Transculturality and the Gesta Romanorum in Light of Hartmann von Aue’s Gregorius and Heinrich Kaufringer’s Verse Narratives

My present interest concerns the probably most popular and most influential collection of Latin prose narratives, the Gesta Romanorum, compiled by an anonymous author/authors sometime by the end of the thirteenth or the early fourteenth century, either in England or in Germany, if we consider the two major branches of surviving manuscripts. Many literary luminaries, such as Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Heinrich Kaufringer, Thomas Hoccleve, Hans Sachs, William Shakespeare, and others drew from this anthology (either in Latin or in a translation) and created their own versions. One of the most striking examples for this reception process proves to be Tale LXXXI, which is predicated on the motif of incest between brother and sister. Both here in the Gesta Romanorum and in numerous other literary texts do we learn of examples involving incestuous relationships that had to be suppressed, hence the fictional accounts that served as a warning to their various audiences. The religious author skillfully re-functionalized an old account which he had obviously learned from the Middle High German verse narrative Gregorius by Hartmann von Aue (ca. 1186–1199). Turning from this literary exchange between Hartmann and the Gesta Romanorum to the relationship between the latter and an early fifteenth-century German author, Heinrich Kaufringer (fl. 1400), we can clearly recognize the reverse funnel effect.