‘Das es teutsche zung vernimpt’: Zur Übersetzungsliteratur Tirols um 1400

The achievement of Vienna (and particularly of its University) in spreading the culture of late-medieval Latinity via translations into German is well known. Much less thoroughly explored, however, is the role played by contemporary Tyrolean translators in building a bridge between their German audiences and a variety of important products of medieval Latin, French, and Italian literature. This article foregrounds three South Tyrolean translations, by Michel Velser, Hans Vintler, and Ulrich Putsch, and also refers to the anonymous Tiroler Petrarca-Translation. All of these were composed between roughly 1390 and 1430, and transmit versions of texts that had enjoyed enormous popularity in the Romance lands. The piece focuses especially on questions of translation technique and of reception. It concludes that there is no firm evidence on which to postulate the existence of a concerted Tyrolean 'school' of translators or the involvement of a particular influential patron, but demonstrates that the cultural 'bridge' built by these Tyrolean authors was a significant and multi -faceted one, which as such merits far more investigation. It also provides further evidence to support medievalists' increasing awareness that medieval books were often in practice owned and read by rather different people from those whom their authors had envisaged.