The aim of the dissertation project was to analyse the interlacing of de-limitation and acquisition, of expansion and communicative and interactive consolidation in its mechanisms and spatial depictions. The resemantization and dynamisation that can be observed in this context is meant to shed new light on the mediaevalisation of ancient subject matters.

Research

The medieval adaptation of the ‚Historia Apollonii regis Tyri’ by Heinrich von Neustadt significantly expands the plot of the ancient original. The detailed description of Apollonius’ travels allows for a de-limitation, fictionalisation and resemantization of the ancient travel-space according to medieval patterns of cognition, imagination and interpretation.

Medieval concepts of society, interaction, and communication are projected onto ancient space and thus become ascertainable and describable. Ancient spaces are thus transformed, hybridized and inscribed into a specifically medieval salvific and courtly history. As Lea Braun intended to show in her dissertation project, this inscription is fundamentally achieved through the spatial structures of Heinrich’s ‚Apollonius’. The specifics of this process of transformation were analyzed on the basis of four major questions: 1. The fictionalisation and resemantization of ancient spaces; 2. The depiction of the other; 3. Spaces of governance; 4. Gender and space.

Results of the project were published with the title:

Lea Braun, Transformationen von Herrschaft und Raum in Heinrichs von Neustadt ›Apollonius von Tyrland‹, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2018