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norms, rules, and laws have determined the interaction of people throughout time, and yet transgressions have always occurred. Crime and subsequent punishments are fundamental issues identifying every society. The articles in this volume study medieval laws and documents reflecting on vices, crimes, and wrongdoings and thus give a profound analysis of the premodern world in its development in social, economic, legal, moral, and ethical terms. Albrecht Classen,University of Arizona, Tucson, USA;Connie Scarborough, Texas Tech University, Dallas, USA.

The computer revolution is upon us. The future of books and of reading are debated. Will there be books in the next millennium? Will we still be reading? As uncertain as the answers to these questions might be, as clear is the message about the value of the book expressed by medieval writers. The contributors to the volume The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages explore the significance of the written document as the key icon of a whole era. Both philosophers and artists, both poets and clerics wholeheartedly subscribed to the notion that reading and writing represented essential

How did people in the early modern period deal with the question of how to lead a good life in order to also experience a good death? This discourse, deeply rooted in antiquity, continued during the Middle Ages, and then grew significantly in intensity in the 16th and 17th centuries, primarily as a result of the impact of the Protestant Reformation and of innovative medical research, especially the work of Theoprastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus. Theological, philosophical, ethical, moral, medical, and hygienic considerations all intersected and, at times, blended with each other.

Despite common perceptions of the medieval world as mostly land-based or limited to individual courts, we can discover the development of the urbanization process already in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The complexity of the matter requires a fully interdisciplinary approach, including art history, literature, urban geography, women´s studies, social and economic history, religion, and philosophy. The contributions to this new volume build on extensive research on urban history but develop intriguingly new insight into living space, mental structures, and social conditions within medieval and early-modern cities.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed a tremendous growth of globalism, at least in terms of European outreach and interest. We can identify this phenomenon particularly well through two different and independent sources, first, the publication of Adam Olearius's Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung der Muscowitischen vnd Persischen Reyse, 1647, and then the growth of Jesuit reports about their missionary activities all over the world carefully collected and published by Joseph Stoecklein ca. hundred years later in his highly popular Welt-Bott, compiled and published since 1726. Globalism is, of course a complex term, both for today and for the past. Everything depends on the narrator's perspective, the engagement with the other culture/s, and the reciprocity. Olearius appears to have achieved a major breakthrough with his travels to Russia and then later to Persia, introducing much of Persian culture to Germany. The Jesuits (Eusebio Kino, Ignaz Pfefferkorn, Joseph Och, et al.) provided their German (!) readers with astoundingly precise comments and reports about the New World in northern Mexico and in the province of Sonora (today, partly Arizona), while their many colleagues globally contributed their own reports about all four corners of this world. Combining these two perspectives, we can identify a very early but already very strong effort to learn more about the foreign world, to overcome the otherness (from a Eurocentric perspective), and to create a global platform far beyond what travelogue authors such as Marco Polo or Odorico da Pordenone had achieved in the fourteenth century, irrespective of their extraordinarily extensive travels to China. This paper, however, will begin, after I have reflected on the latest theoretical approaches to Global Studies, with a most unusual eye-witness account from ca. 1350, and then pursue the discourse on globalism as it developed over the following centuries, crossing several periodical barriers and bridging different narrative genres within the Germanlanguage context.

Many times, even scholars in the Humanities do not know how to deal with literature because they work only in the field of language acquisition, linguistics, or other data-driven study areas. Not surprisingly, when the issue emerges how to explain and to defend the Humanities, the literary areas seem to be the first on the chopping block. On the one hand, we can certainly argue that there is a specific literary canon that provides the readers/students with a sense of cultural identity and history. On the other hand, it seems more significant and effective to consider literature from whatever period or written in whatever language as a kind of laboratory of human behavior. The fictional framework makes it possible to experiment with unique types of situations in human life, often in an extreme fashion, which facilitates, as any scientist working in a lab would confirm, the critical analysis without too many outside distractions. The present paper argues that we can learn much about human communication through the study of literary texts. This finds an excellent illustration in the works of the late medieval German poet Heinrich Kaufringer (ca. 1400), in whose verse narratives we encounter a plethora of various situations and conditions reflecting on ordinary cases in people's lives, with all the shortcomings and potentials pertaining to the human language and the social community.

We certainly live in a world today determined by globalism, however we might want to define it. But it would be erroneous to assume that earlier centuries, and not even pre-modernity, were entirely ignorant about foreign worlds and did not have any interest in reaching out to, or in approaching foreign countries, peoples, and cultures either peacefully or militarily. The first part of this paper examines some of the misconceptions and then outlines many features that justify us in using the term 'globalism' already at that early stage, maybe free of much of the modern baggage brought upon by the colonialist attitude pursued by early modern Europeans. To illustrate the claim more specifically, this then leads over to a detailed examination of one of the many versions of the Alexander narratives in the Middle Ages, specifically of Priest Lambrecht's Middle High German Alexanderlied. Although Alexander is presented as a conqueror of the Persian empire and the Indian kingdom, apart from many other countries, there is still a strong narrative strategy to open the perspective toward the East and to make it to an integrative part of the global worldview of the western European audiences. This and many other Alexander versions contribute in their own intriguing way to the process of "worldmaking," as Nelson Goodman (1978) had called it. Although historic-fictional in his approach, Lambrecht facilitated in a path-breaking way, drawing on many classical sources, of course, the establishment of a global vision, at least in the mind of his medieval audiences.