Die Visio Pauli

The book offers a complete edition of 115 Latin, Old Czech and German texts, for the most part transcribed for the first time. This forms the basis for an investigation of the dissemination of the Visio Pauli in medieval Europe; on its incorporation into new, changing contexts of transmission and combinations of text as well as on its vernacular translation. In so doing the author shows that the Apocrypha (the apocalypse of Paul) which arose in the East in late antiquity and their European transformation (Visio Pauli) - one as a closed text, the other as an open text - represent in their complex history of transmission two completely different versions of one and the same material. The structure of a text is here seen in the context of its dispersion and in the concrete uses to which it is put. Establishing variable and open factors, the circumstances, consequences and description of establishing these, is the actual subject of this investigation.