Material Narratology - Rhythm and Voice

In addition to its linguistic meaning, every text also has its own visuality: a letter looks different from a newspaper, a novel different from a map. Layout, typeface, use of colours and open spaces can tell us how a text wants to be understood. This is especially true for texts from the Middle Ages that were copied by hand individually. A particularly important manuscript for German-language literature of the 12th century lies in the Vorau Abbey in Styria under the shelfmark 276. Many literary works from this period are known to us today only because they are contained in this volume. In addition to a German and a Latin chronicle (`Kaiserchronik` and `Gesta Friderici`), the manuscript contains a series of narratives going back on biblical material, as well as poetry systematically treating contents of the Christian faith. This so-called `Vorauer Sammelhandschrift` has therefore mostly been seen as an attempt to mediate salvation and world history along the line of important rulers. We now ask in several respects what stands in the way of such an understanding. On the one hand, we are interested in the representation of temporality. Under the category of `rhythm`, we ask how the natural sequence of events is disrupted by the arrangement of texts in the manuscript, how the same events are referred to across different texts, which role non- narrative works play, and how narrative and other forms of communication (representing, praying, explaining) relate overall. Our aim is to enrich and expand the image of the manuscripts as a history of salvation and world history. Secondly, we are interested in the category of `voice` and ask whether there is a primary speaker in the respective texts, what is learned about them, how they relate to the figures speaking and how different instances of speech can open up different perspectives on the same objects. Our second aim is to counter the notion of a closed narrative with an exploration of the complexities produced by polyphony. In both areas, `rhythm` and `voice`, we will examine how changes between narrative and non- narrative passages and between different speakers are indicated through forms of page division, placement of breaks and initials, later additions, headings and corrections. By establishing a connection between the materiality and visuality of the manuscript on the one hand and the narrative and content-related facture of the texts on the other, we are venturing a methodological experiment. This combination of material-philological and narratological questions promises to be a new approach to the study of medieval compilations in general.