The contributions contained in this volume are dedicated to the most important animal poem of the European Middle Ages, the story of Reynard the Fox The subject matter of the individual studies is, in accordance with the conception of the volume, limited to the transmission and research of the closely related Dutch, English and Low German versions. In the history of Reinaert and Reinke philology, examining the interdependence of the various surviving versions is an indispensable prerequisite for the literary study of the texts. The most detailed contribution in this volume, an abridged and edited printed version of Niels Witton's unpublished dissertation, once again deals with this complex of questions. It contains suggestions that refine and in part also modify the stemmatological picture. The illustrations in the early prints of the Reinaert history (Antwerp - London - Lübeck) have been known for a long time, but researchers have certainly become quite aware of their philological significance in recent years. This problem is dealt with in two articles in the present volume. In the first, important new facts from the English tradition are communicated and linked with what is already known to form a history of illustrations; The connections with the woodcuts of the Dutch and Dutch German early prints are also examined. Kenneth Varty's restoration of the oldest English series of Reynard illustrations is an essential step towards the reconstruction of the woodcut sequence in the Dutch incunabulums. In his contribution to the early German Reinke illustrations, Raimund Vedder starts from the famous woodcuts in the Low German print of 1498 and examines the survival and change of this tradition in the wider Low German tradition. Since the English tradition turns out to be important in the assessment of the Low German illustrations, the two essays are particularly closely related. Hubertus Menke devotes an investigation to the historical aspects of the reception of Reinke's poetry, in which the German tradition of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries is documented. The interpretation of the facts presented allows a more detailed insight into the readers' histories and their interest in the later versions of Reineke as a popular 'scholarly poem'. The volume is rounded off by two bibliographies. The first by Loek Geeraedts contains the secondary literature published since 1944 on the Dutch Reinaert, the second by Peter Meurer contains the contributions published since 1800 on the Low German Reinke. - [Forward]

Language: German, English