Geographien des Minnesangs

Abstract

he paper first discusses current proposals to replace narrative models of literary historiography – above all Franco Moretti’s quantitative methods – and then it verifies the possibilities of applying a spatial literary history, such as the one suggested by Luttazzo and Pedullà in the Atlante della letteratura italiana, to the Middle High German literature and, in particular, to the so-called donauländischer Minnesang (The “Danubian Minnesang”), which orientation to spatial models has already been proved by means of the current/common classification.
The relations of temporal and spatial arguments (as in Die höfische Literatur by Helmut de Boor, published in 1953 in the series Geschichte der deutschen Literatur) should be problematized looking at new research on the early Minnesang; that is why Benz makes the hypothetical attempt to critically judge their surplus value towards the convectional literary-historical representations, starting from the representation and analysis categories developed in the Atlante della letteratura italiana.