A HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED VERSION OF THE ALEXIUS LEGEND: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MANUSCRIPT GER. 4

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the as yet unpublished manuscript of the legend of Alexius (referred to as P), which is contained in Manuscript Ger. 4 in the Rare Book Collection of the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania. The first part consists of tracing the historical development of the legend with emphasis on identifying the source of P from the nine other known German versions. Because the legend appears in two distinct groupings, bridal and papal, and P belongs to the papal group, the subject matter of P is compared in detail to all other German papal versions. The result is that although one of the papal versions, K, closely resembles P, it is not P\u27s source, but rather it is likely that P and K may have had a common source which goes back to Latin C. The second part consists of a linguistic-philological analysis of the dialect of the manuscript, i.e. an attempt to localize its dialect and the time of its writing on the basis of philological evidence in the text. Going from the general to the specific, there is a discussion of Middle German, Middle Franconian, and finally Moselle Franconian and Ripuarian, listing each dialect\u27s distinctive characteristics and providing examples from the manuscript wherever possible. This is followed by a phonological study of each sound as it appears in the manuscript, with examples of each word in which the sound appears and a determination of whether the sound is characteristic of one of the dialects listed above. At the same time, through the analysis of the sound forms this study attempts to determine the period in which each sound was prevalent. The dissertation concludes that the linguistic evidence of the manuscript points to a Middle Franconian dialect with many typically 15th century Ripuarian forms. Part Three consists of the edition of the manuscript reproduced exactly as it appears, with the addition of punctuation. Part Four consists of the glossary, containing every word as it appears with its corresponding form in Middle High German