Matthias Meyer (University of Vienna)

"The Austrian Chronicle 1454-1467 and what it tells us about narrative practices and the House of Habsburg"

Matthias Meyer has studied German Studies (mostly German medieval and modern literature), medieval and modern history, and Russian language and literature at the University of Heidelberg and at the FU Berlin, where he also wrote his dissertation and his Habilitationsschrift. Post-Doc-Positions at the University of Bielefeld and again at the FU Berlin led to guest professorships at Beijing, Olomouc, Vienna and Berlin, before becoming full professor at the University of Vienna, where he also served as Dean and in several other official functions, e.g. head of the Vienna Doctoral Academy ‘Medieval Academy’. He was also head of a recently finished funded research project on the ‘Austrian Chronicle 1454-1467’.

From the speaker:

After a short introduction into the ‘Austrian Chronicle 1454-1467’ as a text and its somewhat surprising transmission, I will talk about the persona of the chronicler. While sometimes very well informed and almost scrupulously accurate, he can also verge into sarcastic commentary – and he has a surprising penchant for death scenes. I am interested not only in the traditional question of how chronicles are narrated, and what the modes of narration can tell about the chronicler, but also how the chronicle fits into its contemporaneous surroundings in and around Vienna, which means: how it fits into the early stages of the (sit venia verbo) well-oiled Habsburgian propaganda-machine.