Abstract

German-Austrian cultural studies at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries are characterized by a "new interest" in medieval preaching. If earlier it was studied by theology, literary criticism, linguistics and history as a document fixing the status quo, the existing state of affairs in a particular area - ethical norms, genre features, functioning features (pragmatics), grammatical forms and evidence of events - now preaching explored in its orientation to the future, as a genre within which promising models of behavior are developed.