Manuel Braun, “Staying in Touch with the Sources: A Digital Edition of Middle High German Lyric” (Digital Humanities Focal Group)

In the Middle Ages, lyric poetry is intended for the voice first, and then the manuscript. Nineteenth and twentieth century philologists squeezed it into a printed book and in doing so laid violent hands on it. As the book follows a logic of linearity, of economy and of definiteness, it reduces the diversity of medieval written records radically. Only the digital edition can meet the needs of medieval texts because it is flexible and can display texts in different versions and conditions and is therefore more closely connected to the sources than any printed edition. This presentation will reveal the actual shape of such a digital edition, which is currently being developed in Erlangen and Stuttgart under the title “Lyric Poetry of the High Middle Ages.”