S – Straßburger Alexander

The parchment codex Strasbourg, Seminarbibl., Cod. C. V. 16.6. 4° (first two decades of the 13th century) that preserved the Straßburger Alexander was unfortunately destroyed in the city fire in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war. Thanks to some early editors, we have access to the texts that were handed down in the manuscript, namely two Middle-High-German devotional poems, preceding the Alexanderlied, and an incomplete hagiographic version of the life of Pilatus, following it. It is the longest redaction of the poem on Alexander and recounts the whole biography of the Macedonian king, with his Indian campaigns, up until his failed attempt at conquering Earthly Paradise, his conversion and death.

An idea of how the manuscript looked like is provided by Schreiber’s 1828 lithography, while other important paleographic and codicological information can be found in a copy of Massmann’s 1828 edition which was annotated by Franz Roth after a collation with the manuscript. This annotated copy is now housed in Strasbourg at the Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire (BNU) under the signature Ms. 2.379 and it is used in the digital edition instead of the manuscript facsimile (courtesy of the BNU). S’s digital edition is now in its Beta version and consists of a reading text and the visualization of the copy annotated by Roth. A future release will showcase three editorial levels: a diplomatic, where the manuscript will be transcribed as faithfully as possible; a semi-diplomatic, where abbreviations and superscripts will be expanded, capitalization and punctuation will be added and the most evident scribal mistakes will be corrected; and a critical edition, which will include more editorial emendations and an apparatus of critical notes; furthermore, lists of named entities and hotspots that will help deciphering the most important notes by Roth will be added.

Responsible of the interpretative transcription of S: Prof. Maria Adele Cipolla (PI and main editor of the DAL project), with the assistance of Dr. Giulia D’Agostino (University of Verona/Darmstadt), Dr. Lorenzo Ferroni (University of Verona) and Dr. Paola Peratello (University of Venice).

Here you can access the edition: https://dh.dlls.univr.it/dse/dal-s/.