ABSTRACT
By way of introduction, let us first consider some fundamental issues concerning the book and reading in the Middle Ages, before I turn to the Middle High German examples. In his seminal study European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, first printed in 1948, and last reprinted in an English translation in 1990, Ernst Robert Curtius incorporated an entire chapter to “The Book as Symbol” because the book has always been a significant metaphorical element in all periods of the history of Western literature and its treatment has gained it the rank of a topos. This observation also applies to the Middle Ages, although one of the most pervasive popular notions of that age is that it was a time dominated by oral culture. Orality was indeed a primary means of transmitting information, but the intellectual elite nevertheless developed and relied on the written document as the most important vehicle for their knowledge, thus also privileging their culture over the vernacular, popular culture. 1
