Zurich love letters
As Zurich love letters one is medieval Liederhandschrift with minnesongs referred from around the 1400th It is kept under the signature RP 3 (rarities desk 3) in the Zurich Central Library.
Find
The handwriting of the so-called Zurich love letters came to light behind a plastered wall between two beams in 1843 when a medieval house was being converted at Rennweg 33 in Zurich's old town. The house owner Johann Heinrich Faesi handed the document over to the antiquarian society founded a few years earlier . This commissioned its member, the literary historian Ernst Ludwig Ettmüller, with the scientific processing of the texts. His commentary appeared in 1844 under the title Six Letters and a Leich, along with some remarks about love for women in the Middle Ages, as the eighth issue in the communications of the Zurich Society for Patriotic Antiquities . The house at Rennweg 33 was demolished in 1911.
description
The document consists of eight sheets of parchment in Oktavformat 6.9 x 4.8 cm, of the type area measures 4.7 x 3.5 cm. The leaves are written in Gothic texture in one column, mostly on twenty lines. Traces of an earlier binding suggest that the fine leather binding is a little younger than the handwriting itself.
The first two sheets are badly damaged and some of them could no longer be deciphered. The stains are probably the result of a chemical treatment that had already been used to make the text more visible. With the help of the scientific service of the Zurich City Police , it was later possible to make the text largely legible again.
Ettmüller dated the manuscript to the end of the 13th century, Max Schiendorfer, Professor of Older German Literature at the University of Zurich , to the first quarter of the 14th century. The texts are among the first surviving Middle High German love letters.
Based on the orthography, it can be assumed that the author was neither a Zurich nor a professional writer. The linguistic peculiarities suggest an author from northern Swabia , northern Alsace or southern Rhine Franconia .
content
The booklet contains six letters in couplets, and a corpse . The texts join the tradition of the German court poets. The poet uses traditional letter elements such as greetings, requests and oaths of loyalty. Often there are also compliments about the beauty of the loved one or complaints about unrequited love:
Owê, daz I am not muz bî ir,
daz dut me always wê:
so gentle dut me ir werder gruz.
ir kel is wîz alsam der snê,
ir cheeks clear, ir munt is red:
sorry for a ma so grôze need?
si roast me or i'm dôt.
literature
- Max Schiendorfer (Ed.), Johannes Hadlaub: The poems of the Zurich minnesinger. Zurich / Munich 1986, pp. 218–222.
- Max Schiendorfer (arrangement): "mine sinne di sint mine". Zurich love letters from the time of minstrels. Kranich Verlag, Zollikon 1988.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Max Schiendorfer (arrangement): "mine sinne di sint mine". Zurich love letters from the time of minstrels. Kranich Verlag, Zollikon 1988; P. 79.