This Festschrift, published on the occasion of Hans-Joachim Behr’s 65th birthday, offers a wide range of contributions by renowned scholars of medieval studies as well as specialists on the reception of medieval literature in the Early Modern and Modern Period. Following the research interests of the jubilee, the articles discuss religious and political poetry (Dieter Merzbacher, Johannes Rettelbach, Václav Bok, Winfried Frey and Claus-Artur Scheier), lyric poetry (Christoph Huber, Horst Brunner and Wolfgang Beutin), texts and topics of the Early Modern Period (Jan-Dirk Müller, Gerhild Scholz-Williams) as well as questions concerned with historical linguistics, media studies, and medievalism (Claudia Märtl, Pamela Männel, Wiebke Ohlendorf, Vera Heinrich, Charlotte Pappendorf and Alexander Schwarz as well as Ingrid Bennewitz) from an interdisciplinary point of view.

The contributions in this volume assess the value of the acoustic in the Middle Ages and evaluate its importance in medieval literature. Although a great deal of research in Medieval Studies has focused on issues related to visuality, there has never been an in-depth study of the significance of auditivity in medieval courtly culture. The implications of sound and hearing have likewise remained unexamined. The essays (from John Greenfield, Harald Haferland, Susanne Knaeble, Andreas Kraß, Claudia Lauer, William Layher, Sylvan Wagner and Viola Wittmann) face the challenge of recovering that which seems to have faded away: the audible Middle Ages. Using a rigorous approach to examine acoustic phenomena and their reception in medieval texts and the cultures that produced them, this volume presents new insights about the richness of cultural production in the Middle Ages.

The South Tyrolean knight Oswald von Wolkenstein (ca. 1377-1445) is the most notable German lyricist of the late Middle Ages. The present volume contains 25 articles in total, which have been compiled from the presentations at a great conference held by the Oswald von Wolkenstein society in Brixen in 2012. The authors are a mixture of renouned and younger Germanists and musicologists. The papers reveal diverse perspectives from which researchers are investigating the songs of Oswald today. The volume represents the current state of Oswald von Wolkenstein research.

Die vielfältigen Repräsentations- und Inszenierungsformen des Körpers werden in jüngster Zeit gerade im methodischen Umfeld der "gender studies" intensiv diskutiert. In welchem Ausmaß dies auch in der Literatur des Mittelalters der Fall ist, machen die Beiträge dieses Bandes deutlich.