“Refracting the Jewel – The Implementation of Fable Material in the Textual Witness Cod. Bodmer 42 (15th century)” (working title)

The project focuses on the manuscript Cod. Bodmer 42 (1455–1460, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, Cologny/Geneva), in order to start from there to negotiate questions of heteronomous dependencies and autonomous textual realizations on a concrete object. The codex contains Ulrich Boner’s The Jewel (German: Der Edelstein) and was produced in the context of the so-called ‘Lauber workshop’. In this respect, Cod. Bodmer 42 belongs to these two corpora and appears to be the only extant text that is part of both. To what extent the codex depends on the conventions of these two corpora and to what extent its realization follows its own criteria is to be clarified.  

The concentration on this particular manuscript is justified by its singularity, which is reflected in both the material and the contents. Cod. Bodmer 42, for example, shows peculiarities in text inventory and sequence, in the bilingualism of Latin and German, in the layout, in the inter- and paratextual references, and in its imageless state.

The manuscript is to be located in its cultural-historical contexts, such as the change of media and the increasing vernacular writing. One thesis of the project is that this textual witness manifests reactions to the innovations and changes of its time (e.g., book printing, rationalization and economization processes) as well as to established traditions (e.g., the European fable tradition, especially Boner’s The Jewel, the production of the ‘Lauber workshop’). In this way, mutual conclusions are to be drawn from contemporary changes and the tradition to the particularities of the manuscript and vice versa.

The aim of the research project is to order, evaluate and interpret these particularities of the concrete object. For this purpose, methods of codicology, paleography, and stemmatology will be used, as well as literary approaches to textual immanence, intertextuality, reception aesthetics, and edition philology. A transcription of the manuscript is made according to the guidelines of the TEI.