Mapping Intersectional Identities in Old Yiddish Romance: 'Bovo d’Antona' and 'Pariz un Vyene'

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Marion Aptroot; Professorin Dr. Miriam Edlich-Muth
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: from 2020 to 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 451487953

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

This project has investigated the construction of intersectional identity in the fifteenth-century Yiddish romance Bovo d’Antona by Elye Bokher. Employing a mixed-method approach combining annotated reading and digital analysis, the project produced a publicly accessible database and graph analyses of identity references in Bovo d‘Antona and this data has also informed three journal articles. The overview article on “A Distant Reading Model of Intersectional Identity in Fiction: What Constitutes Character in the Early Modern Yiddish Romance Bovo d’Antona?” presents the project's overall findings, demonstrating the performative nature of identity in Bovo d’Antona and advocating for the integration of mixedmethod distant reading and intersectional approaches into processes of literary analysis. This was accompanied by two more granular, analogue analyses that function as casestudies of intersectional approaches to identity in this romance. One of these studies takes a comparative approach to the intersection of setting and social status in Bovo d’Antona in comparison to the fifteenth-century Middle English romance Partonope. The second study analyzes the cynocephalus character Pelukan from the Bovo romance as a metaphor for the multifaceted, intersectional experience of early modern Jews, drawing parallels between Pelukan's liminality and Bokher's own "double consciousness" as a Jewish translator in Christian society. In the course of our studies in this direction, we have also uncovered a previously unknown version of the Bovo story in a seventeenth-century print edition, details of which will be made public at a later date. Overall, by creating digital graph analyses of identity in Bovo and structuring these around the principle of identity as intersectional, the project has developed a novel methodology for analyzing intersectional identity in literary texts. In the form of an open-access database of identity references and the graph analyses of intersectional identity in Bovo, this project has further created valuable resources for scholars of Yiddish romance and identity in fiction that ample avenues for future research.

Publications

• Database of References to Different Strands of Characters’ Identity in Elye Bokher’s Bovo d’Antona
  Zaidman-Mauer, Daniella & Edlich-Muth, Miriam
  
• Graph Representations of Intersectional Identity in Elye Bokher's Bovo D'Antona
  Edlich-Muth, Miriam & Edlich-Muth, Christian
  
• Born that Way? Setting and Social Status as Intersecting Constituents of Identity in the Middle English Partonope and the Yiddish Bovo d’Antona. Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literature
  Edlich-Muth, Miriam & Kaempfer, Lucie
  
• Pelukan in the Forest: Exploring Jewish Identity in Bovo d’Antona. Renaissance Studies vol. 39.5
  Bruder, Anthony J. & Zaidman-Mauer, Daniella