“Saving the Body. Semantics and Narratives of Somatic Salvation in the late Middle Ages”

My second book will shed light on narrative constellations of rescue in German literature from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period. Although rescue is a widespread component of narrative texts, it has never been critically investigated. I use the postcolonial idea of saviorism as a vantage point to investigate the history, semantics and theory of rescue in pre- and early modern literature. I pay attention to those texts in particular that juxtapose the rescue of the body and Christian salvation. The study will provide new angles on how the rescue of the body is negotiated in exemplary texts from the 13th to the 16th century with a focus on the entanglement of immanent and transcendent meanings of rescue. Due to the semantic proximity of rescue and salvation, the subject is well suited to critically engage with the grand narrative of secularization. My approach is designed to combine historical semantics, narratology and culture studies. Thus, I will uncover the historical depth of the starkly asymmetrical relationship between captive, captor and rescuer as it is represented in German literature. German Studies have not yet engaged with the topic of captivity in a way similar to e.g. English studies, where the genre of captivity narratives has already triggered greater awareness.