Mittellateinische Studien und Texte – serie

This book throws new light on the question of authorship in the Latin literature of the later medieval and in the early modern periods. It shows that authorship was not something to be automatically assumed in an empathic sense, but was chiefly to be found in the paratextual features of works and was imparted by them. This study examines the strategies and tools used by authors ca. 1350-1650, to assert their authorial aspirations. Enenkel demonstrates how they incorporated themselves into secular, ecclesiastical, spiritual and intellectual power structures. He shows that in doing so rituals linked to the ceremonial of ruling, played a fundamental role, for example, the ritual presentation of a book or the crowning of a poet. Furthermore Enenkel establishes a series of qualifications for entry to the Respublica litteraria, with which the authors of books announced their claims to authorship.

In Erzählte Bewegung. Narrationsstrategien und Funktionsweisen lateinischer Pilgertexte (4.-15. Jahrhundert), Susanna Fischer analyzes the function and structure of the genre of pilgrimage narratives from a literary point of view.The first part of the book is devoted to theoretical reflections and a systematic analysis of characteristic elements of pilgrimage narratives. Interpreting the texts from a narrative perspective, she focuses not only on formal characteristics but also on narrative structures and thus takes a closer look at the poetics of pilgrimage narratives. Through the detailed analysis of fourteen Latin texts about pilgrimage to the Holy Land from the 4th to the 15th century, she illustrates the development of a literary tradition with specific structural, stylistic and narrative characteristics.See inside the book.

Volume 1 of the two-volume set MITS 56: In 1508, Johannes Trithemius, the Black Abbot, dedicated his Polygraphia, a treatise on writing in ciphers, to Emperor Maximilian I, personally handing over an elaborate autograph. Unlike the editio princeps, which was to be printed a decade later, the manuscript retains the arcane and mysterious tone of the bibliophile scholar’s earlier works on the subject. This book offers the first critical edition and translation of this first version, together with an extensive commentary illuminating the numerous obscure allusions, the impressive literary knowledge of its author, and the genesis of the mechanisms discussed.

Volume 2 of the two-volume set MITS 56: In 1508, Johannes Trithemius, the Black Abbot, dedicated his Polygraphia, a treatise on writing in ciphers, to Emperor Maximilian I, personally handing over an elaborate autograph. Unlike the editio princeps, which was to be printed a decade later, the manuscript retains the arcane and mysterious tone of the bibliophile scholar’s earlier works on the subject. This book offers the first critical edition and translation of this first version, together with an extensive commentary illuminating the numerous obscure allusions, the impressive literary knowledge of its author, and the genesis of the mechanisms discussed.