Peter Glasner, Sebastian Winkelsträter, and Birgit Zacke, eds., Abecedarium: Erzählte Dinge im Mittelalter. Basel: Schwabe, 2019
2022
Abstract
A book review. Within the Festschrift genre, the present volume is an extraordinary achievement: it has a clear and solid concept that is applied in most of the contributions.
It includes both theoretical considerations on the "culture of narrated things" and a number of valuable case studies built on close readings of several still notwidely familiar medieval German texts. The textual analysis reveals symbolism, allegory, agency, the power of repetition, transformation, structural value, linguistic associations, and much more in narrated things.
Although the volume clearly shows that the comparative history of medieval literature is still to be written, it is, however, a solid building block-just as it was meant to be.