Florian Geddes

• GER 300Y1 L0101 Intermediate German II, MW 11am–1pm
• GER 401HS L0101 Advanced German II, TR 9–11am
• BMS 331H1S The History of the Book: Elements of Bibliography and Print Culture, W 3–5pm

My dissertation focuses on late medieval and early modern German heroic poetry collections known as “Heldenbücher” (working title: The Making of the ‘Book of Heroes’ (15th/16th c.): Textuality, Materiality, and the History of the Book). In my research, I combine literary theory with methods from the field of book history, thus reading the corpus of the Books of Heroes not only as compilations of poetic texts but also as material artifacts. As a result, my work revolves around the production and reception of heroic poetry between manuscript and print culture, transformation and adaptation processes throughout the textual history of individual poems, and the many ways in which manual labor, material, and text intersected in creating the Books of Heroes.

As part of a five-year project on “Medieval Undergrounds” (PI: Prof. Markus Stock) generously funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, I work on literary and visual representations of the subterranean in Middle High German heroic poetry. Caves, tunnels, and hollow mountains play a prominent role in this genre as sites of heroic challenge, transgression, and transformation. My research in this area focuses on the entanglement of human and nonhuman agents with subsurface environments, fantasies of the generative potential of underground spaces, and the complex literary figure of the dwarf.