Der arme Heinrich – digital
Hartmann von Aue's legendary narrative Der arme Heinrich (Poor Henry), composed towards the end of the twelfth century, is a courtly verse novella recounting the miraculous healing of a leper. This brief tale (c. 1,500 lines) is now regarded as a classic and remains widely used in academic teaching.
On this website you will find a digital edition of Der Arme Heinrich. It comprises three modules. At its core are editions of selected textual witnesses, each accompanied by annotations and significant variant readings. These are editions conceived in terms of 'textual history': they present individual manuscripts rather than aiming at a text-critical reconstruction of an authorial archetype. The second module consists of a virtual manuscript library, offering digital images of all manuscripts and fragments together with their transcriptions, intended to facilitate more detailed source analysis. Finally, a synoptic view forms the third module, enabling users to study multiple textual witnesses simultaneously on screen, to display transcription and edition side by side, and to add a translation for comparison.
The section Introduction presents an introduction to this digital edition and its underlying principles, together with a descriptive list of the manuscripts.
Under Materials we assemble all philological research tools, including a complete verse concordance, the full critical apparatus of variants, a visualisation of co-transmission, and a bibliography containing numerous texts digitised specifically for this project or available online.
The section Information provides details on the project history, the team, terms of use, and recommendations for citation.
Der arme Heinrich – digital forms part of the portal Hartmann von Aue – digital, which brings together editions of all four of Hartmann’s narrative works. In addition, it offers project-wide information relevant to all editorial undertakings, including principles of editing and textual presentation, the TEI handbook, and guidance on the functionality of the viewing modules. The portal also provides a more general bibliography on Hartmann von Aue's narrative works, coordinated with the bibliographies of the individual editions. All of this content is likewise accessible directly via the navigation menu of each edition.
Der arme Heinrich – digital digital is jointly directed by Gustavo Fernández Riva (Universität Heidelberg) and Victor Millet (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela), with support from Jakub Šimek (Universität Heidelberg), and in collaboration with the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg. All image and text data are made freely available online in Open Access under a CC licence, without restrictions. In this sense, Der Arme Heinrich – digital is conceived not only as an edition, but also as a collection of openly accessible and reusable research data, enabling further analyses—particularly those supported by computational methods—in the spirit of Open Science.