Digital Alexanderlied. The Vorau Version (Beta)

Welcome to the Digital Alexanderlied Project (DAL), Vorau version (PI: Prof. Maria Adele Cipolla, academic field L-FIL-LET/15 – Germanic Philology). Within the Project of Excellence of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature of the University of Verona,the aim of this project is a digital scholarly edition (DSE) of the whole manuscript tradition of the so-called Alexanderlied. The Alexanderlied is a Middle High German poem belonging to the transnational literary tradition concerning Alexander the Great and it is handed down in 3 recensions: V, B, S. V (Vorau, Augustiner Chorherrenstift, cod. 276, ff. 109ra-115va 9: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/stav_ms276?ui_lang=ger) was perhaps copied between 1185 and 1202, and it contains the Kaiserchronik, a series of short poem on Old and New Testament and Christian eschatology in German, with a peculiar version of the Alexanderlied (1515 | 1533 lines) in the middle, since Alexander was considered as the turning point of the history. The recension V of the Alexanderlied describes the hero’s youth adventures, until a great battle against the Persians in Mesopotamia (in which memories of Isso and Gaugamela merge): there, Alexander beheads Darius with a sword blow. This is an innovation in the traditional plot (which the recensions S and B do not share and is alien to both the historiographic and the narrative traditions on Alexander), but will be known, a century later, to Jans von Wien. Apart from this original conclusion, V (as well as the only extant fragment of Alberich: Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 64. 35, ff. 115r-116r) is mainly based on Curtius Rufus, on the Zacher Epitome and the original text by Julius Valerius, with scattered traces of the Middle Latin tradition spreading from Leo’s 10th century translation of the Greek Alexander Romance (Historia de preliis). The manuscript in its present state closes with the Gesta Friderici Imperatoris by Otto of Freising, which are dated by the scribe (not the one who worked on the German part) during the regency of Provost Bernhard of Vorau (1185-1202). The German section of the Vorau manuscript is written predominantly by a single Proto-Gothic hand (with scribal fluctuations allowing one to assume various antigraphs).