Il Medioevo di Wolfgang Lazius (1514-1565). Le citazioni dal Canto dei Nibelunghi e dal Laurin

Abstract

Wolfgang Lazius (1514-1565), humanist from Vienna, has often quoted from medieval texts in German language in his works. Usually, he refers to manuscripts to which he had access or which he personally owned. This is most prominently exemplified by the passages from the Nibelungenlied and from Laurin, which Lazius reproduces on the basis of a manuscript lost to us. Quotes from the Nibelungenlied can be found in two printed historiographical works by Lazius, the Commentarii Reipublicae Romanae as well as De gentium aliquot migrationibus. This article will first (1) summarise the known facts concerning the history and whereabouts of this lost manuscript, next (2) reproduce the Middle High German excerpts according to the Early Modern prints (for the first time in a literal rendition), as well as re-evaluate the text history of the Nibelungenlied and Laurin, and finally (3), consider the question of the quotes’ function within the Early Modern context of Lazius’ work. Apparently Lazius’ reproductions of the texts cannot and do not want to meet modern philological requirements. Rather, as scholarly compilations, they provide evidence for a general cultural, biographic-genealogical knowledge about the Middle Ages as imagined by Lazius. The distinctive feature of the texts’ reproductions is especially the fact that vernacular texts are used here, for the first time at all, argumentatively in historiographic contexts and thus become quotable for the scholarly humanist ‘Medieval Studies’.