Project Details
Projekt
Mapping Intersectional Identities in Old Yiddish Romance: 'Bovo d’Antona' and 'Pariz un Vyene'
Subject Area
General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
Term
since 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 451487953
The romances that were being adapted across Europe in the late medieval and early modern period represent a wide range of intercultural encounters and settings that generate powerful narratives concerning the identities of the protagonists, the antagonists and their implied readers. These dynamics raise fundamental questions concerning the role of literary texts in offering templates for selfhood and self-making to the different reading communities they serve. This project will undertake an intersectional analysis of the way that different strands of identity are represented in the Old Yiddish romances 'Bovo d’Antona' and 'Pariz un Vyene' alongside their European sources and cognates in order to investigate what these texts reveal about the intercultural dynamics shaping the representation of identity in late medieval and early modern literature. In doing so, we will create a methodological template for engaging with intersectional representations of identity in late medieval and early modern literature and for discussing their effects in hailing flexible and transient reading communities that coalesce around different factors shaping identity. By using the example of two texts that were read by multilingual Jewish readers from different European regions, our project will provide a counterpoint to misleading narratives that order medieval and early modern romances into national canons and thereby underplay the role of shifting constellations of religion, mother-tongue, class, ethnicity, age and location in shaping the creation of late medieval and early modern texts and their reception by different readers across Europe.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
