Motif Index of German Secular Narratives from the Beginning to 1400

The Motif-Index is an indispensable reference work for narratologists, medievalists, literary historians, historians, ethnologists, art historians and cultural historians. Using the systematicity of Stith Thompson, this new motif index catalogues and accesses all the important narrative motifs in secular narrative literature written in German from the 9th to 14th centuries. The Motif-Index of German Secular Narratives not only provides a complete catalogue of all the occurrences in each individual work of medieval literature of widespread narrative patterns, but also provides a sophisticated system of indexing and referencing to make it possible to access and research the individual motifs across different works. Thus it is, for example, possible to swiftly locate all the parallel occurrences of a particular motif in other works or to track the development of motifs or groups of motifs in particular literary genres or periods in medieval literature. Volumes 1 to 5 present genre-based catalogues of motifs arranged by work in alphabetical order: 1. Matiere de Bretagne Part 1, 2. Matiere de Bretagne Part 2, 3. Oriental and Miscellanous Romances/Chansons de Geste, 4. Heroic Epic/Maere and Novellas, 5. Romances of Antiquity. For each passage relevant to the history of a motif a concise paraphrase of the content is given, together with the relevant Thompson classification. Volume 6 provides three valuable indexes: 1. a central index of motifs using Thompson's classification system, which enables the reader to identify all relevant textual occurrences at a glance, 2. an index of all key-words belonging to the naming of a particular motif - e.g., "Fairy" or "Belt", with corresponding references to the Thompson classification, and 3. an index of all names quoted, which will thus make it possible, for example, to locate all the motifs connected with a particular name. Volume 6 is accompanied by a CD-ROM which enhances the search potential. Two volumes are published each year.Austrian Academy of Sciences Staff is the author of 'Motif Index of German Secular Narratives from the Beginning to 1400 ', published 2005 under ISBN 9783110184877 and ISBN 3110184877.