Recent Books

GERMANY

Editionen deutscher Texte des Mittelalters—aktuelle Projekte. Beiträge des Festkolloquiums zum 6/. Geburtstag von Rudolf Bentzinger am 11. August 1/04. Ed. by Eva Rothenberger, Martin Schubert, and Elke Zinsmeister. (Sonderschriften der Akademie gemeinnütziger Wissenschaften zu Erfurt, 50.) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. 2019. 205 pp. €28. isbn 978 3 515 12316 7. .

A useful volume affording a conspectus of current work in editing a wide range of medieval German texts from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, together with an account of the history of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences' series 'Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters' (the first volume of which appeared in 1904), with which the dedicatee of this Festschrift, Professor Rudolf Bentzinger, has long been associated

Der frühneuzeitliche Kometendiskurs im Spiegel deutschsprachiger Flugschriften. By Anna Jerratsch. (Boethius, 71.) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. 2020. 883 pp., 23 illus., 2 tables. €84. isbn 978 3 515 12517 8. .

A study of perceptions of comets in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany, based on accounts given in contemporary printed pamphlets

Sigenot. Ed. by Elisabeth Lienert, Elisa Pontini, and Stephanie Baumgarten. (Texte und Studien zur mittelhochdeutschen Heldenepik, 12.) Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. 2020. x + 369 pp. €109.95. isbn 978 3 11 062152 5 (hardback); 978 3 11 062636 0 (e-book). .

A welcome new edition of both versions of Sigenot, one of the poems about the exploits of Dietrich von Bern, the literary reflex of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great (aD 454–526), and one of the earliest heroic poems to be printed in Germany (on these see The Library, v, 22 (1967), 228–42). The older, shorter version survives in a fourteenth-century manuscript, while the younger version is known from seven manuscripts and twenty-two printed editions dating from c. 1487 to 1661, one of them from c. 1565 in Low German and another in a Yiddish version in Hebrew characters, printed at Cracow in 1597. This is the first comprehensive study of the material since 1926 and takes account of recent discoveries. The edition of the younger text is based principally on the version issued by Heinrich Knoblochtzer at Heidelberg in 1490 (ISTC is00497350), all surviving copies of the Augsburg edition by Johann Bämler of c. 1487/88 (ISTC is00497300) being incomplete. It is a pity that the new edition does not reproduce any of Knoblochtzer's woodcuts (or any of the other surviving illustrations), but a facsimile of the Heidelberg edition was produced by Karl Schorbach, Dietrich von Bern (Sigenot). Heidelberg 027/. Mit vollständiger Bibliographie, Seltene Drucke in Abbildungen, 2 (Leipzig, 1894). An edition of the Yiddish version was published by John A. Howard, Dietrich von Bern (0375) (Würzburg, 1986)

LondonJohn L. Flood