Got alt hui. Some considerations on the German dialogue between Massimiliano Sforza and Maximilian I in the Liber Iesus (Milan, Archivio Storico Civico e Biblioteca Trivulziana, Cod. Triv. 2163)

The so-called Liber Iesus, a Latin prayer book commissioned for the young Massimiliano Sforza by his father Ludovico il Moro in the 1490s, features a splendid miniature depicting a meeting between the child count and Emperor Maximilian I. It is accompanied by a brief dialogue in German with an interlinear version in Italian on the topic of the Milanese-Imperial alliance on the opposite page. Although the presence of a German version has often been discussed in research, no linguistic analysis has been conducted; statements about the dialogue's contents have apparently always been based on the Italian version. However, it has gone unnoticed that the German text shows a number of idiosyncratic forms that greatly limit its comprehensibility. This finding raises doubts about the common interpretation of the dialogue as a transcript or learning aid for a factual meeting between the two protagonists. In this paper, the language of the dialogue is analysed and the possible genesis of the text in its written form is reconstructed. Moreover, the potential functions of the dialogue beyond the communicative value of the language are discussed.