ich bin niht niuwe –? Innovation/Novelty as Paradoxical Effect in the Medieval and Early Modern Discourse of Courtly Love

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Susanne Köbele
• Subject Area: German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 265293505

Based on paradigmatic sequences of texts from the 13th to the 16th centuries, the subproject aims to move towards a historically sensitive poetics and pragmatics of innovation/novelty in medieval and Early Modern love poetry. At the heart of this genuinely lyrical poetics of the ,new‘ lies the question of how ,old‘ formal, generic and discursive traditions become intertwined in ,novel‘ re-combinations embedded in dense networks of intertextuality. By closely combining the analysis of textual traditions with arguments based on pragmatics, poetological considerations and text theory, the concept of ,retextualisation‘ – a well-established approach as far as the medieval epic is concerned – will be transferred to and modified in accordance with the specific performative, poetological and media-related demands and conditions of lyrical poetry. Research in the first funding period has validated the project’s key thesis: when it comes to examining the ambivalent dynamics of old and new involved in poetic processes of transformation, it is not, for the most part, the texts that engage in the implicit (allusive, metaphorical, ironic, medial-performative) and/or explicit (argumentative, self-reflexive) discursivisation of ,old‘ and ,new‘ in symmetrical or synchronic form that are of particular systematic and historical significance, but rather those that exhibit temporal and axiological counter-movements. Another hypothesis borne out in the course of the first funding period is that the negotiation of the tension between heterogenous and heterochronic claims of innovation is especially complex in the case of courtly love, a theme highly integrative in terms of semantics and epistemology. A matter of contention both on the object level and on the meta-level, the competing implications of ,old‘ and ,new‘ multiply and intermingle, producing a variety of interferences: discursive (secular-spiritual, classical-courtly-Christian), generic, media-related (oral vs. literary; manuscript vs. printed text; text vs. image) and linguistic (vernacular vs. Latin). Two complementary synchronic incisions render the unwieldy wealth of material manageable: one trajectory examines late medieval hyperbolic discourses (Überkunstwerke: Hyperbole, Meta-art, Discursive Transgression); the other involves author corpora of the 14th and 15th century (in particular of transitory figures such as Hugo von Montfort or Michel Beheim) as well as bilingual (vernacular and Latin) manuscript miscellanea (Innovation/Novelty and Multilingualism in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Discourse of Courtly Love). Compared to the objectives detailed in the initial application, the project has thus undergone a certain degree of modification in two central respects: 1. the timeframe covered has been deliberately extended to include the 16th century; 2. systematic nuancing has made it possible to dovetail the research areas of project leader and researcher even more precisely.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2305: Discursivizations of the New. Tradition and Innovation in Medieval and Early Modern Texts and Pictures
• International Connection: Switzerland