The Codex Manesse. Collection Structure, Contextualisation

Named to the UNESCO World Documentary Heritage list in 2019, the Codex Manesse is a manuscript created around 1300 that, with 140 author corpora and 137 miniatures, represents the most extensive collection of Middle High German poetry. The aim of this project is to investigate the organizational structure of the manuscript. Questions will be asked regarding how the ordering of the author corpora came about from the standpoint of transmission history in order to make statements on the principles of collection and organization that are effective in the manuscript, as well as on the literary historical knowledge that is reflected in it. Although there are codicological and art historical investigations that have provided information on the genesis of the Codex, the content of the text collection has not been sufficiently investigated. Until now, literary research has focused mainly on specific authors, considering them apart from the context of the collection. The transmission history has been researched (if at all) in isolation with regard to individual authors or texts; the palaeographic and codicological findings have mostly been ignored in literary studies. The planned project aims to address these desiderata and bring together the aforementioned disciplines. The starting point for this project is the recent codicological finding that social status is not the sole organizing principle of the collection. In the course of the production of the book, the parchment layers were rearranged, partly disassembled and reassembled; a number of double leaves were cut and sewn together again in a different arrangement. The reconstruction of these manufacturing techniques reveals a creative will that has yet to be explored substantively. In the planned project, individual manuscript segments will be singled out and questions regarding the groupings will be asked. For this purpose, different perspectives of interpretation will be used to examine the author corpora with regard to its transmission and reception history, as well as its historical and poetological relations. This contextualization will produce fundamental insights into the organizational structure of the collection as well as the literary historical knowledge that is reflected therein. Furthermore, evidence of patterns in this manuscript is expected to be found. The project will therefore make a significant contribution to the origin history of the codex. The findings will be encoded in the TEI-XML file format, which lays the foundation for a complete digital commentary of the Codex Manesse. They will also be published in a monograph written by the applicants together with the project staff, which will encompass a philological and literary examination of the selected manuscript segments with regard to the question of the organizational structure of the Codex Manesse.

No additional funding sources recorded.