This comprehensive survey examines Germanic literature from the eighth century to the early fifteenth century. The authors treat the large body of late-medieval lyric poetry in detail for the first time.

Edition and translation of the first freely invented German Arthurian romance. Der Stricker's Daniel is the first freely invented German Arthurian romance, bringing the genre to a new level of originality. Beginning with Hartmann von Aue's Erec (c.1185) and up until Daniel (c.1210-25), German poets had drawn their tales of King Arthur's knights exclusively from the world of the French romance, most commonly from the oeuvre of the great romançier Chrétien de Troyes; but in relating his eponymous hero's adventuresagainst giants, dwarves and fellow knights, der Stricker made a clean break with this tradition, claims that he received his story from the French poet Alberich de Besançon being considered a formula only. This volume presents for the first time together both the original Middle High German text of Daniel and a full English rendering of the 8,482 verses, on facing pages; the text is accompanied by extensive notes, bibliography, and index. MICHAEL RESLER is Professor of German Studies, Boston College, Massachusetts.

The Secret in Medieval Literature explores the many secret agents, actions, creatures, and other beings influencing human existence. Medieval poets had a clear sense of the alternative dimension (the secret) and allowed it to enter quite frequently into their texts.

Translators’ contribution to the vitality of textual production in the Renaissance is still often vastly underestimated. Drawing on a wide variety of sources published in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, German, English, and Zapotec, this volume brings a global perspective to the history of translators, and the printed book. Together the essays point out the extent to which particular language cultures were liable to shift, overlap, shrink, and expand during one of the most defining periods in the history of print culture. Interdisciplinary in approach, Trust and Proof investigates translators’ role in the diffusion of discourse about languages and ancient knowledge, as well as changing etiquettes of reading and writing.

This handbook brings together 42 contributions by leading narratologists devoted to the study of narrative devices in European literatures from antiquity to the present. Each entry examines the use of a specific narrative device in one or two national literatures across the ages, whether in successive or distant periods of time. Through the analysis of representative texts in a range of European languages, the authors compellingly trace the continuities and evolution of storytelling devices, as well as their culture-specific manifestations. In response to Monika Fludernik’s 2003 call for a "diachronization of narratology," this new handbook complements existing synchronic approaches that tend to be ahistorical in their outlook, and departs from postclassical narratologies that often prioritize thematic and ideological concerns. A new direction in narrative theory, diachronic narratology explores previously overlooked questions, from the evolution of free indirect speech from the Middle Ages to the present, to how changes in narrative sequence encoded the shift from a sacred to a secular worldview in early modern Romance literatures. An invaluable new resource for literary theorists, historians, comparatists, discourse analysts, and linguists.