Project Details
Projekt
Rereading Alan of Lille. Conceptualising Nature in Medieval Latin and German Literatures
Subject Area
German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
Greek and Latin Philology
Greek and Latin Philology
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 467274274
From antiquity to modernity, notions, semantics and conceptualizations of nature have played an important role in the foundation of morality, society, and power structures. Although often crucial for establishing such concepts and semantics, the impact of literary discourse has usually been given too little attention. Against this background, the future project will concentrate in an innovative way on literary constructions and conceptualizations of nature in the Middle Ages, with a special focus on a comparative analysis of Latin and German poetry. The starting point for the project will be the poetic works of Alanus ab Insulis (12th century), in which he transforms the discourse of natural philosophy into literary discourse in an innovative and influential way: both his 'De planctu Naturae' and 'Anticlaudianus' exerted lasting influence on both Latin and vernacular literatures that can hardly be overstated. On the basis of previous studies by the project leaders, the proposed project will firstly deal with the reception of Alanus' 'De Planctu Naturae' in Latin culture: a reception that, surprisingly, has hardly been studied before and will be analyzed comprehensively for the first time in our project. By concentrating on Spruch, Lied and Leich, the project will secondly examine hitherto ignored conceptualizations and semantics of nature in German literature of the Middle Ages. Thirdly, the project will examine in a comparative way how the concept and figure of Natura as negotiated in Alanus' 'Planctus' influenced the depiction of nature in Latin, German and European love poetry of the Middle Ages (Nature Entries, Nature and Minne, Nature and Society) and, vice versa, how the discourse of Medieval love poetry was already incorporated into the works of Alanus themselves. The overall aim is therefore to enrich, both materially and conceptually, what is probably the most fundamental literary tradition of nature in the Middle Ages.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
