Abstract:

The Klosterneuburger Evangelienwerk is a vernacular prose compilation of predominantly New Testament pericopes with extensive glosses incorporating Old Testament quotations as well as apocryphal material. The Evangelienwerk defies established genre categories for medieval religious literature, yet despite---or perhaps because of---its unique status, manuscript transmission suggests it enjoyed popularity in the Middle Ages.

Nearly two dozen fourteenth-and fifteenth-century manuscripts transmitting all or part of the Evangelienwerk are currently known. This dissertation concentrates on three manuscripts, chosen because they offer rich codicological, textual, and pictorial evidence of how the Evangelienwerk was understood and received by at least three different medieval audiences.

The Introduction serves a three-fold purpose: it establishes a theoretical framework for the dissertation, provides the reader with provenance and background information on the selected manuscripts, and situates the Evangelienwerk in its literary historical context, particularly with regard to German Bible translation. Chapter One presents a more detailed discussion of the Evangelienwerk 's text, particularly the prologue and its information on the Evangelienwerk 's author and intended audience. The chapter continues with select typical glosses, providing the reader with a sense of the type of information deemed necessary for a fourteenth-century audience and the pedagogical style of the author.

The core of the dissertation, Chapters Two, Three, and Four, investigates three selected manuscripts: S, K1 and G?, respectively. The luxurious, yet radically different, pictorial programs of S (produced circa 1340) and K1 (produced circa 1410) highlight diverse aspects of the text and suggest that although the Evangelienwerk 's text remains stable, its appeal and function varied widely. The emphasis on narrative displayed in S's pictorial program is replaced in K1 by a strict adherence to canonical iconography, making K1's Evangelienwerk easy to navigate and ideal for sermon preparation. G? (produced in the fifteenth century), lacks a pictorial program, but minor textual variations and an increase in rhetorical devices combine to create in the reader's mind an imaginary oral scene of reception.

Through analysis of the material evidence offered by manuscripts of the Klosterneuburger Evangelienwerk , this dissertation explores the changing role of vernacular religious texts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.