Die Paradoxie mystischer Lehre im ›St. Trudperter Hohenlied‹ und im ›Fließenden Licht der Gottheit‹

Wenn Werke der mittelalterlichen volkssprachigen Mystik in Literaturgeschichten behandelt werden, so scheint oft die Wahl zwischen zwei Zugangswegen. Verbreitet ist, vor allem wenn es um Werke schreibender Frauen geht, eine autobiographische Lesart, bei der das sprechende Ich umstandslos mit der Autorin identifiziert wird. So entstand der Begriff der ‘Erlebnismystik’, in der literarische Zeugnisse unmittelbar als Bericht aus dem Leben gelesen wurden, einem Leben, das dann oft pathologisiert wurde.[…] Im Rahmen solch autobiographischer Authentizität scheint ein Anspruch auf Lehre, die ja gerade die interpersonale Übertragbarkeit von Regeln voraussetzt, unangemessen. Wenn man hingegen die literarische Konstruiertheit der Texte hervorhebt, […] gilt das Augenmerk vor allem der zentralen Paradoxie, an der sich diese Texte abarbeiten, nämlich der Versprachlichung des grundsätzlich die Sprache übersteigenden Augenblickes der unio. Wo die eine Richtung in Begriffen von ‘Erlebnis’ und ‘Erfahrung’ die biographische Echtheit der Texte beschwört, sieht die andere den besonderen Status der Texte gerade in ihrer Literarizität. Solche Elemente literarischer Konstruiertheit aber, die Werke geistlicher Literatur in die Nähe weltlich-fiktionaler Dichtung verschieben, erscheinen aus ganz anderer Perspektive ebenfalls unvereinbar mit Lehrhaftigkeit. Was beide Interpretationsweisen dabei in der Regel aus den Augen verlieren, ist der Aspekt des lehrhaften Sprechens […]. Beide von mir ausgewählten Beispiele sind deutlich der Didaxe verpflichtet und präsentieren sich als an ein Publikum gerichtet, das sie belehren möchten

Including the Excluded:Strategies of Opening Up in Late Medieval Religious Writing

Practices of rewriting and mouvance are central to medieval culture, but have been neglected by contemporary scholarship. This paper highlights how collaborative forms of writing such as religious song engage with complex theological thought, opening up a discourse from which the laity had previously been excluded. Using forms which defy conventional author-based aesthetic norms, these songs explore poetic practices which are both collective and inclusive.Almut Suerbaum, ‘Including the Excluded: Strategies of Opening Up in Late Medieval Religious Writing’, in Openness in Medieval Europe, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum, Cultural Inquiry, 23 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 191-208 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-23_10

Openness in Medieval Europe

This volume challenges the persistent association of the Middle Ages with closure and fixity. Bringing together a range of disciplines and perspectives, it identifies and uncovers forms of openness which are often obscured by modern assumptions, and demonstrates how they coexist with, or even depend upon, enclosure and containment in paradoxical and unexpected ways. Explored through notions such as porosity, vulnerability, exposure, unfinishedness, and inclusivity, openness turns out to permeate medieval culture, unsettling boundaries, binaries, and clear-cut distinctions.Openness in Medieval Europe, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum, Cultural Inquiry, 23 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-23

Aspects of the Performative in Medieval Culture

The volume assesses performative structures within a variety of medieval forms of textuality, from vernacular literature to records of parliamentary proceedings, from prayer books to musical composition. Three issues are central to the volume:the role of ritual speech acts the way in which authorship can be seen as created within medieval texts rather than as a given category finally, phenomena of voice, created and situated between citation and repetition, especially in forms which appropriate and transform literary tradition. The volume encompasses articles by historians and musicologists as well as literary scholars

What Does It Mean to Be Young for Syrian Men Living as Refugees in Cairo?

This article deals with Syrian young men who fled to Egypt after the uprising in 2011. Their life was affected by the challenges stemming from displacement, such as their confrontation with new responsibilities, unknown vulnerabilities and emotions, liminality and precarity. They suffered from forced displacement in a gender- and age-specific way

PLoS Genet.

Our understanding of basic evolutionary processes in bacteria is still very limited. For example, multiple recent dating estimates are based on a universal inter-species molecular clock rate, but that rate was calibrated using estimates of geological dates that are no longer accepted. We therefore estimated the short-term rates of mutation and recombination in Helicobacter pylori by sequencing an average of 39,300 bp in 78 gene fragments from 97 isolates. These isolates included 34 pairs of sequential samples, which were sampled at intervals of 0.25 to 10.2 years. They also included single isolates from 29 individuals (average age: 45 years) from 10 families. The accumulation of sequence diversity increased with time of separation in a clock-like manner in the sequential isolates. We used Approximate Bayesian Computation to estimate the rates of mutation, recombination, mean length of recombination tracts, and average diversity in those tracts. The estimates indicate that the short-term mutation rate is 1.4x10(-6) (serial isolates) to 4.5x10(-6) (family isolates) per nucleotide per year and that three times as many substitutions are introduced by recombination as by mutation. The long-term mutation rate over millennia is 5-17-fold lower, partly due to the removal of non-synonymous mutations due to purifying selection. Comparisons with the recent literature show that short-term mutation rates vary dramatically in different bacterial species and can span a range of several orders of magnitude

Gebärden im mittelhochdeutschen Prosa-Lancleot

Die vorliegene Arbeit untersucht anhand der deutschen Fassung des Prosa-Lancelot, welche Bedeutung der Darstellung von Gebaerden in der Strukturierung der Narration zukommt. Szenen, in denen zeremonielle Gebaerden in stark typisierender Funktion eingesetzt werden und damit gesellschaftliche Normativitaet im Raum inszenieren, lassen den Gegensatz zu solchen Episoden besonders scharf hervortreten, in denen gebaerdenhafte Zeichen sowohl fuer die Figuren im Text wie auch fuer Leser mehrdeutig werden. Es wird gezeigt, dass im Prosa-Lancelot solche Ambiguitaet wesentlich fuer die Konzeption der Liebenden, aber auch fuer die Figur des Koenigs Artus wird, dessen Praesentation als Melancholiker die Erosion herrscherlicher Ordnung im Zeichen der Minne ins Bild setzt. Die Gralsqueste dagegen unternimmt im Umfeld zisterziensischer Spiritualitaet eine Reduktion auf eindeutige Zeichen, in der koerperliche Gebaerden fast voellig hinter dem gesprochenen Wort zuruecktreten

PLoS Genet.

The Helicobacter pylori cag pathogenicity island (cagPAI) encodes a type IV secretion system. Humans infected with cagPAI-carrying H. pylori are at increased risk for sequelae such as gastric cancer. Housekeeping genes in H. pylori show considerable genetic diversity; but the diversity of virulence factors such as the cagPAI, which transports the bacterial oncogene CagA into host cells, has not been systematically investigated. Here we compared the complete cagPAI sequences for 38 representative isolates from all known H. pylori biogeographic populations. Their gene content and gene order were highly conserved. The phylogeny of most cagPAI genes was similar to that of housekeeping genes, indicating that the cagPAI was probably acquired only once by H. pylori, and its genetic diversity reflects the isolation by distance that has shaped this bacterial species since modern humans migrated out of Africa. Most isolates induced IL-8 release in gastric epithelial cells, indicating that the function of the Cag secretion system has been conserved despite some genetic rearrangements. More than one third of cagPAI genes, in particular those encoding cell-surface exposed proteins, showed signatures of diversifying (Darwinian) selection at more than 5% of codons. Several unknown gene products predicted to be under Darwinian selection are also likely to be secreted proteins (e.g. HP0522, HP0535). One of these, HP0535, is predicted to code for either a new secreted candidate effector protein or a protein which interacts with CagA because it contains two genetic lineages, similar to cagA. Our study provides a resource that can guide future research on the biological roles and host interactions of cagPAI proteins, including several whose function is still unknown