medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Dear John,
Regarding 'drieschen' and 'drieschhafer' you wrote:
>Yes, but both of these are clearly derivatives of 'Driesch' and, as
>such, are not terribly useful if the meaning of 'Driesch' has already
>been established.
Not terribly useful, no, but maybe not entirely useless either, if the meaning is actually open to some debate between us. The existence of words like 'drieschen' and 'drieschhafer' may well remind us -- and this was the point I intended to make -- that plowing and sowing a 'driesch' were concepts associated to some degree with (or at least not entirely incompatible with) the notion of a 'driesch'.
>Though considerably older, the nineteenth-century Grimm (which of
>course was the very first thing I consulted once I started thinking
>about 'Driesch' several years ago) has the advantage of
>allowing 'permanently uncultivated' as one part of this word's semantic
>field (no pun inended!). The revised Grimm put out in 1970ff. by the
>Akademie der Wissenschaften der [damaligen] DDR and more recently by
>the academies of Berlin-Brandenburg and of Goettingen reduces this
>to "_zeitweise_ ungebautes ... ackerland, auch ruhender Weingarten"
>(Bd. 6, Sp. 1391; emphasis mine). But the word's use in toponyms
>(which is very old) implies that in these instances the land referred
>to is either permanently or at least ordinarily uncultivated.
Yes, if you have toponyms clearly antedating the local introduction of two- or three-field crop rotation, the implication of permanence may be compelling, otherwise perhaps not so. It is my impression that -- depending of course on time and region -- 'driesch' can cover the whole range of meanings from 'brache' (fallow) in the strict sense (i.e. acre or part of an acre left uncultivated for a year) to 'oedland' (more or less permanently waste land) and may often refer to something in between (poor soil requiring more than a year for regeneration and possibly used as a pasture in the meantime).
Kind regards, O.
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