The Hunt in German Specialist Texts of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period: Linguistic Token - Textual Shaping - Typological Characteristics

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Simone Schultz-Balluff
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 387515922

The project has as its subject the hunt and hunting in German texts of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. The central focus is specialist hunting literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The objective is to capture the concept of hunting as a specialist topic through the analysis of linguistic tokens, textual shaping and literary processing. A textual corpus with an accompanying commentary is to be developed which is to be edited digitally. The project will be a contribution to the reconstruction and visibility of this important field of knowledge that extends well beyond the Middle Ages.The topic Hunt and Hunting presents an exciting challenge given that hunting is not only a practical craft but also enjoys extraordinary prestige compared to other trades. Furthermore, both men and women from all estates engaged in hunting, the concept of which was ubiquitous in the Middle Ages. Consequently, the thematisation of this subject is found in a wide variety of contexts such as religion, law, specialist knowledge, secular narrative, chronicle. Contextually, the linguistic token acquires a particular shape (lexicon, syntax), as does the textual form (from the text type to the characteristic style of individual passages) and the execution, both in the matter of everyday life as well as in literary texts (the location in the text and in the flow of the narrative).All the specialist hunting texts up to the end of the Early Modern Period, including all extant variants, will be worked up. Following this, passages from other text types that make use of hunting as a theme will be processed. The texts will be of interest to a range of users through a dual-edition model that provides linguistic annotation at various levels as well as philological edition with commentary. Access to a comprehensive corpus of specialist texts will provide a basis for diachronic research into specialist language that is methodologically innovative and that will make possible some overarching conclusions. The project will serve to round off typological investigations into specialist texts. Evaluations and analyses will contribute to research into specialist texts from a foundation of thematically rich material.Altogether the project will provide a fresh delineation of an area of knowledge that is central to everyday life in the Middle Ages and will make possible an overview of the deployment of hunting themes across the centuries in a range of text types. In the course of the project all processed texts as well as the marking up of linguistic and literary parameters will be made accessible online.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants