Project Description

 

The MWB is a period dictionary of High Medieval German from the period 1050 to 1350.

It deals with the vocabulary and word usage of the entire spectrum of German-speaking texts that have survived from this period, the Song of the Nibelungs and classical Middle High German epic and lyric poetry (Heinrich von Veldeke, Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Straßburg, Walther von der Vogelweide and others) as well as German-speaking documents, law books, chronicles and non-fiction texts or the works of German-speaking mysticism (Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Seuse, Johannes Tauler).

The MWB is prepared under the responsibility and sponsorship of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz and the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen in three workplaces in Trier and Mainz (Mainz Academy) and in Göttingen (Göttingen Academy). Since 2006 a double delivery of about 300 pages has been published annually by S. Hirzel Verlag Stuttgart. In 2025 the work is to be completed in five to six volumes of about 1000-1200 pages each. In parallel, the Mainz Academy's office in Trier also provides MWB Online, an Internet publication of the dictionary, which also contains the keyword list, the electronic document archive, and the underlying text collection, and is linked to the network of retro-digitized predecessor dictionaries on the Internet.