Prof. Dr. Michael Stolz – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Dr. Michael Stolz

University of Bern
Medieval German Studies

External Senior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP)
February 2023 – July 2023

Last Update: 31.08.2023

Curriculum Vitae

Michael Stolz was born in 1960 in Munich (Germany). He studied German and French literature in Munich, Poitiers (France), and Bern (Switzerland), where he obtained his PhD (1993) and finished his habilitation thesis (2000). He was assistant lecturer in Bern (1988–1995, 1998–2001), visiting fellow in Oxford, St Edmund Hall (UK, 1995–1998), assistant professor in Basle (Switzerland, 2001–2005), and professor (W2) in Göttingen (Germany, 2005–2006). Since 2006 he holds the chair in medieval German literature at the university of Bern. Intermediately, he was guest lecturer in Vienna (Austria, 2001) and Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, 2004), invited professor in Paris (Sorbonne, 2007/08), Fellow at FRIAS (2014/15), Visiting Scholar at Stanford University (2015), and Senior Fellow at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftkolleg in Greifswald (2021/22). Other positions: director of the Parzival Project (www.parzival.unibe.ch); president of the Swiss Academic Society of German Studies (2008–2012) and of the Bernese Centre of Medieval Studies (2009–2012); Vice-Dean (2010–2012) and Dean of the Arts and Humanities Faculty of the University of Bern (2012–2014). Since 2022, he is editor in chief of the periodical ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur’. His research interests include Middle High German literature in comparative perspectives, the history of learning and intellectual history, medieval manuscript culture, digital editing.

Selected Publications

Artes-liberales-Zyklen. Formationen des Wissens in lateinischen und deutschen Text-Bild-Zeugnissen des Mittelalters. 2 Vols. (Bibliotheca Germanica 47,1/2). Tübingen/Basel: Francke 2004.
With Gabriele Rippl (edd.): Original und Kopie: Techniken und Ästhetiken der re-/produktiven Abweichung, Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 4 (2019), Heft 3: https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/kwg/4/3/kwg.4.issue-3.xml
Parzival im Manuskript. Profile der Parzival-Überlieferung am Beispiel von fünf Handschriften des 13. bis 15. Jahrhunderts. Mit einem Beitrag von Richard F. Fasching, Basel: Schwabe 2020 [www.doi.org/10.24894/978-3-7965-4223-7 ].
Religiöse Ambiguitätstoleranz in Wolframs ›Parzival‹ als Reflex jüdisch-islamischen Wissens, in: Vielfalt des Religiösen. Mittelalterliche Literatur im postsäkularen Kontext, ed. by Susanne Bernhardt and Bent Gebert, Berlin/ Boston 2021 (Literatur – Theorie – Geschichte 22), pp. 155–176.
Natura, Artes und Virtutes. Alanus ab Insulis in der spätmittelalterlichen ‚Intellectual History‘, in: Alanus ab Insulis und das europäische Mittelalter, ed. by Beate Kellner and Frank Bezner, Paderborn: Brill Fink 2022, pp. 361–414.

FRIAS Project

The Poetics of the Visual. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Arab Optics

In recent decades the poetics of the visual has attracted increased scholarly interest in cultural and historical studies; but so far the topic has rarely been considered in intercultural perspectives. A revealing example of this is Wolfram von Eschenbach’s medieval poem Parzival, composed shortly after 1200, that suggests that his author was – at least to some extent – familiar with the Arab learning of his time, as transmitted through the Iberian translation centre of Toledo. The metaphorical language of the poem evokes contrasts of light and darkness, the phenomenon of haziness and the play of colours. So far, there has been no attempt to relate these motifs to contemporary Arab optics. Influential thinkers such as Alhacen (Ibn al-Haytham) or the Andalusian poet Ibn Hazm studied the radiation of light, the quality of darkness, and the effects of colours. Whereas these ideas would spread in occidental science only over the course of the 13^th century (via Roger Bacon and others), Wolfram’s Parzival ‘reflects’ elementary components of Arab optics already in an earlier period. The project analyses relevant episodes of the poem (including textual variants occurring in the manuscript transmission) and confronts them with statements in Arab science.