Arts , Humanities & Social Science

Abstract

Among other important and rare books, The National Central Library of Florence in Italy preserves a manuscript dated to the first half of the 14th century and compiled in Bohemia. It contains three Middle High German courtly romances: Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan, its continuation by Heinrich von Freiberg, and Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein. This paper focuses on the history of the codex and some interesting stylistic features of Iwein's copy, which denotes a strong tendency to simplify the text. It is suggested that the Florentine Iwein is not a 'rewriting', rather, it could be seen as a 'reshaping' of the inherent sense of the chivalric poem, given its probable audience would likely not understand the old code of the Arthurian world.