Babylon und Jerusalem: Sinnkonstitutierung im "Reinfried von Braunschweig" und im "Apollonius von Tyrland" Heinrichs von Neustadt. Von Wolfgang Achnitz. Hermaea.Germanistische Forschungen, Neue Folge, 98. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002. Pp. viii + 482. €72.

Middle High German courtly romances written in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries continue to be disregarded by scholarship for a number of reasons. They do not conform to the literary standards established by late-twelfthcentury poets, they pursue different ideals and advocate new values, they are not based on the Arthurian genre or on the Tristan romance, and they tend to be massive in volume, making it difficult to read them simply in physical terms. Two of these, the anonymous Reinfried von Braunschweig and Heinrich von Neustadt's Apollonius von Tyrland, are the object of Wolfgang Achnitz's detailed investigation in his habilitation, accepted by the University of Münster in 1999 and only slightly revised for the publication. Achnitz attempts to gain a comprehensive understanding of both texts and their context by applying a comparative analysis in which he first focuses on each text individually before trying to draw conclusions about their commonalities and differences. Instead of identifying these two romances as "Minne- und Abenteuerromane," Achnitz suggests the term "Herrschafts- und Staatsroman" (p. 8) because the ultimate purpose of both works consists of the effort to reorient the protagonist ruler to his political, religious, and moral duties back home. Achnitz alerts his readers from the start to a major problem in his study (p. 8). Since both romances are huge oeuvres, any analysis has to deal with a vast amount of narrative details. Consequently the author includes extensive paraphrases of the two texts, which might be helpful for those unfamiliar with the two romances, but which will considerably irritate those who have dealt with both. Would it not have been better to separate both areas and to provide, first, a detailed summary, and only then turn to the actual interpretation? After all, this is supposed to be a scholarly investigation, and not an introduction to both texts for the general reader. However, even among German medievalists, neither Reinfried nor Apollonius is well known. Nevertheless, long stretches of this study amount to a simple retelling of the narrative events, and one has to wait until the latter half of this—by itself monumental—study for the specific interpretations and conclusions.

Albrecht Classen
University of Arizona