Edition Practices

Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters [German Medieval Texts]

The long-term Academy project German Medieval Texts explores medieval German manuscripts and produces editions that reflect the text of the manuscript in detail.

Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters [German Medieval Texts]

Medieval manuscripts have an undimmed fascination as tangible evidence of a past era. They are the path by which many striking texts have been transmitted to us, and we are not even close to exhausting the resources available for the study of this period, which has given a profound imprint on our culture today. In 1904 the ‚German Commission’ located at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin started a long planned initiative to explore the medieval German vernacular manuscript tradition. Their intention was to provide a cross-section of the complete tradition of German literature by creating manuscript descriptions and publishing selected texts in a series of editions.
 
In our days, the project ‘German Medieval Texts’ is able to consult the manuscript descriptions compiled for the Academy and stored in the Manuscript Archive. Due to these resources the Archive is able to reconstruct the collections of libraries that suffered loss and damage during the Second World War. Step by step the descriptions are placed online and are linked to relevant digital tools for manuscript research. Next to this the project hosts the Report on Editions, an index of editorial projects in German medieval studies, which is updated continually and published in print once a year.
 
The series of editions focuses on texts of the High and Late Middle Ages, including fundamental literary works long neglected by researchers, such as the Middle High German Passional (from around 1300), a 43,000-line epic poem that narrates the lives of Mary and Jesus and the legends of the Apostles. Computers are used at every stage of the editorial process in order to allow the complex searches that are essential for reliable research on the history of German language and literature.