History of the Latin Literature in Tyrol

The project here presented aims at providing the first history of Latin literature in Tyrol. Although the impact of Middle- and Neolatin literature on the cultural life and the development of Europe during the middle ages and the modern age can hardly be overestimated, this literature is still very poorly known. Alongside editions and commentaries to make single key texts accessible, a literary history which would present and make understandable the historical genesis and the development of this phenomenon is one of the most important desiderata. Due to the large mass of extant texts and manifold heuristic problems such a history can only be written for single regions at one time. The region of Tyrol, mediating as it does between the two different cultural and literary areas of Italy and Germany and possessing many important writers and texts of its own, proofs especially interesting in this regard. The project here presented therefore wants to delineate the historical development of Tyrolian Latin literature from the emergence of Tyrol as a political entity in the 13th century to the present day (earlier authors and texts being presented in a summary way in an introductory chapter). Our research will cover the whole of the political entity Tyrol constituted during the biggest part of this period. Authors will be treated if they come from Tyrol, if they have lived and worked there, or if their works show important connections with the region. The modern concept of literature as belles lettres did not exist during the middle ages and the early modern age; its place was taken by the much broader concept of litterae. Therefore, the project is not meant to lead to a literary history in the presently most current sense of the word, but to a history of Tyrol`s Latin litterae in their entirety: Inscriptions, clerical texts, letters, texts of daily use, and scientific prose, even if they must be treated concisely because of the large bulk of texts belonging to this genres and of their comparative uniformity, will nevertheless be included as well as belletristic prose and poetry. Furthermore, the description must not exhaust itself in an enumeration of names of authors and titles of works, but will always have to take into account the material and ideological conditions of the production and reception of the texts in question. This means that it should pay attention to questions such as concerning e. g. the material and educational conditions for the growth of Latin literature in Tyrol, the social classes involved in its production and reception, its modes of presentation, its relations to clerical and secular power and its interaction with the vernacular literatures. Such a concept calls for an interdisciplinary approach from the very beginning: textual philology will have to be supplemented by regional, social and religious history, history of ideas and of art, library science, codicology, modern philologies (German and Romance language and literature) and modern literary theories such as cultural poetics or reception theory.

The object of research was the history of the Latin Literature written in the territory of the historical county of Tyrol or aimed especially at the audience in that territory. The result of the project is the first comprehensive history of the Latin literature in the Tyrol. This is also the first comprehensive regional history of the Middle-Latin and Neo-Latin literature worldwide. The literary history is divided in four periods: 1. Befor the unification of the county of Tyrol (1285). 2. Until the death of the emperor Maximilian I. (1518). 3. The 16th century until the death of the archduke Ferdinand II. (1595). 4. The 17th century until the founding of the university (1669). The periodization follows the significant turning points in the political history which had profound influence on tyrolean literature and culture. An introductory chapter outlines the general characteristics of every period and describes the determinants of the literary activity such as book press, educational institutions or literary circles and tries to define the role of Latin in the cultural and social life of the time. In the first period the literature is presented synoptically, in the others it is subdivided according to topical and genre criteria (poetry, theatre, rhetorics, history, geography, biography, epistolography, dialogue, music, schoolbooks, humaniora, theology, philosophy, science, medicine and law). The follow-up Project P17964 currently concentrates on the literature after 1669 until the present day. After the completion of the follow-up project the two-volume "History of Latin Literature in Tyrol" from the beginnings until the present day will be published.