Konrad Von Würzburg. Ein Handbuch

Joining De Gruyter's broad range of reference materials, this handbook on Konrad von Würzburg is a welcome companion to one of the most prolific and, as the back cover rightly notes, most versatile and important of medieval German poets. Konrad's work spans genre and form, ranging from lyric and short narratives to lengthy romances and the more than 40,000 lines of the unfinished Trojanerkrieg, and his life in the mid- to late-thirteenth century is better documented than many of his peers and predecessors. It is therefore appropriate to collect descriptive entries and analytical perspectives on Konrad and his work in a single volume, a desideratum left unfilled in terms of textual editions or translations but here realized successfully and readably as a reference work.A tripartite work, the handbook begins with three chapters on “generalities” (Konrad's life, contacts, and body of work; his aesthetic; and his reception in the Middle Ages and Early Modern), followed by thirteen chapters detailing primarily single works but also at the level of textual form/genre (for example, one on the lyric and another on legends), and finally a single chapter in the third section on the manuscript transmission of Konrad von Würzburg's literary production.While the majority of the book is comprised of the second section, both the introductory essays and the chapter on transmission are useful bookends. In the biographical introduction, Markus Stock begins with the salient point that Konrad von Würzburg is simultaneously probably the most important figure in thirteenth-century German literature and the composer of a body of work that is neither easy to date nor in some cases to attribute; furthermore, neither the toponym in his name as a birthplace nor the year of his birth are certain. Nevertheless, on the basis of relatively abundant documentary evidence we can be reasonably sure that he was not a member of the nobility, but more likely an itinerant poet and singer with a wide network of contacts and patrons. Here the disparities arise again: active among a large network in Basel, Konrad received support from well-off patrons whose interests surely influenced or were influenced by Konrad's literary output, but despite the comparatively large number of sources, it remains true “ohne dass man aber solche Erwartungen und Tendenzen im Einzelnen literatursoziologisch anbinden oder in den Werken nachverfolgen könnte” (without, however, being able to link such expectations and tendencies in detail to literary sociology or trace them in the works) (p. 10).Jan-Dirk Müller begins his exploration of Konrad's style and aesthetic by overturning past scholarship that characterized the poet as a capable but unoriginal continuator of the “classic” Middle High German literary giants. Because his stylistic register and generic breadth is so great, Konrad is assigned a programmatic mode of aptum/decorum, that is, fuoge. Müller considers Konrad's self-reflective poetics, poetic praxis throughout the genres in which he composed, and aestheticization of the profane world in order to bridge the contradictions between the courtly and Christian worldviews, offering “einen einigen Raum der Enfaltung” (a singular space of development) (p. 41). To close the first section, Michael Baldzuhn's longer chapter on Konrad's reception begins with a reflection on the difficulties of tracing it and how one might best define reception between semi-oral poetic cultures and subsequent literary forms before working through the texts described in this volume in generic groups. Alongside questions of borrowed motifs, directly referenced reception, and the spread of “Konrad-Tönen” among the Meistersinger, one finds additional discussion of attribution as reception history.Each chapter on a text or collection of texts consists of some constellation of the following sections, sometimes with varying titles: transmission, editions, contents, questions of authorship, sources, genre contexts, history of scholarship, new methodological approaches, potential further research questions (and missed opportunities, desiderata, etc.), and a bibliography of manuscripts, editions and translations, and, while not exhaustive, extensive lists of secondary literature. In other words, the composition of each “entry” fits the realities of the relevant text and its place in the history of scholarship. Chapters are as brief as eight pages and as long as twenty-seven, long enough to cover in detail many short texts and to present in managed brevity discussions of longer works such as the Trojanerkrieg. Some works whose attribution is questionable and/or late have been moved to the chapter on reception, while others, such as Die halbe Birne, are included in the second section. Texts are not ordered chronologically but on a relatively loose basis from the lyric to shorter and then longer narrative forms.Among the texts in section two, chapter authors strike a balance between description and analysis, for the latter determining, e.g., which research questions should prove promising in the future and which methodological considerations have run their course. This extends to remarks in other sections as well, such as Markus Stock's and Walker Horsfall's notes about the deficiencies of the standard edition of Die Klage der Kunst or Ann Marie Rasmussen's and Olga V. Trokhimenko's positive assessments of both primary editions of Die halbe Birne. These evaluations in aggregate structure the volume as a true handbook, attempting to lead the reader to the most useful information, whether in the form of editions, fruitful branches of scholarship, or through arguments about the structure, influences, and generic components of a text (see Christopher Liebtag Miller, “Heinrich von Kempten,” pp. 218–21). Unsurprisingly, a desire for new editions permeates the volume, although some projects are already heading in that direction, e.g., for Partonopier und Meliur a digital edition alongside the manuscript basis and Karl Bartsch's outdated edition, translation, and commentary project begun by the author of the chapter on that text (†Seraina Plotke of the Uni Basel). In discussing Das Turnier von Nantheiz, Rüdiger Brandt takes pains to outline the consequences of texts composed by well-researched authors that languish outside of critical attention, first summarizing the entirety of the history of scholarship on the text, its methodological shortcomings, and finally distinguishing among the open research questions between new approaches to old questions and those that have simply never been posed, e.g., on the text's semiotic dimensions or gender politics.In the one chapter comprising section three, André Schnyder provides a summative analysis of the contents, dating, and provenance of 113 manuscripts, comparing and evaluating disparate dating attempts from the Verfasserlexikon and Handschriftencensus when appropriate. The diachronic table of manuscript transmission is particularly interesting: while of course only approximate, it nevertheless displays the interplay between a rough chronology, manuscript location, and which texts were circulating more or less at various times. A subsequent table conveys the same information ordered geographically, from the Middle Dutch to the Middle Low German, Middle Middle German, and Middle High German dialect areas, the last comprising the bulk of extant copies (82 or 113), but the text Die goldene Schmiede spans the widest geographical area with an abundance of manuscripts. The rest of the chapter carefully traces the history of scholarship on Konrad transmission with regard to specific texts.Such handbooks fulfill more than one potential need; in this case, anyone with an interest in medieval literature able to read German can benefit from the overview of Konrad's oeuvre, but particularly undergraduate and graduate students in Medieval Studies, as well as scholars less familiar with the poet, will find the bibliographies, summaries of the state of research, manuscript information, and analysis useful as a starting point for further investigation or a preparation for reading the texts in the original or translation. Given the existence of a freely available digital bibliography at the University of Toronto library website (Markus Stock and Walker Horsfall, 2023), the editor chose to provide individual bibliographies for the chapters rather than a comprehensive list in the back matter; while that entire long document may not be reproduced in its entirety across the chapters, they certainly provide a wide range of relevant scholarship from the last two centuries. Konrad von Würzburg has another advantage beside the utility and range of its contents, namely that it brings together scholars of different generations working in both North America and Germany, highlighting the benefits of continued collaboration across the Atlantic as the discipline contends with decline. The steep price leaves this volume a resource for university libraries, but one that should not be missed.

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