Sytems of knowledge in the oeuvre of Sebastian Brant

Up into the 1990s, research on Sebastian Brant has focused almost exclusively on the „Narrenschiff“, this above all in the light of other literary corpora or given form patterns like „Narrenliteratur“ or „Satire“. The rest of the author's work remained less illuminated, for example in the areas of editing, translation, law, etc.

Joachim Knape was the first to show how fruitful a comprehensive perspective can be: by moving the NS out of its main work status for the first time, by relating it to the courses of the professor of poetry and by explaining it from the journalistic efforts of the jurist Brant.  It was above all the merits of Thomas Wilhelmi and Joachim Knape for this part of the work that prompted more intensive research into Brant's entire oeuvre.

On this basis, the article will focus on Brant's editorial work, in particular the editions of those texts which pass on the knowledge of action of earlier epochs (antiquity, the Middle Ages, early Renaissance). In this area of work a corpus of instructive, partly gnomish wisdom literature (e.g. Disticha Catonis, Aesopus, Freidank) stands out, for which S.B. can be regarded as an early modern pacemaker in Germany.

This corpus reveals a concept of the unity of philosophy and poetry, which also allows a new view of the NS.