Arthurian research, which created a forum for itself with the founding of the International Arthurian Society in 1948, serves to explore the common cultural foundations of Europe. With around 250 medieval works in ten different languages, the Arthurian romance is undoubtedly one of the most successful epic genres of the European Middle Ages - with an unbroken tradition of productive reception to this day. Arthurian literature, which originated as regional-political poetry with reference to an older oral narrative tradition, soon became a forum for the supra-regional discussion of values, a space for finding social or cultural identity or a field for experimenting with literary forms.
The volumes of the German-Austrian section of the Arthurian Society bring together the various research perspectives of the philologies dealing with Arthurian literature, each focusing on a central question. The volumes examine the relevance of concepts discussed in current literary and cultural studies (such as "myth" and "body concepts") for Arthurian research and the contribution that Arthurian research, which is fundamentally multi-perspectival due to its diversity of subjects and interdisciplinarity, can make to worldwide cultural and literary research.