Anne Ramin

The effects of the ‚Little Ice Age' did not end with snow, ice and frost. The project places scarcity, as a consequence of changing weather, at its centre: crop failures, blocked trade routes and the resulting price rises produced a shortage of food that was felt as a pressing problem across broad sections of the population. Building on the premise that literary texts can, at least in part, be read as reactions to such real-world problems, the thesis pursues a history-of-problems approach. Using depictions of scarcity and abundance, it examines whether and how such contexts found their way into literary production.

As a foundation, the study considers the contemporary book market, understood as both an archive and a bridge between literature and reality. It proceeds from the assumption that printing decisions – such as the inclusion of a literary text in a programme otherwise dominated by practical and specialist texts – were not made independently of the interests and needs of a potential readership. By viewing narrative texts as products of specific publication contexts, further perspectives open up on the significance of narrative literature in relation to the period of its creation.

The study focuses on four texts that engage productively with the varieties of scarcity and abundance: the ‚Faustbuch' from Johann Spieß's press in Frankfurt am Main, together with its successor known as the ‚Wagnerbuch', and the ‚Lalebuch' from Bernhard Jobin's press in Strasbourg. Johann Fischart's ‚Geschichtklitterung', which stems from the same printing context, is drawn on as an additional source.