THE RECENT publication of critical editions of two of the four prose novels attributed to Countess Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken (b. c. 1395; d. 17 January 1456) – Loher und Maller (2013) and Herzog Herpin (2014) – makes it easier than ever before not only to study these two texts by themselves as major contributions to late medieval German literature but also to gain a much more precise understanding of the literary discourse involving a female author (whose authorship is still somewhat debated) and of the cultural life at a fifteenth-century court, Saarbrücken, at the border between the French and the German-speaking lands. Two of her other novels, Hug Schapler and Königin Sibille, have been available in reasonably solid editions for some time, and increasingly Elisabeth emerges as a major author (and translator) in her own right.

For our purposes, however, these two new publications, along with the previous editions, will also facilitate a much more in-depth investigation of the Charlemagne myth as it had developed in the late Middle Ages and as it altered in the course of time. Moreover, with Elisabeth's works we find the fascinating situation of a medieval literary tradition that was picked up by early modern printers, who thus gave a remarkable afterlife to some of those texts, except Elisabeth's Königin Sibille, which seems to have failed to attract interest on the early modern book market – it was never printed and has survived in only one manuscript, Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. 12 in scrin.3 That manuscript also contains Elisabeth's Hug Schapler (fols 1r–57v; Sibille appears on fols 58r–76v).

Research has long recognized the remarkable quality of these novels, as the rich scholarly literature indicates, and the recent discussions by Bastert and von Bloh in the introductions to their editions (Loher und Maller and Herzog Herpin) shed even more light on the intricacies of the narrative plots; the relationships between the individual texts, which are all related through genealogical ties among the protagonists; the historical background of all four texts, which are grounded in the early medieval history of the Carolingians, and the connection between the narratives and their illustration programmes, wherever they exist.

Elisabeth's Depiction of Charlemagne

Our interest here focuses on how Charlemagne is depicted in each of these four novels, and what ethical and moral parameters the author employed.