Social imagery in Middle Low German : : didactical literature and metaphorical representation (1470-1517) / / Cordelia Hess.

• Superior document: Studies in medieval and Reformation traditions ; v. 167
• Author: Hess, Cordelia.
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden ;, Boston : : Brill,, 2013.
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in medieval and Reformation traditions 167.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (416 pages)

Social imagery during the Late Middle Ages was typically considered to be dominated by the three orders oratores, bellatores, laboratores as the most common way of describing social order, along with body metaphors and comprehensive lists of professions as known from the Danse macabre tradition. None of these actually dominates within the vast genre of lay didactical literature. This book comprises the first systematic investigation of social imagery from a specific late medieval linguistic context. It methodically catalogues images of the social that were used in a particular cultural/literary sphere, and it separates late medieval efforts at catechization in print from the social and religious ruptures that are conventionally thought to have occurred after 1517. The investigation thus compliments recent scholarship on late medieval vernacular literature in Germany, most of which has concentrated on southern urban centres of production. The author fills a major lacuna in this field by concentrating for the first time on the entire extant corpus of vernacular print production in the northern region dominated by the Hanseatic cities and the Middle Low German dialect.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material / Cordelia Heß -- Introduction / Cordelia Heß -- I A Space of Its Own: Urban Literature from Cologne to Lübeck / Cordelia Heß -- II The “real world”: Social Groups in Normative and Legal Sources / Cordelia Heß -- III Tripartitions and Their Dissolution / Cordelia Heß -- IV The Nine Choirs of Angels / Cordelia Heß -- V The Good, the Bad and the Mighty: The Division of Society into Oppositions / Cordelia Heß -- VI Revues des états / Cordelia Heß -- VII The Mystical Body of Christ / Cordelia Heß -- VIII Exotics: Allegories / Cordelia Heß -- Conclusion: A Science of (unaccomplished) Possibilities / Cordelia Heß -- Bibliography / Cordelia Heß -- Appendix: Middle Low German Incunabula and Early Imprints / Cordelia Heß -- Index / Cordelia Heß.