social world of the epic, and can therefore be cross-referenced in other heroic epics and in Diu Klage. They are undermined in a systematic way that reflects the second meaning of game rules. The nine chapters that follow the theoretical introduction concern rewritings of the saga tradition; aporias of orality and writing, with an intriguing analysis of Diu Klage as a product of the culture of writing that not only corrects the epic but actually revokes the typology of the oral tale (p. 119); the social worlds of the Nibelungen, for example, the kingly court versus the heroic band; objective emotions, or the impropriety of psychological approaches to character; visibility and the gaze, with a discussion of the display of Prünhilt's ring and girdle as about "the confusion about signs in a world without writing, but in such a way that the reader is permitted to see through the confusion" (p. 170); space, especially the movements between open and closed spaces, rank ("highness") signal a character's involvement or distance from events, "nearness" as a way of talking about political concord, etc.; rules of personal interaction; the "Verspielen" or gambling away of courtly alternatives leading to total annihilation; and violence or the final deconstruction of the Nibelungen world. It is odd that in this rich set of social game rules, gender, surely one of the most important, is missing. Although the work of feminist scholars such as Ingrid Bennewitz is mentioned, gender theory does not get the attention it deserves.

Sarah Westphal (University of South Carolina) Speculum, July 2002

SMGS Newsletter and Reviews on-line
Our Web site aims to be of service to our colleagues and medieval German studies by making the SMGS' Newsletter and Reviews more readily available to everyone, especially to colleagues outside of North America. Our Web site address is: http://www.fhsu.edu/mlng/smgs.html

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News from Colleagues
...will appear again in the February/March Newsletter. Be sure to contact us with projects, plans, recent publications and forthcoming works of interest to the scholarly community.

Sibylle Jefferis (University of Pennsylvania) would like to announce the the February Meeting of the Delaware Valley Medieval Association (DVMA),

February 15, 2002, 9:30 a.m. ­2:30 p.m. to be held at Rosemont College, Pennsylvania,
in the Kaul conference Center. Host: Erlis Glass Wickersham; Organizers: Erlis Glass Wickersham, Elaine M. Beretz, Dorothy M. Shepard, and Sibylle Jefferis.

Topic: Medieval Representations of Culture

John Wickersham, Ursinus College:

"The Medieval Music of the Carmina Burana."

Heidi Kaufmann, Princeton:

"The 'new spirituality' in the miniatures of the mid-13th century Mainz gospels and the Franciscans in Mainz."

William J. Connell, Seton Hall University and Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University:

"Meaning, Misogyny, and the Lombard Nobility in the Book of the Courtier."

Nota bene: DVMA will also be meeting this coming October.

For information on both meetings

Contact: Dorothy M. Shepard

118 Library Place

Princeton, NJ 08540

718-636-3598 office

609-921-2635

dshep25784@aol.com

Kathryn Starkey (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Sara S. Poor (Stanford University) have organized two sessions for the program of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference of the German Studies Association (GSA), October 4-6. 2002 in San Diego, California.

Session 83. Language, Gender, and Power

Sponsor: YMAGINA (Young Medievalist Germanists in North America)

Saturday, 10:30 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. Windsor

Moderator: Sara S. Poor, Stanford University

"Kriemhilt's Kiss"

William Layher, Washington University

"In Festo Paschali: Language, Gender, and Performance Devotion in the Easter Plays from Wienhausen."

June Mecham, University of Kansas

"Visionary Or Hysteric? Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina and Mechthild of Magdeburg's The Flowing Light of the Godhead."

Kamakshi P. Murti, Middlebury College

Commentator: Ann Marie Rasmussen, Duke University

Session 113. Ritual, Culture, and Knowledge in Late Medieval Germany

Sponsor: YMAGINA (Young Medievalist Germanists in North America)

Sat 4:00 p.m. - 5:45 p.m. Brittany

Moderator: Kathryn Starkey, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"Taking Notes: A Late Medieval Compendium of Magical and Practical Tests."

Elizabeth I. Wade, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

"Lesen, Lehren, Achivieren. Von der Arbeit am 'Renner' Hugos von Trimberg."

Thomas Rathmann, Technische Universität Berlin

"Eastern Europe in Late Medieval German Cultural Memory: Ludwig von Eyb's Turnierbuch"

Alexander Sager, University of Georgia

Commentator: James A. Schultz, University of California, Los Angeles

Marc Pierce (University of Michigan) is a new member of SMGS, who specializes
in Germanic linguistics, early Germanic religion, culture and literature. He is currently revising his dissertation for publication.

E-mail: karhu@umich.edu

The SMGS Newsletter & Reviews is written and edited by Ernst Ralf Hintz,
Dept. of Modern Languages (German), Fort Hays State University, 600 Park St.,
Hays, Kansas 67601-4099, U.S.A. Fax (785) 628-5693. E-mail: ehintz@truman.edu
The next issue will appear in at the end of February 2003. We invite you to send contributions in German, English or French by 14 February 2003, using the attached information update form.

On behalf of Edward R. Haymes, Francis G. Gentry, Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand and
The Society for Medieval German Studies,
Best wishes to you all for the new semester,
Ernst Ralf Hintz

(SMGS) Group at Kalamazoo

Please return to:

Ernst Ralf Hintz
Department of Modern Languages Fax: (785) 628 - 5693
Fort Hays State University E-mail: ehintz@truman.edu
Hays, Kansas 67601-4099 U.S.A.

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