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IMC 2011: Sessions

Session 816: Wealth, Poverty, and Social Action in German Literature, II

Tuesday 12 July 2011, 16.30-18.00

Sponsor:Society for Medieval German Studies (North America)
Organiser:Joseph M. Sullivan, Department of Modern Languages, University of Oklahoma
Moderator/Chair:Judith Benz, Department of World Languages & Cultures, Juniata College, Pennsylvania
Paper 816-aWhen Wealth Was Good and Poverty Sin: Profit, Greed, Generosity, and the Creation of the Noble Merchant in Konrad Fleck's Flôre und Blanscheflûr
(Language: English)
Katharina Altpeter-Jones, Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures, Lewis & Clark College, Oregon
Index terms: Economics - Trade, Language and Literature - German
Paper 816-bA Poverty of Skills?: Reading Text and Image against and with Each Other in the Illustrated Parzival Manuscripts
(Language: English)
Evelyn Meyer, Department of Modern & Classical Languages, Saint Louis University, Missouri
Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - German, Manuscripts and Palaeography
Paper 816-cWealth and Poverty in the Political Poetry of Walther von der Vogelweide
(Language: English)
Judith Kaup, Independent Scholar, Ettringen
Index terms: Language and Literature - German, Politics and Diplomacy
Abstract

The presentations interrogate how medieval texts deal with sudden poverty and great wealth as well as how manuscripts were influenced by the wealth, or dearth, of skills of their producers. Thus Hartmann, Gottfried, and Oswald treat social decline sometimes as a dire event and other times handle the onset of poverty as an occasion for satire. For his part, Konrad Fleck creates the unique category of the positive merchant, an individual characterized by his generosity (milte) and blurring of aristocratic and urban class distinctions. Lastly, the intriguing discrepancies between the story told in the textual representations and pictorial programs of illustrated manuscripts of Wolfram's Parzival may have resulted from the imperfect skills of illustrators and rubricators.