Alessandro di Basilea (Basler Alexander). Studi sul testo

The Basel Alexander's plot presents the hero's biography under the constraint of knowing and dominating the universe. In the infinite medieval matter of the sources (heterogeneous but interconnected works), the legend is renewed in a particular way in each: in southwestern Germany, on the threshold of modern times, the Basel Alexander offers a further update. This complete biography of the hero is a compilation of various sources. The reference works differ in dating, language and literary genre, while the ‘Basel Alexander’ only transmits a reworking of the core of the Alexander saga. This core is framed, as far as the events surrounding the birth and death of the protagonist are concerned, by a new version of the Latin prose by Leo and the Historia de preliis in high German two-line stanzas. Before his death, Alexander concludes his adventures of conquest and knowledge with a series of fantastic journeys taken from the world chronicle by Jans von Wien. The mixture of prose and poetic source texts characterises the Basel manuscript in its entirety, in which the Saxon World Chronicle was interpolated with metrical texts (from the world chronicles of Rudolf von Ems and Jans von Wien, an anonymous German Ilias and, as mentioned, the Alexanderlied). This semi-diplomatic edition of the Basel Alexander holds as closely as possible to the only witness (Basel, University Library, Cod. E VI 26, Basel manuscript); in the apparatus, the few cases that differ from the manuscript are recorded; the spelling often had to be deciphered, so the corresponding keywords in the dictionaries of Middle High German were cited in the apparatus if necessary. The relevant aspects of the document were considered from a codicological-paleographical and stylistic point of view. The edition of the poem is followed by a set of notes that aim to explain significant or dubious aspects of the content. The bibliography is selective with regard to the editions of the texts considered and a few reference works for the overall understanding of the text. The other two witnesses of the so-called High Medieval Alexander romance (the Vorau and Strasbourg manuscripts) and the pseudo-historiographic Latin corpus that goes back to the High Medieval version of the Greek novel of Alexander, namely the translation by Archipresbyter Leo and its interpolated recensions known as the Historia de preliis, were mainly taken into account. It is also considered part of the World Chronicle of Johannes von Wien, which summarises the life of the hero on his fantastic travels, which the Basel Alexander sees as the culmination of the odeporic journey after the Indian adventures and before the tragic death of the protagonist. The problem of the sources overlaps with the variability of the text, and the recensions of the Alexanderlied either follow each other or diverge, excluding or integrating traditional narrative units. Comparison with the text corpora listed above is complicated by the different conditions of their usability: Some of the works incorporated into the Basel Alexander, i.e. the text complex of Leo and the Historia de preliis as well as the Universalchronik by Johannes von Wien, have rich and complex manuscript traditions that are only accessible via outdated editions (which only take into account some of the later known testimonies), which are methodologically questionable and have difficult-to-read apparatuses.