Description:
<jats:p>This article is dedicated to the early modern Novel of Antiquity, its ancestors and successors. In the 15th century, the ‘matière’ with which vernacular novel actually had started more than three centuries before became the pioneer for the Early <jats:sc>nhg</jats:sc> Prose Novel. The Novels of Alexander, Troy and Apollonius of Tyre are also among the earliest to be printed. These texts and their contexts thus become seismographs of the generic and epoch change. They occupy an intermediate position in many respects: between old and new form (verse/prose), old and new medium, continuity and reception of the Middle Ages, medieval and humanistic concepts of Antiquity, ‘old’ and ‘new’ knowledge, historical didaxis and the perception of historical contingency, and last but not least: ‘novel’ (which they aren’t in a proper sense) and history, sometimes even ‘poly-history’.</jats:p>