Gregorius – digital

Hartmann von Aue's hagiographic tale about Gregorius, also called 'the good sinner', was written towards the end of the 12th century, and based on the Old French Vie du pape saint Grégoire. The story tells of the son of an incestuous sibling relationship who is abandoned as an infant and found by fishermen, spends his early childhood years in an adoptive family, then receives a spiritual education in a monastery, but nevertheless as a youth chooses knighthood, goes out and liberates his mother's land, and unwittingly enters into an incestuous marriage with her; when he finds out, he retires to a rock in the sea to repent, and seventeen years later is elected pope by divine signs. The story was widely spread throughout Europe in the Middle Ages as well as in the early modern period.

On this website you will find a digital edition of Gregorius. In its center there will be the edition of selected witnesses. The editorial module will show the text with notes and relevant variants.

Parallel to the editions you will find the virtual manuscript library, with digital copies of all manuscripts and fragments, as well as the corresponding transcriptions, which you can put beside the image of the respective manuscript.

In the section Introduction you will find a general Introduction to this digital edition, an explanation of the editorial principles, and a descriptive list of manuscripts (only in German).

Under Materials we collect additional working tools, such as a complete verse concordance to Gregorius, and a bibliography with texts specially digitized or available online.

In the section Information you will find details about the project, the team, the terms of use and the citation recommendation.

Technically, the transcribing and editing work is done in XML format according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). For the specific design of the encoding, we follow the guidelines of HeiEditions and our own TEI-handbook. All image and text data are made available online without restriction under an 'open access' licence. For this reason, Gregorius – digital is also a textual database that will serve future data-based research.

Gregorius – digital is edited by Victor Millet (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) and Marie-Sophie Winter (Université de Picardie Jules Verne), in cooperation with the Heidelberg University Library.