Boner, 'Der Edelstein' – Digital Edition and Documentation

• Applicants: Dr. Jochen Apel, since 2/2024; Professor Dr. Gerd Dicke
• Subject Area: German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 516469669

‘Edelstein’ by the Bernese Dominican (Ulrich?) Boner, written around 1350, is the first collection of Aesopian fables and small epics conceived as a complete ‘buoch’ in the German language. Its success is evidenced by 36 known, mostly illustrated codices, its distribution by Diebold Lauber’s manuscript manufactory and two incunabula with which the Bamberg printer-publisher Albrecht Pfister took the investment risk of the first combination of type and woodcut printing in 1461/62. Earliest ‘Edelstein’ studies (Gellert, Gottsched, Lessing) were followed by three early complete editions, which were used by the emerging German studies community to train and debate their editorial tools. In 1844, F. Pfeiffer presented a text-critical reconstructive fourth edition, which was primarily based on two now lost and barely half of the surviving witnesses. Although A. Schönbach pointed out its considerable shortcomings in 1875 and a new edition has been a unanimous desideratum ever since, Pfeiffer's editio citanda has been retained until now. The main crux of a new edition was the unclear reasons for an unstable tradition, which fluctuates in the inventory between 84 nos. in just under half of the textual witnesses and the numerus perfectus of 100 texts together with the prologue and epilogue in only one codex (burnt in 1870). It remained controversial whether a new edition should be based on the gradual authorial growth to a hundred texts or on the successive decay of the collection through eclectic reception. Only an elaborate stemmatology proved that the heterogeneous state of the collection was caused by a variance in tradition rather than in authorship and crystallised, in addition to individual mixed editions, three effective forms that set the goal of the edition: a leading manuscript edition of the author-intended archetypal full form as a reference text for two effective forms that are reduced in number and modified in terms of text, which are to be synoptically comparable. The edited full form appears in three view modes (moderate and forced normalised as well as transcribed according to their respective guide manuscript), to which transcripts of representative textual witnesses of their versions can be added in parallel columns. Like the textual witnesses relevant to the edition, the 30 others can be displayed synoptically or independently in full views of their digital facsimiles. Heidelberg Univ. Library accompanied the project in advance by setting up the virtual manuscript library. It will provide technical support for all phases of the digital edition within the framework of its heiEDITIONS infrastructure, from data management, TEI modelling and authoring aspects to XML processing, visualisation and long-term data publication. A special focus will be on the development of an input tool integrated in the Oxygen XML Editor for a genuinely digitally modelled variant apparatus and on expanding the possibilities of synoptic text and image display.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Maria Effinger; Dr. Christina Patz; Dr. Jakub Simek
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Veit Probst, until 1/2024