Die kollaborativen Bildbeischriften des Cgm 51. Neubewertung der paläographischen, stilistischen und inhaltlichen Aspekte

The contribution aims to reassess the complexity of Cgm 51, the oldest witness of Tristan by Gottfried von Straßburg and Ulrich von Türheim. In its current binding, the manuscript combines the poetic text with a complete cycle of illustrations annotated by an unspecified number of secondary hands. This study focuses particularly on these inscriptions, which are the product of the “collaborative writing” of many unknown agents who, over more than two centuries, interpreted and commented on both the poetic and visual romance. To this end, and excluding the names of characters (which represent the most frequent type of captions), the annotations have been analysed into four textual categories: 1. diegetic inscriptions, 2. parenetic comments, 3. dramaturgic inscriptions, 4. subjective remarks. These categories are examined with regard to their palaeographical characteristics as well as their linguistic, stylistic and content-specific peculiarities. Although it is impossible to recognize the hands responsible for annotating the illustrations – often overlapping one another in the same writing spaces – the palaeographic analysis, attempted here for the first time, highlights several significant traits. These findings contribute to defining the cultural context in which part of the illustrated manuscript’s history unfolded.