Commentary

Summary

1 Here and throughout, I follow Brall-Tuchel's use of new subheadings which help considerably to structure the entire text. Those, however, do not exist in the two manuscripts. They are all kept in bold which thus indicates the addition. Helmut Brall-Tuchel, Von Christen, Juden und von Heiden: Der niederrheinische Orientbericht, ed., trans., and commentary by Helmut Brall-Tuchel (2019). His contribution deserves great respect, and I would like to acknowledge his enormous accomplishment. The Middle Low German text is often not easy to understand, even for an expert of pre-modern German, so Brall-Tuchel's translation into modern standard German was a great help. Nevertheless, the original text contained in Ms. W*3, as edited by Anja Micklin (2021, see below) is the basis for this English translation, so I compared carefully how Brall-Tuchel had approached his task, which actually made it possible for me to offer numerous corrections throughout. Many times, I also had to disagree somewhat with the comments in his footnotes based on my own research. Rendering a Middle Low German narrative into modern English represents, to be sure, a very different challenge and charge.

The text has by now been edited critically by Anja Micklin, Der »Niederrheinische Orientbericht»: Edition und sprachliche Untersuchung. Rheinisches Archiv, 163 (Vienna, Weimar, and Cologne: Bohlau, 2021), which has allowed me to examine closely the original two manuscripts for the translation. Micklin offers mostly a historical-linguistic analysis but she is not concerned with the cultural-historical background and framework. See my review in Mediaevistik 35 (forthcoming). Cf. also my encyclopedia entry, “Anonymous: Niederrheinische Orientbericht [Low Rhenish Report about the Orient]” (1720 words), The Literary Encyclopedia. (https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=40912; last accessed on April 12, 2023). For the first edition of our text, accompanied with good background information, see Reinhold Rohricht and Heinrich Meisner, “Ein niederrheinischer Bericht uber den Orient,” Zeitschrift fur deutsche Philologie 19 (1887): 1–86. As to the role of Egypt in this account, see Albrecht Classen, “Agypten im Niederrheinischen Orientbericht: ein spatmittelalterlicher Augenzeuge,” Kairoer Germanistische Studien 25 (2022): 15–27.

2 The author uses the phrase “und van allen landen van over mer” (30: and about all the lands across the sea), which scholarship has regularly called ‘Outremer’ after the French usage, referring to the four kingdoms set up in the Holy Land in the cause of the crusades.