Rudolf von Ems, 'Barlaam und Josaphat': Edition, Translation, Critical Commentary

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Mathias Herweg
• Subject Area: German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
• Term: from 2018 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 406120036

The project aims to produce a completely new scholarly edition of Rudolf von Ems's "Barlaam and Josaphat" (c. 1220), basing the editing on a leading manuscript. Preserved in 51 manuscripts known to date, the 'Barlaam' is the most popular medieval version of the originally Indian legend of the Buddha that has survived from the Middle Ages. The text has, however, never yet been revised since its first edition by Pfeiffer in 1843, the philological standards of which are today considered obsolete, and which fundamentally lacks the modern pragmatic features that allow the text to be read by students or non-specialists. The project aims to resolve this situation by editing the text in a more historically and philologically adequate way, and also by adding a commentary, a modern German translation, as well as an introduction that considers the manuscript tradition, the sources, the genre and current research on the text. The new edition will thus offer a reliable and more accurate text to researchers as well as to students and readers of various disciplines.Philological research has confirmed that the tradition of the 'Barlaam' manuscripts allows for an edition close to both manuscript witnesses as well as to an assumed 'authorial' text. As such, the project opts for a slightly normalized and modified leading-manuscript practice, which reflects two philological findings: on the one hand, a significant number of manuscripts of the 'Barlaam' date back almost to the time of Rudolf himself, with some of them even preserving the author's Alemannic dialect; on the other hand, the manuscript tradition clearly shows two major textual 'conditions' (one primarily courtly, the other religious), which can be observed in terms of individual modifications throughout the text's transmission, irrespective of its stemmatological order. As it stands, manuscript D (Freiburg, last quarter of the 13th century) suits best as the leading manuscript. The text it provides is likely to be very representative of the manuscript tradition on the whole. Both its mechanical losses and its intentional cuts will be filled in with text from another old and complete manuscript and clearly marked. Readers will therefore for the first time be able to observe the major modes of reception and the quite striking mouvance of the text, especially when it comes to passages that have been crucial to the interpretation of the text in the scholarly tradition. Variances will be documented in an apparatus below the edited text.This completely new scholarly edition of Rudolf's 'Barlaam' will encourage new perspectives in the fields of both cultural studies and scholarly editing; the aim is to promote further research into one of Rudolf's most popular and intriguing texts. The project is furthermore connected to a broader context of recent debate about editorial methods, with the aim of demonstrating how medieval texts can be edited in a manner close to both author and manuscript.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants