Wolfram von Eschenbach strukturiert den Kosmos seiner zweiten großen Dichtung durch Verwandtschaftssysteme und konkretisiert daran die Krisen und Probleme der erzählten Welt. Im „Willehalm“ determinieren verwandtschaftliche Bindungen nicht nur das Handeln einzelner Figuren, sondern stellen zudem ein Strukturprinzip dar, das das gesamte Werk zusammenhält und dessen Verästelungen einen Schlüssel zum Verständnis des Epos bieten können.

The series "QUELLEN UND FORSCHUNGEN ZUR LITERATUR- UND KULTURGESCHICHTE" (Sources and Research in the History of Literature and Culture) is an established feature among the renowned publications for German Literary Studies. Edited by Mark-Georg Dehrmann and Christiane Witthöft, the series presents examples of high-quality scholarship examining literary texts in conjunction with historical cultural phenomena.

Focusing on the concept of ’changing places’, the essays in this anthology discuss processes of constitution, stabilization, and transformation of ’worlds of knowledge‘, covering a wide range of thematic and historical perspectives from the European Middle Ages to the 21st century. Objects as eclectic as church buildings, panel paintings, etchings, pieces of narrative and dramatic literature, motion pictures and TV genres serve to illustrate how access to as well as the interpretation of ’stocks of knowledge‘ is determined by spatial orders and their oscillations.

The volume goes back to a transdicsiplinary conference held in December 2010 at the University of Trier. It contains articles dedicated to tree key concepts that are central to the 'spatial turn'-discussion in the framework of the historically oriented cultural studies. These key concepts are "places", "orders", and "oscillations". All three key concepts stand both for existing and imaginary/factitive entities and focus the discussion on their dynamic features as well as on the continuity and discontinuity of their development, on their interdependence and on the impact they have on each other. The volume covers a wide time period from the Middle Ages until modern times and includes diverse case studies of a manifold range of sources stretching from the architectural structure of a Gothic cathedral to printed (visual and verbal) sources of different genres. In this way, the volume contributes significantly to the cultural historical discussion of the concept "space" within the European knowledge archive.

Contrary to former studies the volume focusses on the opportunities of fictional world concepts in the Arthurian narrations of the European Middle Ages apart from the factitive dictate. It examines phenomena of narration that opened spaces of story-telling to French and German premodern literatures but are sealed to temporary educated literature.