| Abstract | Paper -a:
The Granum Sinapis, an early 14th-century, eight-stanza poem in Middle High German is a literary precis of the mystical theology of Meister Eckhart to whom the work has been sometimes been attributed. To assist in contemplating the poem, an anonymous commentator appended two crude diagrams to the manuscript: an empty circle bounded by a solidly drawn circumference; and a set of concentric, permeable circles each labeled with one of the rankings in a pseudo-Dionysian hierarchy. Together the poem and diagrams portray a mystical cosmography, collapsing light and darkness, the universe and nothingness - a space in which god may be found.
Paper -b:
Defeated on many battlefields, and at an advanced age, Oswald von Wolkenstein (1376-77/1445) retreated to a safer, but always pugnacious literary war against the Hussites. He had been facing them and their ideals since the Council of Constance and composed against them two poems, Kl. 27 and Kl. 32. Kl. 27 is Oswald's only certified anti-Hussite song, in which the nobleman calls all his peers to fight against the army of geese in the name of God; Kl. 32 is a strict prediction of eternal punishment for heretics, Jews, heathens, and unbelievers. Realising how ruinous the crusades had proved, Oswald abhorred the incompetence of his allies, and started directly addressing God and the Virgin Mary for immediate intercession: Kl. 109b is a translation of a Marian hymn containing references to doctrines condemned by Hus's followers; Kl. 134 is the beginning of a longer lost anti-Hussite poem in which the poet puts Christianity in God's hands. This paper intends to investigate, from a lexical and semantic point of view, the changes in Oswald's perception of the Hussites in his late works, and the turning of his vivid and aggressive exhortations into silent and almost resigned prayers.
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