The Old Yiddish 'Widuwilt'. Edition, Transliteration, Translation, and Commentary

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Astrid Lembke
• Subject Area: German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature) ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 408797665

The Old Yiddish Arthurian Romance 'Widuwilt' is one of the most complex, creative, and original adaptations of a Middle High German literary hypotext by a Jewish author that have been transmitted from pre-modern times. This late medieval text is an ideal object for a great number of questions from a philological, cultural, and historiographical point of view. Despite its significance, the text has not been made accessible philologically so far. There is not consistent and modern edition. Scholars working with this romance - especially if they come from German Literary Studies or History - must still use out-dated transliterations of one or two textual sources without being able to survey the complete transmission and without having access to the Yiddish text in Hebrew letters. The project aims to rectify this situation by producing a new edition of the late medieval/early modern romance which contains the text from the transmitted manuscripts as well as the text from the earliest printed edition. The project will create a dependable text on the basis of current and up-to-date research that will give the edition's users access to the romance as it was written down and received in its own time. The additional transliteration of the Yiddish text into the Latin alphabet will make it suitable also for readers who do not know how to read Hebrew letters. The appendix, moreover, will contain a translation into Modern German, a commentary, and an index of proper names and places. After the project has been completed and the edition has been published, scholars from Yiddish Studies and Jewish Studies, but also from German Literary Studies, History, and Translation Studies will for the first time be able to use a philologically reliable edition. The project aims to further the exchange between the disciplines and thereby to create possibilities to develop new modes of research. By presenting a text that is close to the textual sources, a transliteration, and a translation, the project intends to make its object available for interdisciplinary research and a whole range of socio-cultural questions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants