Erotische Narrative: Mit der Mittelhochdeutschen Begriffsdatenbank (MHDBDB) auf den Spuren kulinarischer Sexualmimesis

Medieval and early modern literature and imagery operate with iconic models that interweave individual works with one another in their motifs. The spec-trum of connotations is extremely rich and includes both different genres and topoi. The narrative markers for this process of metaphorisation are the given lexical units, entities, phrases, and linguistic images from various areas of semantic meaning, among them strikingly often the concept ‘food’. The concepts of food and sexuality merge into an allegorical overwriting in text and image. The semantic tipping effect, for example from fruit to woman, is based on mimetic connections and leads to the metaphorisation of eroticised bodies. The allegorical alteration of words, meanings and pictures represents a game that is on the one hand mimetic-natural and on the other fantastic-distorting, to which the following contribution will pay more atten-tion, especially in the area of erotically connotated descriptive formulas, vocabulary elements and narrations. With the aid of the ‘Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdaten-bank’ (MHDBDB, in Engl.: Middle High German Conceptual Database) a heteroge-neous spectrum of medieval literature can be established and a representative over-all view of different literary genres with regard to this topic can emerge.