Public evening lecture by Professor Dr. Maximilian Benz (Bielefeld University, Chair of Medieval and Early Modern German Literature)

The German-language love poetry of the High Middle Ages - the Minnesang - arose, among other things, as a successor to the trobador and trouvère poetry of Romania. At the same time, there are hardly any foreign words in Minnesang: the transfer presupposes multilingualism without exposing it. This finding can be contrasted with a collection of song texts in particular, which are still known today as the "Carmina burana". The lecture presents the collection as well as concise examples of multilingualism.

Maximilian Benz is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern German Literature at Bielefeld University. He completed his doctorate at HU Berlin in 2012 and his habilitation at the University of Zurich in 2019. In 2018, he published the monograph Fragmente einer Sprache der Liebe um 1200.

Moderation: Dr. Florian M. Schmid