Medieval Listening and Reading

This new study brings recent scholarly debates on oral cultures and literate societies to bear on the earliest recorded literature in German (800–1300). It considers the criteria for assessing what works were destined for listeners, what examples anticipated readers, and how far both modes of reception could apply to one work. The opening chapters review previous scholarship, and the introduction of writing into preliterate Germany. The core of the book presents lexical and non-lexical evidence for the different modes of reception, taken from the whole spectrum of genres, from dance songs to liturgy, from drama and heroic literature to the court narrative and lyric poetry. The social contexts of reception and the physical process of reading books are also considered. Two concluding chapters explore the literary and historical implications of the slow interpenetration of orality and literacy.

Benchmark study by world authority; research libraries will need this for the comprehensive bibliography of primary sources at least
Sketches the emergence of a vernacular literature in German from the shadow of Latin as the language of writing in the Middle Ages

Reviews & endorsements

"This book is important for what it reveals about literature in German from 800 to 1300; it is of value, too, for the techniques of analysis that it employs. Even during my first reading, I was thinking how some of Green's methods could be modified to fit Old and Middle English literature. I am not the only reader who will be so animated." Modern Philology

"Long accustomed to providing seminal analyses on medieval German literature, Green has again enriched the discipline with the present masterful study." F. G. Gentry, Choice

"Green's book will be useful to scholars, college instructors, and graduate students not conversant in modern German who seek an informed discussion of questions and sources central to orality and literacy in the German Middle Ages." Speculum

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