Die artistische Überbietung einer brinnenden liebe

Isolated, yet at the same time, in an environment that is hostile to them, the four characters Jörg Wickram imagines in his novel ›Gabriotto und Reinhart‹ are alone together, as the two doomed couples are all also bound to each other in friendship. The construction of paradoxes, calculated primarily for effect, appears to be one of the novels controlled narrative devices. Much like the narratological strategies of intensification, exaggeration and repetition, they are controlled artifices designed for impact, and well-thought-out gambits on the part of the author which he uses, above all, to continue and intensify the tradition of medieval storytelling, and less frequently to counterpose an alternative understanding. Time and again the author makes use of the potential of widespread literary concepts to demonstrate that the love described in the novel is unparalleled.

Ovid and Homer in ‘German Rhymes’ (Ovid und Homer in ‘teutschen Reymen’)

This contribution examines the relationship between vernacular translations of the sixteenth century and the history of the epic poetry genre in the seventeenth. To this end, it systematically analyses the Early Modern High German translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and identifies the various reasons why translators decided in favour of prose or verse. Of all the protagonists of the German reception of antiquity – including such figures as Jörg Wickram, Simon Schaidenreisser, and Johannes Baptista Rexius – it is the Meistersinger Johannes Spreng of Augsburg who most consistently chose rhyme for his translations of the classical epics into German.