New light on Oswald von Wolkenstein: central European traditions and Burgundian polyphony

Abstract

As a person, Oswald von Wolkenstein (1375/8–1445) is a more tangible figure than almost any of his contemporaries. The numerous extant biographical documents enable us to trace his life in minute detail. His autobiographical songs reveal him as a widely travelled knight, a liegeman of his king, but also as a poet and singer performing his own works. His travels took him not only to distant countries but also to places of political importance within the empire – to the Council at Constance, the Reichstag at Nuremberg and Ulm, the royal court at Pressburg, the Council at Basle. Four portraits and a sculpture tell us what he looked like: robust in physique, and with his right eye missing. The numerous reports of quarrels with his neighbours, bishop and duke give the impression of an irascible, pugnacious character. Nonetheless he is one of the greatest Germanic poets of the late Middle Ages (possibly even the ‘most significant lyric poet writing in German between Walther von der Vogelweide and Goethe’, as Ulrich Miiller put it). He was, moreover, a poet with an exceptional flair for combining his words with music. And something else that makes him unique in the German-speaking world is the fact that his works have been handed down as a self-contained collection, in manuscripts devoted to him alone.