Читать книгу Die dänischen Eufemiaviser und die Rezeption höfischer Kultur im spätmittelalterlichen Dänemark – The Eufemiaviser and the Reception of Courtly Culture in Late Medieval Denmark - Группа авторов - Страница 22

Bampi/Richter (Hrsg.), Die dänischen Eufemiaviser, BNPH 68 (2021): 57–87 DOI 10.24053/9783772057502-009

Jonatan Pettersson (Stockholm) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5837-8597

Abstract: The article addresses the question of what happened to the genre of romance when printing technology was taken into use in late 15^th and early 16^th century Denmark, at a time when hand-written manuscripts still were being produced. East Scandinavian romance had a history from the beginning of the 14^th century in Sweden, when the three EufemiavisorEufemiavisor (schwed.) were created, and they continued to attract interest in late Middle Ages up to the beginning of the 16^th century. They appear in Danish manuscripts in the last decades of the 15^th century, but when the printing technology is introduced, they seem to play a less prominent role, as only one text, FloresFlores og Blanseflor (dän.) og Blanseflor, survives in the first phase of printing. In the article, it is argued that the choice to print this particular text probably lies in its ability to respond to late medieval currents and the new urban literary market, but also that it perhaps should be understood within the context of a late medieval religious reading of romances.

Keywords: romance, late medieval romance, early prints, Scandinavian literary culture, Old Danish literary history, EufemiaviserEufemiaviser (dän.), Flores og BlanseflorFlores og Blanseflor (dän.)

European romance is sometimes primarily associated with its high medieval origins, but it continued to attract interest for a long time, not the least during the late Middle Ages.2 The genre was not stable or petrified; it evolved in different directions as time and contexts changed, and it was assigned new functions and meanings and found new audiences. One much discussed example of change within the romance genre is the abandonment of rhymed verse for prose, but the genre as a whole underwent changes that involved formal characteristics, thematic orientation, ideology, narrative structure, and expected audience.3

The late medieval period is also the period of the introduction of printing technology, which in time would change the whole textual landscape. Printing technology had the potential to make books available to new groups due to the much lower sale prices. One estimation states that printing technology lowered the cost of production by up to 80 percent in comparison with a manually produced book (Ludwig 1964: 4). However, even if the change was to be profound, the current scholarly discussion on this period nevertheless stresses the long co-existence of and exchange between the manuscript culture and printing technology rather than speaks of a sharp break (Boffey 2014; Tether 2017:14–16). Romance also found its way into printed book culture, but not without some hesitation towards the genre among printers, and the relationship would remain complex.4 Here, we will approach this process in Scandinavia.

Romances appeared in today’s Norway and Iceland in the thirteenth century, and in Sweden and Denmark, here collectively referred to as East Scandinavia, the genre was introduced in the fourteenth century and seems to have attracted interest during the fifteenth century.5 The printing technology was first introduced in Denmark and Sweden in the 1480s, and during the first decades it was mostly used for religious and educational texts.6 In Sweden, no secular narratives, like romances, were printed at all in this early phase, and this pattern would last. After the nobleman Gustav Vasa ascended to the Swedish throne in 1523, printing became monopolised under state control, thereby limiting the commercial exploitation of the printing technology.

In Denmark, a somewhat different path was taken, as secular texts in the Danish vernacular were printed in the very first decades of domestic printing (Undorf 2014: 16–18). Later in the sixteenth century, a large number of popular narratives were printed. These were a group of texts which sometimes are called ‘chapbooks’ or ‘Volksbücher’, or the more textually oriented concepts ‘Historienbücher’ or ‘early modern narratives’.7 The shifting terminology of this group of texts mirrors the heterogeneity in terms of their content and textual characteristics. Although ‘romance’ is a rather wide and open genre concept, the early modern narrative is a probably even wider category.8

In this article, I address the process of change in the corpus of East Scandinavian secular narratives, of which the romances were part, upon the advent of the new printing technology in Scandinavia, and more specifically, in Denmark. For reasons which will be explained further below, special attention will be paid to the printing of the Danish Flores og BlanseflorFlores og Blanseflor (dän.) of the Floire et BlanchefleurFloire et Blanchefleur tradition. What happened to romance in East Scandinavia when printing technology began to be used at the same time as hand-written manuscripts were still being produced? How can we understand the choices that have left us the corpus of texts we have? Let us look at a broad picture of Scandinavian text history before going into the details of manuscripts and prints.