Álvaro Alfredo Bragança Jr. (Email)

As Ph.D. in German Studies (language and literature) from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, I academically came to know the Germanic tribes through my teaching of disciplines with historical and literary orientation, in which the document and the testimony present us a near vision on the reality of the researched centuries. From the tribes composed by geer-mannen (men with spears) on we come to the German Middle Age and to the stylised representation of ideal knights, holders of pagan and Christian values. In modern times, stereotypes and reinterpretations of the ancient men of the North bwecome the basis for cultural, ideological and political models.Franks, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Swebians, Lombards, Angles and Saxons (only to cite some tribes) provided the occident in real and imaginary contexts with anthroponomies, toponomies, habits, usages – summing up – an unquestionable contribution for that is collected by men with the wisdom, the culture. This way, there is a continuum between the barbarians described in the historical discourse by Caesar and Tacitus and the warriors Siegfried and Hagen, who were immortalized by the art of speech in the Eddas and glorified in Wagner’s music, taken as examples of martial values by right-wing ideologies  and, finally, revisited by the cinematographic discourse, among others. Therefore, I invite the colleagues to come into the social, political, cultural and literary world of the Germanic men from yesterday, today and forever!

Current Resarch: Historical fact and literary text: a culturalist approach of the germanophonous Lower Middle Ages in Iwein, by Hartmann von Aue, as a model of an archetypical society

The current Project is inserted into na interdisciplinary line of research which aims to bring to light points of convergence between historiographic and literary discourses in the German language in the Lower Middle Ages, specially in the XII and XIII centuries. Hartmann von Aue, German ministerial studies by us in previous research, sums up in his work the model procedures – wether desired or not – of the social estamentos valued in the Sacred Roman-Germanic Empire in the centuries mentioned above. On the one hand, the omnipresence of God as the conductor of medievel man and on the other hand the most perfect knight as miles christianus configure ideal archetypes which had as their intention the conformation  and even greater solidification of a society where the masculine voice determined the ordo mundi. Iwein, chivalry romance of the Minnesänger of Aue, through a culturalist approach, allows us to aprehend the historical elements which were contemporaneous to the troubador and their reinterpretation inside the literary text, where History and Literature contribute to the establisment of a wider and micro-historically more “real” model that, even to this day, permeates the everyday imaginary about the Middle Ages.

Areas of Interest:
Mediaeval chivalry; Mediaeval paremiology; Germanic tribes in the Early Middle Ages; Mediaeval poetry in German; Sacred Roman-Germanic Empire; Mediaeval English Literature.