Christophe Thierry, L’Orient dans le Straßburger Alexander: Fin du XIIe-début du XIIIe siècle. Littérature chevaleresque et perfectonnement spiritual. Nouvelle Bibliothèque du Moyen Âge, 131. Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2026, 828 pp.

It is amazing to face this massive volume by Christophe Thierry on the Strassburger Alexander by Priest Lambrecht/Lamprecht, certainly an interesting, though not particularly exciting or different Middle High German version of the ancient Alexander story. Of course, it takes place in the Middle East, where Alexander experiences all kinds of miraculous adventures, but Thierry, who has already published extensively on this romance (?) – see his doctoral dissertation from 2008 – engages with it in such a deep fashion that it seems like as if not one stone has been left unturned. The author emphasizes the role of the Orient, at least in the title of his book, but the critical aspect of that is actually hardly addressed. Instead, Thierry offers extensive discussions of the literary-historical background and then marches through the text in a minute fashion, analyzing even smallest details and engages at length with the major research (there are, unfortunately, considerable gaps, especially what pertains to the research on the Christian-Jewish relationships and the experience of the Orient or the foreign world as such).