Medieval Texts & Translations – serie

First translation into English of the medieval German Leben der Graefen Iolanda, making it accessible to a wider audience.Brother Hermann was a cleric in the region of Luxembourg in the last quarter of the thirteenth century; evidence from his Life of the Countess Yolanda suggests that he was a Dominican with, perhaps surprisingly, knowledge of the Middle High German courtly epic and the poetry of other contemporaries such as Walther von der Vogelweide. The Life, written shortly after Yolanda's death in 1283, concentrates on her struggle from childhood to free herself from secular society, principally by avoiding a contracted marriage, and to enter the cloister of Marienthal, of which she became Prioress. Although Brother Hermann's epic is hagiographic in tone, the fact that he wrote itin German, not based on a Latin vita suggests that he did not regard Yolanda as a candidate for sainthood; his heroine's attempts to find fulfillment have a strong contemporary resonance. Professor Lawson's translation, thefirst ever into English prose, makes this work accessible to a more general readership.

Prose translation with scholarly apparatus, of German epic c.1230, comparable with Nibelungenlied.Kudrun is an heroic epic written around 1230 second in importance only to the Nibelungenlied; it is characterized by its greater focus on female characters and a tone gentler than that of the brutal Nibelungenlied. For his translation Professor McConnell has gone back to the sole (a later and problematic) existing manuscript, found in the Ambraser Handschrift in the holdings of the Austrian National Library at Vienna.