Social Imagery in Middle Low German

Didactical Literature and Metaphorical Representation (1470-1517)
Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-90-04-24775-8
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 167, 404 Seiten, Format (B × H): 158 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 723 g

Reihe: Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions

Social imagery during the Late Middle Ages was typically considered to be dominated by the three orders oratores, bellatores, laboratores as the most common way of describing social order, along with body metaphors and comprehensive lists of professions as known from the Danse macabre tradition. None of these actually dominates within the vast genre of lay didactical literature.

This book comprises the first systematic investigation of social imagery from a specific late medieval linguistic context. It methodically catalogues images of the social that were used in a particular cultural/literary sphere, and it separates late medieval efforts at catechization in print from the social and religious ruptures that are conventionally thought to have occurred after 1517. The investigation thus compliments recent scholarship on late medieval vernacular literature in Germany, most of which has concentrated on southern urban centres of production. The author fills a major lacuna in this field by concentrating for the first time on the entire extant corpus of vernacular print production in the northern region dominated by the Hanseatic cities and the Middle Low German dialect.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hess, Cordelia

Heß, Cordelia

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Praktische Theologie Christliches Leben & Praxis

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
Introduction
I. A space of its own: Urban literature from Cologne to Lübeck
I.1 Language and cultural space
I.2 Print production in Middle Low German 1470–1517
I.3 Different discourses: modes of distinction
I.4 Names and metaphors: Establishing authority in different discourses
II. The “real world”: Social groups in normative and legal sources
III. Tripartitions and their dissolution
III.1 The master narrative: Functional and moral tripartitions
III.2 The terminology of moral tripartition
IV. The Nine Choirs of Angels
V. The Good, the Bad and the Mighty: the division of society into oppositions
V.1 Binomials as social imagery
V.2 The Good and the Evil
V.3 Man and woman
V.4 Husband and wife
V.5 Lords and servants
V.6 Clergy and laity
V.7 Christians and Jews
V.8 “Ioden unde heyden”
V.9 Rich and poor, man and woman, Jew and pagan: the combination of binomials
VI. Revues des états
VII. The Mystical Body of Christ
VIII. Exotics: Allegories
VIII.1 Technological imagery and personification: the Boek van veleme rade
VIII.2 The Chess game
Conclusion: A science of (unaccomplished) possibilities
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Printed sources
Secondary literature
Appendix: Middle Low German incunabula and early imprints

Über Autor(innen)

Cordelia Heß, Dr. phil. (2007) in History, Hamburg University, is a research fellow at the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquity and affiliated with the Centre for Medieval Studies at Stockholm University. Her research has a focus on the religious and cultural history of the Late Medieval Baltic Sea region.