Pursuing a New Order I

Concentrating on the period of advance of the vernaculars in the context of religious text production in Central and Eastern Central Europe from the fourteenth until the sixteenth century, the individual studies in this volume present material so far neglected by the nationally defined historiographies and literary studies. The process of vernacularization created a new sociolinguistic field for the negotiation of social order through the choice of texts and topics. The volume seeks to answer the question whether, why and how distinctive new communicative, literary, and political cultures developed after the vernacular languages had acquired ever higher levels of literacy and education. The volume fills a gap of contemporary scholarship on the role of the vernaculars and vernacular literatures in European medieval societies and with the focus on the Eastern European regions it breaks new ground in regard to questions that have so far only been explored based on material from Europe's 'West'.