Mark Chinca and Christopher Young

Responsible Philology

Editing the Kaiserchronik in the Digital Age

Abstract: This essay considers the problem of normalized orthography in critical

editions of Middle High German texts. Whether the orthographical conventions that

crystallized in nineteenth-century philology present a reliable picture of medieval

manuscript spelling is a question that has long been debated by editors and historians

of the German language. It becomes all the more urgent, however, now that digital

reproductions afford direct access to manuscripts. Drawing on their experience of

producing both a digital and an analog print edition of the Kaiserchronik, the authors

of this essay advocate a print spelling from which a certain amount of scribal variation

is filtered out, but always in such a way as to respect and reflect the writing system of

the medieval manuscript. They also suggest that this practice, although its results and

emphases are very different from the orthographies of Lachmann, Benecke, and

Grimm in the nineteenth century, nonetheless shares with its predecessors the

conviction that any representation of scribal writing practices in the typographical

medium of print must bring its readers into contact with some aspect of the historical

linguistic reality. This, the authors contend, is one of the main tasks for a responsible

editorial philology in the digital age.

1. Introduction

Was there a standardized literary language in medieval Germany? The question of the

so-called Middle High German (MHG) “Dichtersprache” cuts to the heart of literary

endeavor in the Blütezeit, the period that witnessed the major flowering of medieval

German literature ca. 1170-1230. Did poets of such regionally diverse origins as the

Swabian Hartmann von Aue (fl. ca. 1170-1210) and the Austrian Walther von der

Vogelweide (fl. ca. 1180-1230) compose their works in a uniform, supraregional form

of the German language? Such uniformity as may be observed is distributed

differently across the various subsystems of literary language. Correspondences are

particularly close on the levels of register, style, and vocabulary—not least in loans

from Old French—whereas greater regional traces are detectable in the phonology

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and morphology. Poets from the north, whose native language was Low German,

composed almost exclusively in High German, showing that the latter was understood

and accepted at courts in northern Germany, and all poets—High German ones

included—avoided rhymes they knew would not function outside their own linguistic

region.1 As Thomas Klein shrewdly observed over thirty years ago, precisely this

technique of avoidance proved that there was no genuine supraregional language that

poets could rely on ca. 1200;2 Klein later returned to erode the edifice further by

arguing that Low German authors had been orientating themselves towards High

German much earlier in the twelfth century than the emergence of the so-called

“Dichtersprache,” and done so, moreover, on the basis of its Central rather than Upper

German variety.3

The question of the “Dichtersprache” also has far-reaching implications for

editorial practice. Most modern editions of MHG literary works use a normalized

orthography, which evolved in the early nineteenth century and is largely associated

with the philologist Karl Lachmann (1793-1851). Lachmann’s goal was to uncover

both the literary koine of the German Middle Ages and the individual author’s

original through careful consideration of the manuscript transmission. Following the

Giessen manuscript of Hartmann’s Iwein (Giessen, University Library, Ms 97, second

quarter of the 13th century), he settled on a set of principles (e.g. the resolution of

superscripts, a diacritic denoting vowel length, differential marking of short and long

mutated vowels) which, after codification in nineteenth-century dictionaries, still

holds sway. Even today, editions of works from the Blütezeit which are transmitted in

late medieval manuscripts are often normalized back across several centuries into

Lachmann’s early thirteenth-century norm, thus both obscuring and obstructing the

history of the language and giving the editor a great deal of leeway in the construction

of a text that is nowhere preserved in the form into which it is being cast.

Doubts about the validity of Lachmann’s orthographical principles have

grown, and perplex editors, who nevertheless find it difficult to abandon the norm, so

entrenched has it become. As Thomas Klein has noted: “Today this dubious paradigm

is mostly either rejected outright or treated at least with skepticism, and yet somehow

it manages to remain in handbooks and people’s minds.”4 The problem is only

exacerbated by the increased interest in, and availability via digital media of,

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manuscripts in the last few decades, which has given rise to “a more or less openly

expressed mistrust of Lachmann’s MHG Dichtersprache, without the debate about the

pros and cons of the matter ever being reopened.”5

This mistrust has been picked up recently by Florian Kragl, in the first full-

length research article on the normalization of MHG orthography for several decades.

Discussions of the theory of text-editing among German medievalists have largely

ignored spelling in favor of semantics and content; Kragl records moreover that after

a brief period of adhering more closely to the orthography of the base manuscripts in

the wake of New Philology, editors have overwhelmingly returned to Lachmann’s

norms.6 The list of authors and texts is stark testimony to a discipline caught in a trap

of its own making: Gottfried’s Tristan, Hartmann’s Erec and Iwein, Wolfram’s

Parzival, and poets such as Walther, Reinmar and Morungen, to name only a few.7

Like Klein, Kragl questions the practice of scholars who implement a linguistic norm

that they know to be illusionary and do so—almost exclusively8—with both a sense of

resignation and a feeble gesture to a student audience that would, apparently,

otherwise be unable to read the language.

Kragl has thrown down the gauntlet to all who edit MHG texts. In this essay,

we take up the challenge, but extend his question further, asking: not only how we

should edit medieval works in full knowledge of the manuscript base, but also how

we produce a critical printed edition alongside the digitization of that manuscript

base? This latter is a dimension that Kragl leaves untouched, yet it is of vital

importance for those who edit today. Kragl’s insouciance towards the digital is

symptomatic of a disjuncture in German thinking about the relationship between

manuscripts, their online presentation and edited texts, which we have experienced

when talking about our own work in recent years: our long-term Kaiserchronik

project, which will be the first work in medieval German to be edited simultaneously

within the different parameters of online and print. We have been advised by various

experts either to normalize (since the manuscripts will be available online) or to

replicate the text of the base manuscript (again, since the manuscripts will be

available online). Neither view is satisfactory: the former because it uses twenty-first-

century technology to justify the continued, unreflected use of nineteenth-century

solutions; the latter because it essentially allows that technology to render the modern

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editor obsolete. As electronic media have become increasingly embedded in academic

pursuits, it is time the discipline addressed itself seriously to the relationship between

the old and the new.

The Kaiserchronik is an excellent place to begin this re-consideration.

Composed in mid-twelfth-century Bavaria, it is the first verse chronicle in any

vernacular and comprises some 17,000 lines that recount the reigns of thirty-six

Roman and nineteen German emperors. It exists in three recensions (A, composed,

probably in Regensburg, ca. 1150; B also in Bavaria, ca. 1200; and C, likewise, ca.

1250) of which there are fifty manuscripts, making it one of the most important works

of the German Middle Ages. Our print edition will be a synoptic one of all three

recensions, with an English translation of A and a critical apparatus of A, B, and C. It

will be accompanied by a website at Heidelberg University Library that will comprise

digitizations and transcriptions of all manuscripts and, via a Lichtpultfunktion, allow

multiple comparisons within and across the recensions.9

Scholarship has relied on Edward Schröder’s late nineteenth-century edition,

which contains the text of A only. Apart from the lack of the other two recensions,

this edition is considered robust, as Mathias Herweg’s recent reproduction of extracts

from it evinces. Yet two questions remain. How should we edit a text that was

composed fifty years before the Blütezeit, on which Lachmann’s linguistic norm was

based, and transmitted moreover in a base manuscript (Vorau, Stiftsbibliothek Codex

276) that also predates it? And how, when thinking of such pre-classical orthography,

do we conceive of it in such a way as to do justice to the massive electronic apparatus

that will accompany it and be used by future readers in as yet indeterminate ways—as

its minor, major or equal partner?

This essay will explore these issues with reference to the A text. It will return,

first, to the aims of the philological pioneers of the nineteenth century, whose work

has been often misunderstood; it will proceed to a thorough examination of

Schröder’s editorial practice, which—again—is misconstrued by scholars today,

paradoxically as near-exemplary; and it will go on to scrutinize the orthographic

inventory of the base manuscript. The conclusion will expand on our contention that

such attention to old philology should be seen as vital to editors in the age of new

philology and digital humanities.

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2. The nineteenth-century origins of German philology

It is common for medievalists nowadays to reject Lachmann’s editorial method out of

hand, without however appreciating his seminal accomplishments, and above all

without seeking first to understand the rationale for his method in the context of the

emergent field of German philology in the first half of the nineteenth century.10 Not

not only did Lachmann produce, in a period of just thirteen years between 1820 and

1833, the first critical editions of medieval German literature—a selection of

thirteenth-century poets, the Nibelungenlied and Klage, Hartmann’s Iwein, the lyrics

of Walther von der Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Willehalm, and

Titurel—but he also translated Shakespeare’s sonnets and Macbeth; completed

Bentley’s plan for a critical edition of the New Testament (1831, and in a second

fuller edition 1842-1850); and produced new texts of Catullus (1829), Tibullus

(1829), Genesius (1834), Terentianus Maurus (1836), Babrius (1845), Avianus

(1845), Gaius (1841-1842), the Agrimensores Romani (1848-1852), and Lucretius

(1850). This is not to neglect his two late vernacular German undertakings

(Hartmann’s Gregorius and Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s Frauendienst and Frauenbuch),

influential studies (e.g. his habilitation thesis on the original form of the

Nibelungenlied, 1816), commentaries (e.g. Zu den Nibelungen und der Klage, 1836)

and posthumous editions (Lucilius, by Vahlen 1876).

Lachmann’s endeavor appears all the more formidable when set against the

context of German philology in the early nineteenth century. For together with his

Göttingen teacher Georg Friedrich Benecke (1762-1844), an expert in English and

German literature, and the polymath grammarian Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), he did

not so much establish an academic field as transform it in the act of making it.11

Central to the common pursuit of these three scholars was the desire to apply the

methods of biblical and classical philology to the study of medieval German language

and texts in a period when manuscripts were being discovered and subjected to

investigation by librarians and academics.

At a time when medieval German editions were either reprints of partially

corrected single manuscripts or simple modernizations, there was a genuine need for

methodological reflection. On the one hand, Bodmer and Breitinger had set the tone

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in the mid-eighteenth century with their Sammlung von Minnesingern aus dem

schwaebischen Zeitpuncte CXL Dichter enthaltend (1758-59) and its precursor

Proben der alten schwäbischen Poesie des Dreyzehnten Jahrhunderts. Aus der

Maneßischen Sammlung (1748), which reproduced single witnesses without

punctuation or accurate division between strophes; Christoph Heinrich Müller

(occasionally Myller) produced serviceable copies, which sometimes depended on

questionable transcriptions by other parties; and other texts still, such as Casparson’s

Wilhelm, came from scholars whose paltry knowledge of MHG produced texts of

dubious quality. On the other hand, modernizers such as Johann Joachim Eschenburg

(Boner’s Edelstein, 1810) and Ludwig Tieck (Minnelieder aus dem Schwäbischen

Zeitalter, 1803) cloaked MHG in New High German (NHG) forms, and not always

without wrinkle. The most prominent and convoluted example was Friedrich Heinrich

von der Hagen’s Nibelungenlied, which underwent three editions between 1807 and

1816. The first was neither a translation nor a reproduction of the MHG text, with the

medieval lexicon appearing in NHG guise; the second, while aspiring to be critical,

returned to Müller’s single manuscript; and the third produced something approaching

a diplomatic transcription of the oldest surviving witness.

A step change was announced, if not immediately realized, by Benecke in his

review of the first edition of von der Hagen’s Nibelungenlied and the introduction to

his own Beyträge zur Kenntniss der altdeutschen Sprache und Literatur (1810).

Editions of Boner’s Edelstein and Wirnt von Grafenberg’s Wigalois based on several

manuscripts followed, with Benecke’s Boner, in particular, containing the tools—

glossary, short text extracts grammatical explanation, and cross reference to other

works—that enabled the first proper study of MHG literary language. By this stage,

he had been joined in Göttingen by the precocious and prodigious Lachmann who was

eager to introduce the central tenets of biblical scholarship to the medieval vernacular

—i.e. editing on the basis of the reconstruction of the text’s history achieved by an

examination of all manuscripts. If Lachmann was not the only scholar to have had

such thoughts, he was the first to pursue them with a singularity of purpose, working

his way through the MHG corpus to collect forms, rhymes, and usage that would form

a solid basis for editorial intervention. His own first edition, Auswahl aus den

hochdeutschen Dichtern des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts, a selection of MHG poetry for

classroom use in the Gymnasium in Königsberg, where he taught at school and

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university before returning to a chair in Berlin, appeared in 1820—a year after the

publication of Benecke’s Wigalois edition and the first volume of Grimm’s Deutsche

Grammatik.

As these dates suggest, the emergence of the field was dynamic, and it would

remain so throughout the 1820s. The correspondence between the three scholars as

well as their reviews of one another’s works demonstrate how much they were

gaining from a febrile epoch of philological discovery. Benecke and Grimm, for

instance, solved mutual problems and corrected the other’s misapprehensions (e.g.

about the lack of inflection of the pronoun ir, the status of i-mutation, and the

declension of the defiinite article). Lachmann trawled urgently through his notes for a

day to disabuse Benecke of the notion that original /iu/ and the mutation of /û/ should

be differentiated orthographically. Grimm responded to Lachmann’s Walther edition

with a plea to rely less on fashionable and potentially soon obsolete metrical theory in

favor of grammatical knowledge, which, he said, had already been established for a

good five years.

Philological knowledge was a moving target. There was no dictionary of

MHG—only Benecke’s unpublished collection of lexicographical notes which, on the

evidence of his posthumous collaborators, were less rigorous than many had believed.

Having agreed to take on the supposedly straightforward job of preparing Benecke’s

collection for publication, Wilhelm Müller, who paid Benecke’s executors for the

privilege, and his assistant Friedrich Zarncke, found themselves lumbered with a

gargantuan task that they later lamented in a series of despairing forewords.12

Lachmann, Benecke’s first choice for the project, almost certainly knew better from

first hand, and turned down the opportunity. Until 1822, there was also no account of

MHG phonology. This did not arrive until the second edition of Grimm’s Deutsche

Grammatik, which added some 600 pages of phonological analysis of the Germanic

languages to the first volume, which had appeared in 1819 with only an examination

of the inflectional systems.

Work on Lachmann’s Auswahl had obviously been fast, furious and, for the

editor and his correspondents, fascinating. As he was aware himself, he was not

always consistent, and ideas changed as he worked: “There has been no lack of fervor,

certainly, or industry: but as knowledge accrues our own endeavors inevitably seem

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less satisfactory from day to day.”13 Word separation and the marking of elision

through apostrophe were irregular. Punctuation was not always inserted. Three full

pages of grammatical corrections (e.g. strong for weak nouns) had to be appended to

the introduction. The appearance of Benecke’s Wigalois during his writing forced him

eventually to distinguish between /iu/ and /ü:/ (as opposed to running them together,

as in some manuscripts, under <u̍>)—a feature he could only correct, however, from

the eleventh gathering. And following correspondence with Grimm on his as yet

unpublished phonology, the glossary contained nuanced distinctions between vowel

qualities depending on stress, although these were not implemented in the edition.

While Lachmann, Benecke, and Grimm shared the same conviction that the

language of the German Middle Ages should be captured and rendered as accurately

as possible, they differed in their views as to what was achievable and why.

Orthography, therefore, was a contested issue between them—particularly in the

1820s. As their conversations continued, contradictions in their respective convictions

were gradually leveled. Sometimes this resulted simply from compromise, e.g. when

in 1820 Lachmann gave up writing <k> at the end of words against the usage of both

Benecke and Grimm, “basically so as not to stand alone.”14 There was also a reduction

of elaboration: the complexities of Grimm’s phonology, adopted for the glossary of

Lachmann’s Auswahl, disappeared from his editions through the rest of the 1820s.

And by the time of the Wolfram edition in 1833, Lachmann had definitely decided to

settle for the less complicated status quo: “It seemed best to me to settle without

artificiality for the MHG orthography that we have established in recent years ... e.g.

the marking of all long vowels, the strict distinction of mutated vowels, the separation

of <k> and <ch>. For this orthography delivers what one can expect of it.”15

It is important to register that the orthography of MHG which a few decades

later became codified in the Benecke-Müller-Zarncke dictionary (BMZ) and which

prevails as the standard to the present day emerged in the 1820s on the basis of

historical grammar, a forensic study of manuscripts, a detailed knowledge of usage

and rhyme, as well as discussion, compromise, and accommodation—rather than

simply by diktat or, as is too often assumed, by a mere desire to present MHG as

easily as possible to the lay reader (even if the second edition of Lachmann’s Iwein,

for which he was joined as co-editor by Benecke, might give rise to that impression).16

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It is equally vital though, for the purposes of this essay, to understand the reasoning

behind the positions taken up by Benecke, Lachmann, and Grimm on the way to this

norm, and how these changed in emphasis over the formative years of the subject.

In short: Benecke championed the documentary character of the manuscripts,

Grimm the etymology of phonemes, and Lachmann pronunciation.17 Benecke and

Grimm represented polar opposites, Benecke privileging the witness of the

manuscripts, Grimm the abstract language system that might be extrapolated from

them:

Benecke: “I confess that my orthography does not consider the novice at all;

rather I seek to follow what appears to me most desirable when applying any

writing system to a language. Neither too much nor too little ... We must

reproduce faithfully and authentically what we find in the language. We

should improve nothing, drawing from neither an earlier nor a later period.”18

Grimm: “Whatever is there in the language itself should be reproduced

faithfully and authentically ... Whatever is there in the language itself, not in

manuscripts, which are by turn good or bad or, if we only want to take good

ones (which is a relative concept), display infinite degrees of goodness. The

comparison of many good manuscripts, drawing on older and younger ones,

and ultimately attention to rhymes will allow us to see to the core of the

language itself—from what we attain this way we can draw out a general

rule.”19

Grimm used linguistic comparison, particularly with Old High German (OHG), to

help determine the underlying MHG language he believed the manuscripts to be

revealing; whereas Benecke considered it impossible to determine linguistic change

with such precision that the manuscript forms and their rendition with diplomatic

accuracy could be abandoned. For Benecke, recording what scribes actually wrote

was as important as figuring out what system lay behind it.

Lachmann’s priority was different again. Not only did he wish to produce a

text that was as close as possible to the author’s original in content, but—influenced

by the Italian humanist philologist Leonardo Salviati (1540-1589)—one that scanned

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and sounded as if straight from the author’s mouth. Lachmann’s thinking about how

to achieve this altered over time, and his early principle “to introduce an archaic but

exact spelling”20 turned out to be more flexible in practice than it first appeared. The

gap between the text of the Auswahl and its more sophisticated glossary is a case in

point. And despite the latter being influenced by Grimm, Lachmann’s inclination was

to stay close to his teacher Benecke. The manuscripts seemingly contained enough

evidence to suggest that pronunciation was “oscillating,” and this being so, the editor

was to stay close to his source and alter only with extreme caution:

Now there is altogether so much oscillation in the orthography that I am loath

to abandon the firm footing of the manuscripts. My basic rule, therefore, is

only to deviate from them where I think I can prove the author had a different

spelling, or where the spelling of the manuscript is clumsy and can be altered

without changing the pronunciation.21

By 1826, the “oscillation of pronunciation” had led him to an apparent volte-

face on the issue of “precision”: “I don't like to be absolutely precise when it comes to

certain small matters (Kleinigkeiten) of orthography and punctuation.”22 The operative

word here is “Kleinigkeiten.” For at the same time, Lachmann’s interests also

resonated with Grimm’s. Both, after all, wanted to get beneath the surface of the

manuscript, and both shared a distrust of scribes. In the introduction to the Auswahl,

Lachmann had already sought to convince Benecke that the oldest manuscript was not

necessarily the most reliable, listing a series of stylistic and grammatical infelicities in

the Cologne manuscript of Wigalois, and concluding:

For we are agreed that, with the exception of a very few dialectal details, the

poets of the thirteenth century spoke a distinct invariant High German, while

uneducated scribes permitted to themselves other forms of the common

language, which were in part older, in part corrupt.23

This sentiment was reasserted to the point of principle in the first edition of his

Iwein and seven years later in his Parzival. As early as 1822, in fact, Lachmann had

begun to seek out the works that would give best access to the language that poets

spoke and scribes in his view habitually disfigured. His initial search took him to

Wolfram, Walther, and Hartmann, but further investigation persuaded him to

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concentrate on the latter. Hartmann’s comparative “regularity” and the state of the

best manuscripts would allow him to distill the underlying structure of the poetic

language of the age. For this, a relatively conservative orthography, based closely on

the manuscripts, suited the task. Thus the views of Benecke (who would join him as

co-editor of the second edition of Iwein) and Grimm could be combined.24 Having set

these parameters, Lachmann could nonetheless be flexible when it came to the

practice of capturing the poet’s voice. He had drawn criticism from Grimm about his

overly confident intervention on grounds of meter, and did so again for his view that

Wolfram’s language changed during the long gestation of a work on the scale of

Parzival. Manuscript evidence led him to admit limited spelling variation to reflect

this belief.

Lachmann was therefore a pragmatist, a philologist of the highest order, and a

Romantic idealist. His decisions were made on the basis of painstaking and extensive

groundwork. He knew when the means were proportionate, if not perfect—the MHG

orthography being “completely commensurate with pronunciation, even if it could not

capture all of the finer nuances equally well”25 And he strove “to produce the original,

without any expectation of complete success.”26 Like his major interlocutors, he saw

in the language of the manuscripts a task to be solved. It is hardly his failing if the

solution he devised for a narrow set of authors in a narrow time period became

institutionalized in German philology through the MHG dictionaries and the influence

of Neogrammarians in the second half of the nineteenth century, and through the

publishers and the university seminars they serve in the twentieth. They have missed

his intent (even if we no longer share it) and disregarded his flexibility (even if it is

limited).

If Lachmann saw the manuscripts as a task and the edition as an accumulation

of the editor's endeavors to render these in simpler form, the doyen of post-1945

German philology, Karl Stackmann, reversed the poles in his seminal essay of 1964,

“Mittelalterliche Texte als Aufgabe.” Lachmann’s luster had long since diminished.

This was partly due to the obvious discrepancy between his principle that the editor

should follow objective rules and his practice of indulging considerable discretion,

(particularly for metrical purposes); and partly because the lack of explanatory notes

—Lachmann wrote for intelligent lay readers who would gratefully accept his

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expertise rather than for experts who could in any case find their own way round

manuscripts—fell short of academic scrutiny. But it was mainly the recognition that it

was futile for an editor to try to reconstruct the author’s original that had cast his

method into doubt. This method, moreover, could only work under very specific

conditions.27

Yet, as Stackmann argued, this was no reason to give up on the idea of

producing a critical text. In the early twentieth century, the Old French scholar Joseph

Bédier set a new trend with his insistence that only by editing a single manuscript

with minimum intervention could scholars establish requisite objectivity. Stackmann,

however, took up Lachmann’s mantle in revised form, and showed how, with

appropriate controls, it was nevertheless possible to produce a text that was “better

than the best” available manuscript. Editions, Stackmann proposed, should: be based

on a full knowledge of the transmission; rely on a base manuscript; clearly mark all

deviations from this manuscript; and contain an apparatus that explained major

variants and where the text had come from a lectio difficilior. Stackmann’s creed has

held sway in German philology for over half a century, and not surprisingly he gave

an authoritative and robust response to New Philology in the 1990s. Tantalizingly, on

the matter of orthography, Stackmann was cautious, bracketing out a full discussion,

and noting simply: “Since practically no one believes any more that it is possible to

reconstitute a medieval author’s personal language in all its particulars, we shall have

to adopt, wherever possible, the cautiously normalized usage of a base manuscript.”28

3. The Monumenta Germaniae Historica and Schröder’s

Kaiserchronik edition

Stackmann presented his general principles as a belated adjustment of Lachmann’s

method to the challenge posed for text-editing by Bédier. Yet the style of editing he

advocated, in which both the critical text and the linguistic norm are oriented to a base

manuscript, already had a tradition in Germany that reached back to the founding

period of philology in the early nineteenth century. It was not, however, practiced on

poetic works, but on historical sources from the Middle Ages. Georg Heinrich Pertz

(1795-1876), the first editor of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH), the

series of primary sources for German history before ca. 1500, argued that the text of

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every historical source must be established on the basis of the “best manuscript,”

which for him meant the one that analysis of the entire transmission revealed to be the

most reliable witness to the original version. Pertz’s principles were incorporated into

the editorial guidelines formally adopted by the MGH in 1824: each source was to be

critically edited on the basis of the manuscript or manuscripts that were considered to

transmit the original text most faithfully; manuscript spelling was to be retained,

except for the use of <u>, <v>, and <w> and capital letters, which was to be

normalized according to modern typographical conventions; modern punctuation was

to be introduced, except in editions of charters.29 These principles evidently envisaged

a Lachmannian recensio of the transmission, in order to determine manuscript

filiations and the proximity of each surviving witness to the archetype and the

original; the difference was the expectation that the linguistic form of the edited text

should be oriented to scribal usage in a base manuscript or group of manuscripts.

The 1824 guidelines were extremely general and left room for a range of

editorial approaches and solutions in practice. Nowhere is this more apparent than in

the editions of vernacular German chronicles that were published in the MGH

“Deutsche Chroniken” series in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Where the source in question was transmitted in a unique manscript, the only issue for

the editor was how far to normalize the scribal language over and above the minimal

changes expressly mandated by the guidelines. At one extreme, Carl Kraus’s edition

of the Trierer Silvester reproduced the digraphs <uͦ> and <vͦ> of the manuscript

fragments rather than replace them with the modern typographical symbols that had

become conventional philological notation for the several MHG phonemes they may

represent; at the other end of the spectrum, Hans Naumann’s text of the Kreuzfahrt

des Landgrafen Ludwigs des Frommen von Thüringen normalized the manuscript

spelling very considerably. In the case of sources transmitted in multiple manuscripts,

the editor invariably performed a Lachmannian recensio in order to determine the

relationship of the extant manuscripts to the archetype and orginal of the work, but

exercised considerable freedom when deciding how to treat the linguistic form of the

chosen base manuscript. Sometimes, as with Ludwig Weiland’s Sächsische

Weltchronik, where the Middle Low German manuscript presented little difficulty of

transposition into the modern print alphabet, the scribal language was only moderately

normalized; in other editions (the works of Jans Enikel; the Österreichische Chronik

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von den 95 Herrschaften) it was far more extensively standardized in the direction of

typographical Middle High German; in one case, that of the Limburger Chronik,

whose best manuscript is from the sixteenth century, the original language of the

fourteenth-century author was restored on the basis of extant charters known to have

been written by him.

Edward Schröder’s edition of the Kaiserchronik appeared in the “Deutsche

Chroniken” series in 1892. So far as establishing the text was concerned, Schröder

followed the established MGH practice of Lachmannian recensio in order to

determine the base manuscript and also the principles for emending it whenever it

seemed to him that another branch of the transmission preserved the original text

more faithfully.30 The manuscript on which his edition is based—Vorau,

Stiftsbibliothek Codex 276—dates from the last quarter of the twelfth century; it is the

oldest of the surviving manucripts that transmit the complete text of the

Kaiserchronik. Three scribes were involved in copying the chronicle: the main scribe,

who was responsible for almost all of the text; a second, near-contemporary hand who

added corrections in-text and marginally, and a third, later hand, who recopied the

outer leaves of the first and twelfth quires, which must have become worn from use;

the written language of the text is regionally Bavarian.31 When it came to deciding the

external form of his critical text, Schröder declared that he would take scribal usage as

his guide, in conformity with the editorial principles of the MGH, rather than impose

any of the standardized versions of the language then in use among editors:

So far as the outward form of the text is concerned, the Vorau Manuscript

(which is close in time and place to the original) by and large preserves the

guise of the original so faithfully that I have preferred to tolerate a part of its

irregularities (thereby remaining true to the well-established principle of the

Monumenta Germaniae) and not sought by normalizing to achieve a form that

would inevitably have divested the work of its character of belonging to a

transitional period, and made it appear either too archaic or too modern.32

On careful reading, the statement is not a declaration against all normalization and in

favor of reproducing every aspect of the manuscript orthography. (Note that Schröder

says he tolerated only “part” of its “irregularities.”) Rather, it is a declaration against

extreme forms of normalization that would have resulted in a text that looked either

14

too archaic for a mid twelfth-century work such as the Kaiserchronik, or too modern.

The former would have been the outcome if Schröder had aligned the spelling and

grammatical forms of his text with a canonical earlier author such as Notker III of St

Gallen (ca. 950-1022);33 the latter would have been the result if he had adopted the

norms of Lachmann’s editions, which are based on literary language around the turn

of the thirteenth century.

In actual fact, Schröder intervened in the manuscript language to an extent that

went considerably beyond the minimal changes provided for in the MGH guidelines.

Although his critical text retains a degree of scribal variation (for example, the

spellings of initial and medial /k/ as either <k> or <ch> and of final /g/ as <c>, <k>,

or <ch>), Schröder performed a normalization, especially in the representation of

vowels, that was not very far from Lachmann’s standard: the scribal digraphs <oͮ>,

<uͦ>, <vͦ>, and <wͦ> are replaced by monophthongal or diphthongal graphs in line with

the conventions of typographical MHG; long vowels are consistently distinguished

from short by the addition of a circumflex;34 the scribe’s “more or less unsteady”

representation of the high front and back vowel sounds of MHG is replaced by the

univocal system of graphs used by Lachmann, the Grimms, and the standard

dictionaries: <i> and <u> for the short monophthongs, <î> and <û> for their long

equivalents, and <ie> and <uo> for the diphthongs.35

The principal area of vowel spelling where Schröder chose not to implement

Lachmannian norms was i-mutation: a combinatory sound change involving the

palatalization (fronting and raising) of stressed vowels when they are followed by an

unstressed short or long /i/ or by the semivowel /j/ (thus OHG gasti, nom. pl. > MHG

geste “strangers”; OHG skônî > MHG schœne “beauty”; OHG skarjo > MHG scherge

“messenger, usher”).36 Although the sound change was likely complete well before

the beginning of the MHG linguistic period ca. 1050, consistent marking of all

palatalized vowels and diphthongs became the rule in written German only from the

thirteenth century;37 versions of the scribal graphs provide the basis of the

typographical conventions for representing MHG i-mutation that have been

established in philology from the time of Lachmann and the Grimms: <e>, <ä>, and

<æ> for the palatal phonemes arising from mutation of /a/ and /â/, <ö> and <œ> for

mutated /o/ and /ô/, <ü> and <iu> for /u/ and /û/, and finally /öu/ and /üe/ for the

15

mutated diphthongs /ou/ and /uo/. In the case of the Kaiserchronik, only the mutation

of short /a/ is regularly represented in the spelling of the Vorau manuscript; that of

long /â/ is often, but by no means universally, reflected in the graph <æ>; the mutated

allophones of the other vowels and diphthongs are marked either sporadically, or by

graphs that are not unequivocally umlaut markers, or not at all. Thus, although

introducing the conventional typographical symbols across the board would have

brought the text closer to the norm of MHG as it is presented in the standard

grammars, dictionaries, and critical editions, it would also have imposed upon the

work precisely the misleadingly modern aspect that Schröder wished to avoid.

Accordingly, his text marks the mutation of short /a/ always (e.g. geste “strangers”;

geslähte / geslehte “race”); it mirrors scribal variance by tolerating allographs of the

same word with either unmutated long <â> or mutated <æ> (mâre ~ mære “story,

tidings”); finally, it leaves umlaut completely unmarked in all other contexts, so that

the words that BMZ and Lexer give as hövesch “courtly,” hœren “to hear,” vürste

“prince,” siure “bitterness,” vröude “joy,” vüeren “to lead” appear in Schröder’s

edition as hovesc, hôren, vurste, sûre, vroude, vuoren.

Thus far, we have observed Schröder balancing respect for manuscript

orthography (for example in the representation of i-mutation) with the desire to help

the reader (hence interventions such as the resolution of scribal digraphs). There was,

however, a third factor in play in his decisions about the external form of the text, one

that moreover exceeded the parameters set by the usage of the base manuscript. That

factor—which has to be inferred from Schröder’s editorial decisions, since he never

enunciates it explicitly—was his readiness to adjust, and even override, scribal usage

so as to make the linguistic form of his text reflect more clearly what he took to be the

metrical and prosodic structures of the author’s original verse composition.

Sometimes this readiness manifests itself in the redistribution or reduction of lexical

and phonological variation, as the following three examples illustrate. (1) The

temporal adverb and conjunction dô “then” is spelled three different ways by the main

Vorau scribe: duͦ, doͮ, do. Schröder reduced these forms to two, representing the first

as duo (an older and longer form of dô), and the second and third as either duo or dô

according to whether the word bears metrical stress.38 (2) The MHG definite article in

the nominative and accusative plural has the regular form die in the masculine and

feminine genders, and diu for the neuter gender; the Vorau scribe observes the

16

distinction, but sometimes collapses it by writing the short form di for both. Schröder

restored the full, distinctive forms. (3) The devoicing of initial /d-/ to /t-/, a

characteristically Upper German pronunciation which is reflected in manuscript

spellings such as tonreslege “thunderclaps,” is reversed by Schröder except when the

letter is preceded by a voiceless stop or fricative: line 753 “an dem triten tage” (on the

third day) > “an dem dritten tage”; but line 15265 “ân sik tan” (without victory

thence).39 Schröder provided no explicit rationale for these changes; presumably the

resulting distribution of voiced and voiceless variants according to phonetic

environment was intended to reflect the original author’s desired pronunciation.40 (4)

Variant spellings of the same sound which Schröder otherwise tolerated are leveled in

rhymes: lines 7418-19 mac : tach > mac : tac (<-c ~ -ch> are allographs of affricate /-

kx/); lines 4919-20 waren : romære > wæren : Rômære; lines 11534-35: romare :

nivmære > Rômâre : niumâre (<a ~ æ> are allographs of the palatal long vowel /æ/

resulting from i-mutation of /â/). It is not entirely clear in this instance whether

Schröder’s changes were intended to reflect the spelling as the author wanted it, or

whether they were meant purely to help modern readers, who might otherwise be

misled into believing that the words in question are not pure rhymes.

In the foregoing examples, Schröder generalized certain scribal spellings at the

expense of others; he did not introduce anything into his text that the main Vorau

scribe could not have written. In other instances, however, he adopted forms that the

scribe never wrote, or wrote only very rarely, because he believed they were required

by the prosody of the original work. One example is the word for “nothing”: the

scribe’s preferred form niht is regularly altered by Schröder to nieth when it rhymes

or assonates with words like diet “people” or liep “dear, beloved,” even though the

second form is generally not found in Bavarian written varieties from this period, and

the scribe hardly ever writes it: in the entire chronicle, the form nieth or nît occurs

only twice in rhyme position (line 3270 : liep; line 160004 : widerriet “counseled

against”).41 A second example is the word for “bishop.” The scribe always writes the

distinctively Bavarian form biscolf for the more usual biscof;42 Schröder substitutes

the latter, not only in rhymes and assonances (with hof “court,” (ie)doch “yet,” noch

“still”) but also in line-internal position, even though the form is nowhere in the

scribal repertoire of spellings.

17

From this survey of Schröder’s treatment of the external form of the text, it is

evident that the MGH principle of following the manuscript orthography came under

pressure from two other principles: serving the convenience of the reader, and

restoring the original prosody and meter of the work. Scribal “irregularities” are not

tolerated where they might confuse the reader (in addition to the examples mentioned

above, one may add: the reversal of the <th> metathesis in forms such as (du) math >

maht “(you sg.) can,” and the disambiguation of <ſ> according to whether its value is

sibilant or shibilant, thus geſah > either gesach “saw,” or gescah “happened”).43 Many

of these normalizations are justified if the text is to be accessible to users without

specialist paleographical training. The normalizations that Schröder undertook to

reveal the putative original structure of the verse, on the other hand, are more

contentious, since they rely on assumptions about the rules of vernacular prosody in

the middle of the twelfth century which cannot be proven. It is well known that

assonances and consonantal half-rhymes were acceptable in poetry of the early MHG

period (ca. 1050-1170); the difficulty lies in determining the boundaries of tolerance

for these less than pure forms of rhyme. Schröder’s substitution of biscof for biscolf

assumes that, in the middle of the twelfth century, the rules did not permit half-

rhymes between a single consonant and a consonant cluster: thus biscolf : hof, and

biscolf : noch are unacceptable, whereas biscof : hof and biscof : noch are within the

zone of tolerance. There is, however, no guarantee that the parameters were drawn

this tightly, and indeed the manuscript evidence strongly suggests that they were not.44

Schröder arguably went too far in allowing his “convenience” and “prosody”

principles to override scribal usage; the result is a critical text that is at some distance

not only from the language of the Vorau codex but also from the Bavarian written

variety of which that manuscript is a specimen. Even though Schröder believed that

the chronicle was originally composed in Bavaria,45 and even though his critical text

retains several of the manuscript’s very marked Upper German or Bavarian features

(chom, preterite indicative sg. “came”; haln “to fetch”; megen present indicative pl.

“can”; devoiced initial /b-/ in spellings such as pilde “image,” plîe “lead”),46 he

reduced or eliminated many other Bavarian features: in addition to the already

mentioned substitution of biscof for biscolf and nieth for niht, he removed

characteristically Bavarian spellings such as the <æi> graph for the diphthong /ei/

(e.g. æin “one,” hæilic “holy”), and wart for wort “word” (a spelling which reflects

18

the phonological collapse of /ar/ and /or/ in Bavarian dialect).47 Not only are these

interventions based on sometimes challengeable assumptions about both modern

readers’ limitations and twelfth-century prosody, they create a misleading impression

of the written variety of the chronicle’s oldest complete manuscript: the Bavarianisms

that are retained appear all the more marked and unusual, because they appear in a

normalized linguistic landscape many of whose other Bavarian features have been

significantly eroded.

4. Linguistic normalization in the new Kaiserchronik edition

Our critical text of Recension A of the Kaiserchronik is, like Schröder’s, based on the

Vorau manuscript. Unlike Schröder (or, for that matter, Stackmann) the goal however

is not to produce a “better” text than the “best” manuscript; we follow a deliberately

conservative emendation policy of correcting only outright errors of copying (e.g.

grammatical and lexical solecisms, passages where the text would otherwise be

meaningless), in the conviction that such a strategy is the most appropriate one for the

genre. Chronicles were written with a view to further continuation and reworking;

hence the text-states of individual manuscript recensions are at least as important as

any putative original or archetype standing at the head of the transmission.48

When it comes to the external linguistic form of the text, here too the policy is

to respect the documentary character of the manuscript by subjecting the scribal

writing system to the minimum of interventions required to produce a readable text in

the modern typographical medium. Thus, unlike Schröder, we do not distinguish long

vowels from short by adding a circumflex, because the scribe did not use this or any

other accent to mark vowel length consistently;49 scribal usages that Schröder leveled

are retained whenever they pose no insuperable difficulty for the modern reader who

has become accustomed to them, for example: the <æi> spelling for the diphthong

/ei/, the alternation between voiced and devoiced spellings of initial /d-/; spelling

alternants in rhyme position (e.g. mac : tach; romare : nivmære) are left unadjusted,

as is the manuscript’s characteristic preference for the forms biscolf and niht; we do

not emend or normalize on the grounds of rhyme, meter, or prosody, since we cannot

be certain about the parameters of acceptable usage, either at the time of the

chronicle’s original composition or when the Vorau manuscript was copied.

19

Manuscript spellings are normalized only in those very rare cases when they confront

philologically and paleographically untrained readers with genuine comprehension

difficulties, or might mislead them into positing dialectally anomalous forms. Thus,

like Schröder, we disambiguate the graph <ſ> according to whether it is sibilant /s/ or

shibilant /sc/; metathetical <th> for /ht/ is reversed; the idiosyncratic spelling sprak

“spoke” is normalized to sprah so as not to give the misleading appearance of a Low

German form in this Upper German text.50

The only challenge to producing a readable printed edition of the Vorau text is

the interpretation and resolution of the scribal digraphs <oͮ>, <uͦ / vͦ>, <wͦ>. Simply

reproducing these symbols exactly as they appear in the manuscript is not a defensible

strategy in an edition designed to be used by a wider readership than the small number

of philological specialists, for a number of reasons. First, spellings like voͮrste

“prince” or wͦnder “miracle, wonder” are difficult to recognize and look up under their

standard dictionary lemmas vürste, wunder. Second, the relationship between graph

and phoneme is by no means univocal, so that the user cannot count, for example, on

<uͦ> always representing the diphthong /uo/ (it does in guͦt = guot “good,” but not in

buͦrc = burc “town, castle” or tuͦfe = toufe “baptism”). Third, there is the danger that

readers might deduce from manuscript spellings such as wͦnne and voͮrste that the

scribe wrote the dialectally incongruous Central German forms wonne and vorste

instead of Bavarian wunne “bliss” and vurste / vürste “prince”:51 in fact, <wͦ> must

here be interpreted as a double letter <vv>, with the first <v> standing for the

approximant /w/ and the diacritic distinguishing the second as vowel /u/; <oͮ> is a

positional variant used by the scribe after <v> because it is optically more distinct

than plain <u>.

The scale of the challenge is illustrated by figures 1 and 2. These show the

range of usage of the digraphs <oͮ>, <uͦ / vͦ>, and <wͦ> in two large samples of the

Vorau text of the Kaiserchronik: lines 2875-5838 (fig. 1) and lines 8704-11585 (fig.

2). Totalling almost six thousand lines, these samples account for roughly one third of

the complete chronicle and are therefore extensive enough to be regarded as

representative.

[INSERT FIGURES 1 AND 2 HERE OR, IF IMPRACTICAL, AT END OF ESSAY]

20

The table below integrates and simplifies the data into an overview of the standard

MHG phonemes and phoneme sequences that the digraphs may represent. (For the

purposes of counting, words with alternative forms are normally included under their

main form; occurrences of the temporal adverb and conjunction dô / duo have been

omitted from the count because the scribal spellings constitute a special case.)52 From

the spread and the frequencies two salient facts emerge. First, <oͮ> has a much wider

functional range than the other digraphs, largely because of its function as a positional

graph for a /u/-type sound after <v> or <w>. Second, <uͦ / vͦ> is predominantly a graph

for the diphthong /uo/.

<oͮ> represents:

/o/ (17 examples)

/ô/ (1)

/œ/ (3)

/u/ (97; 83 of these occurrences follow <v> or <w>)

/ü/ (135; 132 of these occurrences follow <v> or <w>)

/û/ (84; 73 of these occurrences are the preposition ûf “(up)on”)

/iu/ (3)

/uo/ (65; 50 of these occurrences follow <v> or <w>)

/üe/ (23; 21 of these occurrences follow <v> or <w>)

/ou/ (161)

/öu/ (11)

/ouw/ (59)

/öuw/ (15)

21

<uͦ / vͦ> represents:

/o/ (2; 3 if sloz is short)

/ô/ (1 if slôz is long)

/u/ (24)

/ü/ (15)

/û/ (16)

/iu/ (6)

/uo/ (384 + 15 ambivalent instances which may be /üe/)

/üe/ (54)

/ou/ (3)

/ouw/ (1)

<wͦ> represents:

/vü/ (2)

/vuo/ (2)

/w/ (2)

/wu/ (10 + 1 ambivalent case which may be /wü/)

/wü/ (4)

/wuo/ (3)

Since the spelling of our edition aims to reflect the writing system of the

manuscript, rather than the phonemic structure of MHG, the resolution of the digraphs

is not as simple as this overview might lead one to think. Specifically, the final

22

decision will depend on our assumptions about important sound changes that occurred

before and during the MHG period, and about whether the digraphs reflect these

changes in spelling in the relevant contexts. The sound changes in question are i-

mutation and diphthongization. So far as the former is concerned, we have already

noted that the scribe deploys the unambiguous graphs <e> and <æ> to mark palatal

variants of short /a/ and long /â/;53 the same clarity does not however attach to the

digraphs that sometimes occur in contexts where, phonologically speaking, one would

expect the palatal variants of the back vowels and diphthongs /o ô u û ou uo/, i.e. /ö œ

ü iu öu üe/. In the first place, <oͮ>, <uͦ / vͦ>, and <wͦ> are not unequivocal markers of

palatalization, since they are all also capable of representing unmutated sounds, e.g.

genoͮmen = genomen past participle “taken,” geboͮten = gebuten past part.

“commanded,” choͮme = chûme / kûme “scarcely,” oͮh = ouh “also,” twoͮgen = twuogen

pret. ind. pl. “washed”; zuͦrnde = zornde pret. ind. sg. “grew angry,” ſluͦz = sloz / slôz

“lock,” beguͦnde = begunde pret. ind. sg. “began,” buͦch = bûch “belly,” huͦbet =

houbet “head,” bruͦder = bruoder “brother”; wͦrden = wurden pret. ind. pl. “became,”

beſwͦr = beswuor pret. ind. sg. “beseeched.” Conversely, the same single vowel graphs

that represent unmutated /ô/, /u/, and /û/ may also represent their palatal variants (e.g.

horen = hœren “to hear”; uerbute = verbüte pret. subj. sg. “might forbid,” ſure = siure

“bitterness”). The lack of univocal graph-phoneme relations is especially palpable in

the forms of strong verbs with morphophonemic contrast in their root vowels between

/u/ in the preterite indicative plural and /ü/ in the preterite indictative 2nd person

singular and the preterite subjunctive plural: compare, for example, woͮrden ~ wͦrden =

wurden “became” vs. wurd- ~ woͮrd- ~ wuͦrd- ~ wvͦrd- = würd- “might become / you

(sg.) became”; voͮnden ~ vvͦunden = vunden “found” vs. voͮnde = vünde “you (sg.)

found”; gewunnen ~ gewoͮnnen = gewunnen “won” vs. gewunn- ~ gewoͮnn- = gewünn-

“might win / you (sg.) won.” The absence of clear orthographical distinctions must be

set against the background of two general considerations: the well-known tendency of

German spelling before 1200 not to mark any umlaut except that of /a/,54 and the

often-noted resistance of Upper German dialects to the mutation of /u/, /û/, /ou/,

and /uo/ in certain phonetic environments.55 When all these factors are weighed, the

only philologically responsible solution is, in our view, to follow Schröder and leave

the mutation of the back vowels and diphthongs unmarked in a modern print edition.

To do otherwise would impose univocity on an area of scribal spelling that may be

described as ambivalent at best, as well as involve a bold claim about the “modernity”

23

of the language of the Vorau manuscript that contradicts everything we know about

the state of German spelling in the later twelfth century.

The second phonological change to consider is the diphthongization of /î/, /û/,

and /iu/ to /ei/, /au/, and /eu/. For example, mîn “my, mine,” hûs “house,” niuwe

“new” develop the diphthongal pronunciations that are standard in New High

German: mein, Haus, neu. This sound change took place during the MHG period,

beginning in the South-East and embracing the dialects of Central Germany during

the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.56 Although the new diphthongs were almost

certainly the norm in spoken Bavarian by the time the Vorau manuscript was written,

there is no reflection of the sound change in the scribal spelling system—except,

Karin Schneider has claimed, in the case of /û/, where the digraphs <oͮ> and (to a

lesser extent) <uͦ> in the preposition oͮf / uͦf = standard MHG ûf “upon” may according

to her represent a diphthongal pronunciation auf.57 Since the digraphs are indisputably

used to represent the old and phonetically very similar diphthong /ou/, this

interpretation cannot be dismissed altogether; on the other hand, the arguments in its

favor are not so strong as to be overwhelming. The only evidence from this period and

region that Schneider cites for the use of the digraphs <oͮ> and <uͦ> to spell the new

diphthong /au/ is from the Vorau manuscript itself;58 moreover, in common words that

are candidates for the diphthongization /û/ > /au/, digraphic spellings in the

manuscript alternate with unambiguously monophthongal spellings. Only the

preposition ûf is written preponderantly as either oͮf or uͦf (207 and 19 occurrences

respectively in the entire text, compared with 33 uf / vf and 1 ûf); digraphic spellings

are in the majority for forms of the verb rûmen “to vacate” (5 ruͦm-, 1 roͮm- vs. 3

rum-), forms and derivatives of bûwen “to inhabit” (13 boͮ(w)-, 1 bvͦ(w)- vs. 2 buwͦ-, 1

buw-), and trût “dear, beloved” (10 truͦt vs. 2 trut, 3 trût); single graphs dominate

however for ûz “out” and derivatives (189 uz(-) vs. 3 oͮz), hûs “house” (56 hus, 1 hûs

vs. 1 huͦs, 1 hoͮs), lût “loud” and derivatives (22 lut(-), 2 lût(-) vs. 6 luͦt(-)).59 Given this

very mixed picture, it seems to us that, as in the case of i-mutation, it would overstep

the bounds of philological responsibility and impose too modern an aspect on the text

if one were to posit diphthongal spellings for any of these words, including ûf; we

therefore render the vowel as the monophthong <u>.

24

Drawing the conclusions from the above discussion, we arrive at the following

resolutions of the scribal digraphs:

<oͮ>

= standard MHG /o/ or /ô/: <o> zornde “grew angry,” tro “threat”;

= /œ/: <o> chom pret. subj. sg. “might come”;

= /u/ or /û/: <u> vunden past part. “found,” uf “(up)on”;

= /ü/ or /iu/: <u> erchuchet pres. ind. sg. “revives,” turlich “dearly”;

= /ou/ or /öu/: <ou> ouh “also,” vroude “joy”;

= /ouw/ or /öuw/: <ouw> frouwe “lady,” (sich) vrouwen “to rejoice”;

= /uo/ or /üe/: <uo> twuogen pret. ind. pl. “washed,” getruoben “to

darken.”

<uͦ / vͦ>

= /o/: <o> worden past part. “become”;

= /u/ or /û/: <u> burc “castle, town,” uf “(up)on”;

= /ü/ or /iu/: <u> furste “prince,” turst “dearest”;

= /uo/ or /üe/: <uo> guot “good,” gruozen “to greet”;

= /ou/: <ou> zouber “magic”;

= /ouw/: <ouw> drouwest pres. ind. “you (sg.) threaten.”

<wͦ>

= /vü/: <vu> vurbringen “to bring forth”;

= /vuo/: <vuo> vuoren pret. ind. pl. “went”;

25

= /w/: <w> getruwen “to believe”;

= /wu/ or /wü/: <wu> wunderlich “strange,” antwurten “to answer”;

= /wuo/: <wuo> swuor pret. ind. sg. “swore.”

5. Conclusion: For a Responsible Philology

The technical and granular detail of the preceding section illustrates the central point

this essay seeks to make: that for text editors in the age of digital humanities there is

no way to avoid the rigors of traditional philology. In concluding, we draw back from

the specificities of the Kaiserchronik to map our findings on to a broader program.

The example of digraphs in a single work in a particular manuscript of the German

Middle Ages demonstrates the tension that arises between the demands of readability

on the one hand and the preservation of manuscript spellings on the other when a

medieval text is transposed into modern typography and full normalization is

abandoned. We believe, however, that this tension can be eased with a combination of

simple and sophisticated methods:

(1) Vocalic and consonantal variation may be left largely unaltered without hindering

relatively straightforward comprehension for modern readers; alterations were only

necessary in a very small number of instances. This recommendation—to follow the

manuscript exactly whenever possible—is easily generalizable.

(2) Certain features however pose challenges. Digraphs appear neither in modern

typeface nor in the lemmas of MHG dictionaries and grammars, and they can

represent a wide range of phonemes. Here our recommendation is to follow the grain

of the scribal spelling system, by which we mean not being any more explicit or

univocal than the scribe was prepared to be. In our concrete case, vowel length,

palatal (mutated) back vowels, and the new dipththongs arising from /î/, /û/, and /iu/

will not be marked orthographically, even though these distinctions were certainly

observed in the spoken language, and the first two also form part of the “standard”

MHG described in grammars and taught in introductory courses. The linguistic reality

this sort of orthography aims to capture is the writing system of the codex, with the

noise filtered out where it would lead to confusion, or make what is represented

26

equivocally and ambivalently in the scribe’s spelling system appear more categorical

than it is. While the specific solution we propose for our text is not generalizable, the

principle is.

As the previous section has demonstrated, arriving at this second

recommendation requires a considerable effort as well as a commitment to stringent

methods. Such an approach, if a label is to be placed on it, may be termed

“Responsible Philology.” Philological responsibility has two essential components: an

expert knowledge of the medieval vernacular in its synchronic and diachronic

structures and varieties; and an extensive and forensic analysis of the linguistic forms

of any given manuscript. Vitally, it also requires the ability to make the one bear upon

the other: in our case, we saw that the puzzling out of multiple superscript values

depends on grammars, while the act of that deciphering could lead to the correction of

those grammars and related scholarship (e.g. Schneider’s assumptions about the

representation of diphthongization in twelfth-century manuscripts).

Responsible philology further requires the editor to negotiate new questions

the material throws up, even if these are unanswerable or ultimately fade from view in

the edition. To return briefly to one final detailed example from the Kaiserchronik,

figures 1 and 2 show that scribal spelling habits were not static, but dynamic. Some

graphs, such as <wͦ>, decline dramatically in frequency as the text progresses,60 while

others by contrast come to be used more frequently in certain contexts. There is, for

example, a marked upward drift in the use of <oͮ> as diphthongal graph and as

positional graph for /u/ or /ü/ after <v> or <w>.61 This dynamism is lost from view in

the spelling of our edition: since it reflects something particular to the scribe—

perhaps his gradual coming to grips with the spelling norms of his exemplar, which

may not have been exactly the same as his own—rather than an aspect of the writing

system, it falls outside the bounds of what any editorial solution might reasonably

seek to capture. In cases such as these, it is the editor’s task both to register the

phenomenon, so that others may work on it—to the best of our knowledge, this scribal

habit of orthographic drift has not featured in medieval German scholarship to date—

and to take the decision to filter it out from the edited text.

Responsible Philology involves ensuring readability while respecting the form

of the original manuscript. The resultant text will not be a one-to-one mapping of the

27

manuscript; rather, it will be based upon and reflect its underlying orthographical

system. In many respects—as in recommendation (1)—it will indeed be identical with

the original; and in others—as in recommendation (2)—it will be more akin to a

transposition of it. To pick up the previous example of the use of <oͮ> as a positional

graph for /u/ or /ü/ to avoid confusion <v> or <w>, it is important to recognize that a

necessity in one medium (writing) need not be reflected when it is no longer

functional in another medium (print). Or to take another example, our final text will

not mark i-mutation, not because we believe there to have been none in the spoken

reality of late twelfth-century Bavarian or, for that matter, in the orthography of the

manuscript, but simply because the distribution of forms strongly suggests that the

medieval scribe’s system did not unambiguously distinguish between mutated and

unmutated vowels. As our analysis has shown, such decisions are not possible without

a considerable amount of detailed work on large data sets. Decisions and

generalizations on the basis of small samples or targeted key word searches can be

misleading.

What role has digital philology to play in all of this? We believe that it is

central to the discussion. It informs the context, sets a challenge, and creates

perspective. The context for our considerations was the long shadow cast by Karl

Lachmann over editorial practice in medieval German studies. While rejecting his

method and motivation, editors still largely return faute de mieux to his

orthographical system, even when it is scarcely appropriate. In reconsidering this

position, the context of Lachmann’s work is vital. For Lachmann and his

contemporaries were editing at a time when there was no ready public access to

manuscripts. Their task was to take their own privileged access and make it available

in suitable form to a broader public. Our task is quite different. We operate in an age

of digital luxury. In the face of this new reality, one could possibly side with Joachim

Heinzle (the editor of Wolfram’s Willehalm and the Nibelungenlied and one of

Germany’s most eminent postwar philologists) and argue that the ubiquity of

manuscript material should satisfy the needs of those wishing to study scribal habits

and the history of the language (here with distinct echoes of Lachmann himself), thus

freeing editors of medieval texts to render them in the most readable and convenient

form possible—i.e. fully normalized.62 We on the other hand believe that it is

28

incumbent upon us to find a mode of editing that respects the textuality of our object,

which modern technology has made so manifest.

Lachmann’s orthography, based on a single manuscript, served the—for him

possible, for us impossible—task of rendering the diction of medieval poets, at a point

when the greatest among them were being rediscovered and presented for the first

time in editions striving towards the highest philological standards. Our task now is to

design orthographical systems that take account of students’ and scholars’ exposure to

the primary sources in a way that Lachmann and his contemporaries could never have

conceived and that was barely even imagined at the dawn of New Philology in the

early 1990s. Modern editions must have an orthography that fits the demands of the

digital age, otherwise they risk becoming irrelevant or driving a wedge between print

and electronic media, at a time when the latter has the potential to revolutionize our

subject.

As we emphasize, the responsible philologist has much groundwork to do. By

their very existence, digitized manuscripts throw down a simple challenge to the

editor of printed texts: to add value. Today, an edition that ignores that imperative and

brings nothing or little to what is freely available online loses its justification. That

value cannot derive from simple normalization and involves a serious engagement

with the manuscript and its underlying system. There is a paradox in this situation.

The closer the manuscripts come to us, the more, not—as many assume—the less

work they cause us. Both new and digital philology have made old philology harder.

Finally, we must consider perspective and note that much recent work falling

under the umbrella of digital philology has a particularly visual focus. Stephen G.

Nichols’ recent monograph From Parchment to Cyberspace: Medieval Literature in

the Digital Age is illustrative of this point. Justly recognized as the work that captures

the moment when New Philology meets Digital Philology and galvanizes the field

afresh, the book works through richly suggestive paradigms for reading illustrated

manuscripts in material, cultural, social, and philosophical contexts. It will certainly

inspire the field as Nichols’ earlier work did. But it has nothing to say about edited

texts—except to treat them occasionally as a perhaps too easy foil63—and we would

encourage scholars of medieval literature to consider scribal as well as visual material

and editors of texts to discover a zeal of their own with which to inspire others.

29

For too long, medieval German scholars have donned the straitjacket of

Lachmann’s orthography. Worse still, as Florian Kragl has observed without

producing a workable solution himself, they have done so without real purpose.64 That

is not something one could accuse Lachmann of. Our plea is for editors to reflect on

the orthography they use in the digital age, and to use orthography with purpose. Even

Karl Stackmann—who returned to Lachmann in the 1960s and to whom Germans

turned for a doughty rebuttal of New Philology in the 1990s65—observed that the

main impetus his colleagues should take from the movement would be to rethink the

orthography of modern editions.66 In this spirit, we advocate that editors practice

Responsible Philology: to avoid skewing the text (as, for example, Schröder did), to

respect the documentary evidence of the manuscripts (Benecke), to determine

underlying structures (Grimm), and to search extensively through the relevant forms

(Lachmann). We cannot speculate how Lachmann would have edited today,

especially in a field that has grown upon and benefited from the foundations he laid

himself nearly two hundred years ago. But we can be certain that the wealth of

manuscript evidence now available to him and his readers at the press of a button

would have informed his choices. Those that disparage him or accept his norms

fatalistically should ponder this.

30

Figure 1: Scribal digraphs, Vorau Kaiserchronik, lines 2875-5838

Note: Words in which digraphs occur are given in their standardized dictionary spelling, so as to reveal the phonemic correspondences more clearly. Anomalous and otherwise notable manuscript spellings are however given, as are alternative forms of the same word. Multiple occurrences are indicated by a number after the word.

For phoneme values, the symbols conventional in German philology are used in preference to IPA symbols (thus /ü/ and /iu/ for example rather than IPA /y/ and /y:/).

< >oͮ�

o ô u û oe ü uo üe ou ouw öu öuwwonet (pret.)

zornde 2

genomen

woltest (MS uoͮltest)

verworhte (past part.)

dô (alt. form duo) 5

antwurte (pret.) 7

antwurt (noun; alternative form antwürte) 2

wurde 4

urvar

wunder

(ge)vunden 5

vulte

ûf 8

bûwen

rûmen

broede (alt. form brôde)

koeme

vür (prep., adv.) 28

vür (vb complement)

vür (vb prefix) 2

vürht- (vb) 3

gebürte (i-stem noun, dat. sg.)

antwürte(n) (alt. form: antworte(n)) 5

twuogen

wuochert 2

muosen

vuor (pret.) 4

-tuom (suffix)

huob

ruom

gevuocte 2

getrüeben

vüere(n) 4

müez (pres. subj.; alt. form: muose)

vüeze (pl.)

ouh 22

vrouwen 5

erloubte

troum 5

gloube 6

goukelaere 3

urloup 4

ouh 2

ouge 2

tougen- 3

vrouwe 4

gerouwe

schouwen

getouwet (past part.)

vröude 10 (MS vroͮvde, line 5312)

vröuwen 3

31

gebuten

-wurfen

würde 4

vrüm- (alt. form vrum-)

vürsten

swuor 4

vuorte 3

wuohs

ruowe

(MS toͮugen, line 3581)

roub

houbet (noun and vb) 4

anlouk

betrouc

houpten

flouc 2

boum 2

< / >uͦ� vͦ�

o ô u û ü iu uo üe ou

32

zornte dô (alt. form duo) 113

burc

ougen (MS auͦgen)

antwurt (pret.)

trûten

rûmen 2

bûch

ûf 4

vürgân 3

kürn

süne(n)

vürste 2

verlüre

bürgetor

vlühte

würde

liute

tiurst

muoz(-)unambiguous /uo/ 33

ambiguous /uo ~ üe/ 91

bruoder 7

guot 42

muoter 5

zuo 9

huob 14

tuon 23

muote 3

muot 9

haimuot

buoch 14

genuoc 8

vruo 2

müejen / müewen

grüezen 3

müede (alt. form muode)

müezec

geüebede

süeze 2

güete 7

behüeten 2

büeze

üeben (alt. form uoben) 2

vüeze 3

chüene 6

grüene 2

toufe

houbet

zouber

1 Parts of the verb müezen “must”: Unambiguously without vowel mutation (i-umlaut) = pres. ind. sg.; pres. subj. 2nd person sg.; pret. ind. With either mutated or unmutated vowel = pres. ind. pl.; pres. subj. (except for 2nd person sg.). Unambiguously with mutation: pret. subj. (no examples in this sample).

33

armuot 2

beruoch- (vb and noun) 2

huote 2

-tuom (suffix) 2

truoc 5

zwuo (“two” fem.; MS zuͦv)

stuont 7

bluome

sluoc 8

vuort(e)

begruoben

suochen 4

vuor 3

bluot

scuof

vluochen

übermüetec

diemüete (alt. form diemuote)

verrüemen

34

ruohte

< >wͦ�

vuo vü w wu wü wuovuoren

vuorten

vürbringen

vürhte

bûwet

getrûwen

wurden 3

wurfen

antwurte (pret.) 2

antwurt (noun; alt. form antwürte)

wunden

wunne

wunderlihiu

erwürve

antwürte (pres.)

antwürten (inf.) 2

gewuohsen

beswuor

35

Figure 2: Scribal digraphs, Vorau Kaiserchronik, lines 8704-11585

Note: Words in which digraphs occur are given in their standardized dictionary spelling, so as to reveal the phonemic correspondences more clearly. Anomalous and otherwise notable manuscript spellings are however given, as are alternative forms of the same word. Multiple occurrences are indicated by a number after the word.

For phoneme values, the symbols conventional in German philology are used in preference to IPA symbols (thus /ü/ and /iu/ for example rather than IPA /y/ and /y:/).

< >oͮ�

o ô u û oe ü iu uo üe ou ouw öu öuwzornde 2

worden

vernomen 2

molte 2

offenlîche

beslozzen

ungewon

hovestat

drô (MS troͮ)

dô (alt. form duo)58

antwurte (pret.) 12

antwurt (noun; alt. form antwürte) 2

überwunden 4

verlurn

wunne 2

gewunnen 6

wundert 2

wunder(-)

ûf 65

kûme

bûwen 7

getrûwen

koem (MS choͮem)

vür (prep., adv.) 42

vüeren 2

vürste 13

würde 10

antwürte (inf., imp., pres.) 4

vürhten 7

gewünne(n) 2

gebürte (i-stem noun, dat. sg.)

tiurlîch

ungetriuwe(lîch) 2

vuor 15

vuorte 4

geschuof

tuot 3

huop 2

-tuom (suffix)

ruowe

guot (adj.)

vuoz 4

vervluochen

vüere (pret. subj.; 2nd sg. pret. ind.) 4

vüeren (inf.) 3

zevüeret (past part.; alt. form zevuoret)

gevüegen

wüesche (2nd sg., pret. ind.)

ouch 30

lougen 3

gelouben 22

ougen 5

houbte (noun and vb) 9

tougen(-) 2

toufe(n) 15

rouch 2

souften 2

vrouwe 46

rouw (pret.)

touwen (alt. form töuwen) 2

blouw

schouwen 2

vröude

vröuwen (all tenses) 11

cröuwelen

36

14

vunden 4

sult 2

wurden 6

(er)vullet (past part.; alt. form (er)vüllet) 4

(er)vulte (pret.) 2

trum

zerunnen

kum(t) 4

begunde 2

wullin (alt. form wüllin) 2

bevulhen

kunde (alt. form konde)

karvunkel

(ver)würken 4

(er)vüllen

gebüten (pret. subj.)

wünde (pret. subj.)

vünde (pret. subj.)

swuor 2

wuohs 2

wuosch 2

armuot

wuoft 2

wuocher

vüeze 3

swüere

wüeterich (alt. form wuoterich)

wüehse (pret. subj.)

erloubte

zouber(-)

vlouc

louc

verlougenen

beroubet

37

< / >uͦ� vͦ�

o ô u û ü iu uo üe ouwworden

sloz (alt. form slôz

dô (alt. form duo) 2

wunne

suln 8

begunde 4

ougen (MS auͦgen)

uralten

wunder 2

gebunden

munster (alt. form münster)

fluhen (pret.)

vunden

ûf 4

hût

kûm

trût

bûch(te)2

erkücket

würde (2nd pers. pret. ind.)

über(-) 2

biutet

liute 2

getriuwe

muoz(-) unambiguous /uo/ 173

ambiguous /uo ~ üe/ 6

(über)muot (masc./fem.) 5

muot 3

diemuot

muoter 5

guot 31

guotlîch (alt. form güetlîch 1

buoch 20

huob 12

diemüetec

(über)müete (fem. dat. sg.) 4

rüegen

gerüeren 2

güete 2

müet (pres. ind.)

trüege (2nd pers. pret. ind.)

süeze 2

grüene

erhüebe

behüeten

drouwest

2 Line 10683 “si chochete und buͦch.” The latter is either the preterite of backen “to bake” = buoch; or preterite of bûchen “wash with lye,” which fits context better, but the scribe has neglected to add the dental preterite suffix bûchte.3 See Figure 1, n1.

38

tuon 18

schuof 2

stuol

(ver)suochen 8

ruoche(n) (noun and vb) 5

vruo 4

huoch

genuoc 2

sluoc 5

behuote (pret.)

bluot 5

uoben 2

ruorten (pret.)

stuont 3

zuo 5

(inf., subj.) 2

gemüete (alt. form gemuote)

39

huot

getruobte (pret.)

almuosen

ruofen (alt. form rüefen)

-tuom (suffix) 2

tuoch 2

bruoder 3

truoc

< >wͦ�

wu wuowunderlich swuor

Notes

40

1. Since the beginning of the historical record, the German language has been divided into

three major dialect areas. These are, running from south to north, Upper German and Central

German (which together form High German) and Low German. Hence the term Middle High

German stands for the language written and spoken in the High German dialect in the period

between Old and (Early) New High German.

2. Klein, “Heinrich von Veldeke” 91.

3. Klein, “Niederdeutsch” 227.

4. Klein, “Niederdeutsch” 203.

5. Klein, “Niederdeutsch” 203.

6. Kragl 1-5, citing Fromm as the last intervention in 1971.

7. Kragl 2 n4.

8. The prominent example is Heinzle 4-7.

9. Further detail on the work and our project may be gleaned from Chinca and Young.

10. The following account draws on Ganz, Lutz-Hensel (in particular 89-104, 164-227, 284-

94, 354-60, 401-404) and Timpanaro, but places its own emphasis at critical junctures.

11. For general background, see Neumann.

12. These can be read at BMZ “Vorworte.”

13. Lachmann, “Auswahl” 157.

14. Cited in Lutz-Hensel 188.

15. Wolfram von Eschenbach vii.

16. Iwein iii.

17. Lutz-Hensel 191.

18. Cited in Lutz-Hensel 185-6.

19. Cited in Lutz-Hensel 183-4.

20. Lachmann, “Auswahl” 164. Ganz (17) by contrast saw no change in Lachmann’s notion

of exactitude.

21. Lutz-Hensel 188.

22. Lutz-Hensel 190.

23. Lachmann, “Auswahl” 161.

24. This critical convergence was overlooked by Lutz-Hensel.

25. Wolfram von Eschenbach vii.

26. Iwein 8.

27. Stackmann, “Mittelalterliche Texte” 246-7.

28 Stackmann, “Mittelalterliche Texte” 254.

29. Bresslau 104, 139.

30. Schröder gives an account of the manuscript filiation and sets out his principles of

emendation in the introduction to his edition Die Kaiserchronik (26-35). We discuss his procedure

for establishing the critical text more fully than space permits here in a forthcoming essay.

31. Schneider 37-41. Further information and bibliography for this codex at

<http://www.handschriftencensus.de/1432>.

32. Die Kaiserchronik 35.

33. The edition of Notker’s Psalm translations by Heinzel and Scherer (1876) would have

been available to Schröder.

34. The main scribe of the Vorau manuscript makes sporadic use of the circumflex, but

places it over long and short vowels indiscriminately, and sometimes also over the first element of a

diphthong. <û> additionally corresponds in some contexts to mutated /ü/ or /iu/, or even

diphthong /uo/.

35. One example of what Schröder meant by the “more or less unsteady” manuscript

orthography (Die Kaiserchronik 36) in this area may suffice: the grapheme for long /î/ comprises

the symbols <i ~ î ~ ie ~ ih>.

36. The controversies surrounding the description and interpretation of i-mutation in German

need not concern us; for an overview see Paul § L16.

37. Schneider 17.

38. It is noticeable that 244 of the 249 instances of the spelling duͦ occur in the first half of the

text of the Kaiserchronik; by contrast, the plain do spelling becomes markedly more frequent from

around the middle of the text (93 occurrences in the first half versus 535 in the second); the

frequency of doͮ also drops off (182: 113), although less dramatically. The distribution of the

spellings over the text suggests that the scribe may not have been distinguishing between the long

and the short forms of the conjunction, but settling into a habit of spelling.

39. On this UG devoicing see Weinhold, Alemannische Grammatik § 169; Paul § E24, L115.

40. The resulting distribution is in accordance with “Notkers Anlautgesetz”: the principle,

implemented in late OHG manuscripts of Notker III of St Gallen, of writing <p> <t> <k> for /b/

/d/ /g/ at the beginning of a clause or when immediately preceded by a voiceless consonant; see

Braune and Eggers § 103.

41. The form niet / niut is a feature of western MHG dialects to which Bavarian was

generally resistant; Paul § L109 n3, L110,2.

42. For this form see Weinhold, Bairische Grammatik § 159.

43. On scribal use of <ſ / s> to write the shibilant /sch/ in the twelfth century, see Schneider

22.

44. Schröder’s criteria also appear to be more restrictive than actual poetic practice as

subsequently described in authoritative accounts of early MHG rhyme: Heusler 2: 21-3; Wesle 103-

43; Hennig 54-82.

45. Die Kaiserchronik 52.

46. See Paul § M79 n4 (kom / chom), M99 (megen), L98 (<p-> for /b-/); Weinhold, Bairische

Grammatik § 4 (haln).

47. See Schneider 83, 85, 89, 98 (<æi>); Paul § E27,10 (/ar/ and /or/).

48. The constitutive openness of chronicle-writing is emphasized by Melville 308-15.

49. See n34 above.

50. Schröder explains that the scribe arrived at sprac on the analogy of other strong preterite

singular forms in /a/ where there is alternation between a final stop spelling <-c> and an affricate

spelling <-ch> which looks identical to the fricative in HG sprach, e.g. lac ~ lach, phlac ~ phlach

(Die Kaiserchronik 36).

51. For the lowering of /u/ to /o/ in Central German dialects see Paul § L35.

52. The manuscript’s spellings of duo / dô are difficult to interpret. Since the graphs <uͦ> and

<oͮ> very seldom represent /ô/ but frequently or even predominantly stand for the diphthong /uo/,

the most plausible plausible resolution of both doͮ and duͦ is duo. On the other hand, if we resolve in

this way, we must find a way to explain that duo forms predominate over dô in the first half of the

work, and this is inverted in the second half.

53. See 00-00 above.

54. See n37 above.

55. Paul § L36, L43, L47, L50.

56. Paul § L17.

57. Schneider 40.

58. Of the late twelfth-century Bavarian manuscripts that Schneider discusses, only two

others, Munich BSB clm 2 and Vienna ÖNB Cod. 2721, contain examples of new diphthongal

spellings; in the examples that she gives however, the sound is not represented by a digraph, but is

written out as two letters: ouzvart “going out,” ouf “upon,” prouchet pres. ind. sg. “uses” (Schneider

43, 48).

59. These numbers are also for the entire text of the chronicle, not just the two samples. In

the case of ûz and hûs, the digraphic spellings are without exception on the first folio, one of the

leaves of the manuscript that was recopied by another scribe a few decades after the main text was

completed; see 00-00 above.

60. In lines 1-2874, i.e. before the first sample, <wͦ> occurs 47 times, in lines 5839-8703, i.e.

between the two samples, 12 times, in lines 11586-17283 (the end of the text) merely 3 times.

61. The frequencies of duͦ / dvͦ are: lines 1-2874: 72; lines 5893-8703: 59; lines 11586-17283:

3. For do the numbers are: lines 1-2874: 18; lines 2875-5892: 6; lines 5893-8703: 69; lines 8704-

11585: 120; lines 11586-17283: 415. The spelling doͮ also drops off over the course of the text: 1-

2874: 102; lines 2875-5892: 5; lines 5893-8703: 75; lines 8704-11585: 58; lines 11586-17283: 55.

62. Heinzle 6. On Lachmann’s views on the subordinate needs of language, see Wolfram von

Eschenbach vii.

63. In particular, Nichols 98-9.

64. Kragl 26-7.

65. See Stackmann, “Die Edition,” “Neue Philologie?” and “Autor.”

66. Stackmann, “Die Edition” 13.

Manuscripts cited

Vorau, Stiftsbibliothek Codex 276. <http://www.handschriftencensus.de/1432>.

Works cited

Auswahl aus den Hochdeutschen Dichtern des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts. Für Vorlesungen und

Schulgebrauch. Ed. Karl Lachmann. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1820. Print.

Benecke, Georg Friedrich. Beyträge zur Kenntniss der altdeutschen Sprache und Literattur.

Minnelieder. Ergänzung Der Sammlung Von Minnesingern. Göttingen: Dietrich, 1810.

Print.

BMZ: Benecke, Georg Friedrich, Wilhelm Müller, and Friedrich Zarncke. Mittelhochdeutsches

Wörterbuch. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854-1866. Web. 4 January 2017.

<http://woerterbuchnetz.de/BMZ/>.

BMZ “Vorworte.” Web. 4 January 2016. <http://woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?

sigle=BMZ&lemid=BA00001&mode=Vernetzung&hitlist=&patternlist=&mainmode=Vorw

orte>.

Boner’s Edelstein in hundert Fabeln, mit Varianten und Worterklärungen. Ed. Johann Joachim

Eschenburg. Berlin: Unger, 1810. Print.

Braune, Wilhelm, and Hans Eggers. Althochdeutsche Grammatik. 14th edition. Tübingen:

Niemeyer 1987. Print.

Bresslau, Harry. “Geschichte der Monumenta Germaniae Historica.” Neues Archiv für ältere

deutsche Geschichtskunde 42 (1921): 1-769. Print.

Chinca, Mark, and Christopher Young. “Uses of the Past in Twelfth-Century Germany. The Case of

the Middle High German Kaiserchronik.” Central European History 49 (2016): 19-38.

Print.

Der Edel Stein getichtet von Bonerius. Aus Handschriften berichtiget und mit einem Wörterbuch

versehen. Ed. Georg Friedrich Benecke. Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung 1816. Print.

Der Nibelunge Not mit der Klage. In der ältesten Gestalt mit den Abweichungen der gemeinen

Lesart. Ed. Karl Lachmann. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1826. Print.

Der Nibelungen Lied. Ed. Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen. Berlin: Unger, 1807. Print.

Der Nibelungen Lied. In der Ursprache mit den Lesarten der verschiedenen Handschriften. Zu

Vorlesungen. Ed. Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen. Berlin: Hitzig, 1810. Print.

Der Nibelungen Lied, zum erstenmal in der ältesten Gestalt aus der St. Galler Handschrift mit

Vergleichung der übrigen Handschriften. Ed. Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen. Breslau:

Josef Max, 1816. Print.

Die Gedichte Walthers von der Vogelweide. Ed. Karl Lachmann. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1827. Print.

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