Intractable Cases and Digital Hopes: How New Media Can Help with Interpreting Multi-Version Vernacular Texts

The dawn of Middle High German literary Überlieferung is characterized by a relatively limited making of vernacular books, and by extremely mov- able texts (as each survived manuscript often represents the testis unicus of an autonomous Fassung). Despite the valid argu- ments raised by neo-Lachmann- ian scholars and some undoubt- able weakness in the so-called ‘new-philological’ mode, in the eld of vernacular traditions an überlieferungskritisch approach has proved to be more recommendable: the editions of such texts, traditionally renounced any reconstructive attempt; editors, nevertheless, faced with the mainstream genealogical Maasian method, behaved eclectically. This paper aims at reassessing the ecdotic issues posited by the tradition of Alexanderlied and the editorial treatments of the text, also envisaging the advantages that digital edition and apparatus might produce for the interpretation of the poem and of its multi-lingual recensio.