Refine
Document Type
- Article (2)
Language
- German (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Keywords
- Mittelalter (2) (remove)
On history in the present day. Laudatio to Lenka Vaňková.
This paper takes as its starting point several statements by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on the role of the German language in literary and scholarly life during Leibniz's era. The languages of scholarship were Latin and French, and Leibniz himself published in both these languages. German was the language of practical life. Viewed from this perspective, it was almost inevitable that medieval and early modern medicine - not in the sense of academic theory, but as a practical activity - developed its own fully-fledged specialist language, which was largely based on the vernacular. In her studies of the language of historical medicine, Lenka Vaňková has shown how such vernacular language was (and potentially still is) able to function in specialist domains.
Mysticism means the verbalization of mystic experiences, or more precisely the verbalization of "unio mystica – the unification of the religious "I" with the absolute, and, in Christianity, with God. An interesting body of German mystic literature has survived from the medieval period, beginning with the "St. Trudperter Hohenlied" (around 1160). In "conjugal mysticism", the "unio" is viewed and verbalized as an experience of love, while speculative mysticism (especially as represented by the Dominicans) formulates a "different" theology, written primarily in German. These new mystical experiences require a new approach to language, i.e. methods of nomination which recall the principles of naming based on the use of metaphor and word-formation in professional language.