This article explores phenomena of marginality in different areas of medieval culture. The introduction explains medieval concepts of the “margin”. In the first part, the author analyzes the tension between the “centre” and the “margin” as found in medieval conceptions of the world such as labyrinths and the mappae mundi. Secondly, he examines the interdependency of social and textual marginalization as it occurs in the 14th century Hausbuch of Michael de Leone. The third part of the article is dedicated to (...) the Munich manuscript of Wolframs von Eschenbach Titurel, a text situated on the margins of the famous Parzival-novel both in terms of its physical location and also its poetic thought. The survey of these examples shows that margins often refer to the centre of cultural constellations despite their allegedly subsidiary role. (shrink)

This paper sheds light on the possibilities and perspectives of linking digital editions of Medieval German texts to each other and to other digital resources. Furthermore, it discusses some of the internal and technical conditions necessary to render this linkage meaningful, like lemmatisation, part-of-speech-tagging, and using standardised mark-up languages. Finally, the sustainability and reusability of digital editions are considered. While in the past, editions of medieval texts were conceived as rather isolated scholarly works of individual editors, nowadays the collaboration and (...) cooperation of greater working groups is essential in editing projects. Due to the complexity of editions consisting of multiple textual layers, e. g. apparatus entries, annotations, or facsimiles, the requirements for future digital editions have risen. The first approach to respond to these demands is to link the various textual layers to each other, enabling the users to navigate between these layers in a sensible way. The second step is to link the edited text to other resources, such as online dictionaries or other editions, allowing complex research networks to be created. These goals are achieved by lemmatising and other tagging methods, ensuring the information being mapped to a normalised and idealised frame of reference. Common standards like Unicode or the TEI guidelines are of great importance for such purposes, as they assure the interchange and re-use of scientific data, as well as their sustainability. (shrink)

Choosing the history of statistics and operations research as a casestudy, several ways of setting the development of 20th century applied mathematics into a social context are discussed. It is shown that there is ample common ground between these contextualizations and several recent research programs in general contemporary history. It is argued that a closer cooperation between general historians and historians of mathematics might further the integration of the internalist and externalist approaches within the historiography of mathematics.