Marie-Sophie Winter
Biography
Marie-Sophie Winter is an assistant professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Picardy Jules Verne (France) and a member of the research unit "Text, Representation, Archaeology, Authority and Memory, from the Antique through the Early Modern Periods" (TrAme). During her USIAS Fellowship, she will be hosted by Professor Thomas Mohnike in the Germanic and North European Worlds (MGNE) research unit of the University of Strasbourg.
Her research and publications focus on literary exchanges between French and German language areas from the 12th to the 16th century, from a perspective that combines poetic, codicological and intercultural approaches.
A former student of the École normale supérieure (Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, France), she is the author of a thesis on medieval romances inspired by the Antiquity (La description dans les récits d'Antiquité allemands, Paris, 2004). Her habilitation to direct research (HDR), defended in 2017 at the Sorbonne, resulted in the book Translations de l’œuvre médiévale (XIIe–XVIe siècles), published in Würzburg (Germany) in 2020. A former laureate of the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2015–2017), she has been a visiting professor at the universities of Stuttgart (2014–15, 2018), Berlin (2019) and Karlsruhe (2020–2022). She has co-edited collective works in France as well as in Germany, most recently on the "classical" German author Hartmann von Aue (with Margreth Egidi and Markus Greulich: Hartmann von Aue 1230–1517).
Marie-Sophie Winter is committed to the intercultural dimension of medieval studies and to the dissemination of knowledge; in 2022 she co-organised, with Mathias Herweg, a Franco-German series of events on medieval love poetry ("Amour fou"), and she speaks about medieval studies in France and Germany in a podcast of the Ruhr University Bochum.
Fellowship 2023
Dates - 01/09/2023-31/08/2024
Project summary
MEDIEVAL ARTEFACTS FROM ALL ANGLES: NEW PERSPECTIVES OF GERMAN MULTI-TEXT MANUSCRIPTS
The production of multi-text manuscripts (recueils manuscrits in French, Sammelhandschriften in German) is a central cultural phenomenon of the late Middle Ages in Europe. Their emergence coincides with an epistemic and aesthetic tendency towards compilation and totalisation, which increases from the 13th century onwards; it also participates in a general evolution of book production, which then tended to become an economic and lucrative activity. These collections of texts in Latin or vernacular languages have received renewed attention in research over the last three decades. Nevertheless, and particularly in the German field, studies have so far concentrated on collections of short narrative forms.
The present project focuses on multi-text manuscripts in German language with “long” texts, and aims at renewing their approach. To this end, the method implemented combines codicology – more precisely structural codicology –, a comparative poetic approach, and the perspective of cultural studies. It will also exploit the possibilities opened up by digital humanities and interdisciplinarity, in keeping with the framework offered by the host research unit “Germanic and North European Worlds”. On this basis, the project will have two parts: on the one hand, a case study of manuscript 2119 of Strasbourg’s National University Library (BNU); on the other hand, a collective essay on German, Scandinavian and Dutch language multi-text manuscripts.
The results obtained will be disseminated within the international scientific community through printed and electronic publications in three languages; they will also be visualised using the digital platform OCTANT developed at the University of Strasbourg, and disseminated to a wider public through contributions to the blog of the BNU. By proposing a holistic and intercultural vision of medieval multi-text manuscripts as "artefacts", the project aims to contribute to a broad vision of the processes of text transmission in the German and Nordic cultural areas, and thus to a global understanding of book production in pre-modern Europe.
