Historical Narratology and Spatial Chronicles: Narratives of origin and foundation in 15th century vernacular chronicle writing based on the example of Old Bavaria

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Edith Feistner
• Subject Area: German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
• Term: from 2021 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 455367289

The project examines by means of narratology a corpus of historiographic texts written in the transition period between the middle ages and early modern times. These texts have been rarely dealt with in German studies. The focus is pointed on the ‘Chronicles of Bavaria’, written in popular prose during the 15th century by Andreas von Regensburg, Ulrich Füetrer, Hans Ebran von Wildenberg and Veit Arnpeck. The chronicles will not only be compared to each other, but also to sources – including preliminary and competing versions – pulled from different chronicle contexts such as universal, monastery and city chronicles, with correspondingly different scopes of time structuring and concepts of interaction between space and time. The comparison is structured by the pattern of ancestral and dynastic narratives of origin, dealing with the emergence of the political actors’ identity, as well as by narratives of monastery and city foundation, dealing with objectivations of this identity in the territory of the Wittelsbach dynasty over time. Narratives of origin and foundation reflect the different forms of interdependency of space and time, which are characteristic for the ‘Chronicles of Bavaria’. Therefore, the narratological analysis focuses on this interdependency and seeks to clarify in which way the interdependency between space and time affects questions of (the) narrating instance(s), figure design, narrative perspective and the formation of coherence as well as narrative schemes. Regarding the ‘Chronicles of Bavaria’ as a whole, a central question is whether and to what extent the coordination between space and time begins to shift from a former concept of spatialized history to the two-dimensional concept of “Vorstellungsfläche” (Dünne): Is, similar to itineraries, the commemoration of space still essentially accompanied by a three- dimensional, i.e. experienceable reconstruction of tracks, which the founding figures, guided by divine providence, have successively laid out through creation? Or do, influenced by the cultural technique of “Verflachung” (Krämer), the chronicles give preference to a bird’s eye view, ‘flattening’ the non-simultaneity of simultaneously percepted objects as it can be seen in the map of Germany transmitted for the first time by Hartmann Schedel’s ‘Weltchronik’? Thus a narratological analysis can even produce a memorial ‘diagramming’ of a specific territory, so that the ‘Chronicles of Bavaria’ shift in a position of crucial importance for historical narratology.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants