| Summary: | This article discusses the construction of literal and allegorical topographies in Hermann von Sachsenheim’s ›Die Mörin‹ and ›Des Spiegels Abenteuer‹, focusing particularly on the apparent opposition between Swabia and the otherworlds to which the narrator in both texts finds himself transported. This opposition is particularly complex in ›Die Mörin‹, in which the land of the personification Venus-Minne is geographically remote and exotic, but at the same time intimately, and provocatively, connected with South-Western Germany; and in which Venus-Minne herself is not only a conventional allegorical figure, but also an aggressive heathen despot who lays political claim to a number of German cities. The article also foregrounds questions of intertextuality, of gender, and of ›occidental‹ versus ›oriental‹ perspective in character dialogues, before suggesting that in both texts, Mechthild von der Pfalz, the patron of Hermann von Sachsenheim, is aligned with the Wolfram-inspired personification fraw Abentur.
|
|---|