|
Department
of Modern Languages
Society for
Medieval German Studies Newsletter
and Reviews
- Nr. 16, Spring 2003
-
Preview of the SMGS’ events at Kalamazoo
2003
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
We are delighted to inform you of the four sessions on “New Research
in Medieval German Studies” granted to SMGS for Kalamazoo 2003,
and of our session at Leeds this summer. It is our hope that the
“New Books Round Table” will again provide an interesting evening
program to discuss a new contribution to our field. This year’s
book will be from Robert G. Sullivan, Justice and the Social
Context of Early Middle High German Literature. (New York
and London: Routledge, 2001). ISBN. 0-415-93685-3
After the final New Research session (IV) on Friday afternoon,
9 May, there will a brief business meeting to comment on this
past year’s activities and decide on the course that SMGS will
take during the coming year. Please join with friends and colleagues
of our society in appreciation for the considerable efforts of
Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand and in honor of Francis G. Gentry,
who has served as SMGS Co-President.
SMGS was successful again in having all requested sessions and
the “New Books Round Table” approved in Kalamazoo for 2003. The
four sessions on “New Research in Medieval German Studies” are
as follows:
New Research in Medieval German Studies I:
Session 17 Thursday, 8 May, 10:00 a.m. Valley I, 107
Organizer: Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand, Goshen College
Paper 1)
Hildegard’s Notion of Justice: The Historical and Intellectual
Content
Presenter: Robert G. Sullivan, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Paper 2)
“Ich erwirbe von ir ein Lachen”: Female Laughter in Minnesang
Presenter: Olga Trochhimenko, Duke University
Paper 3)
Death, Eroticism, and the Self in Hartmann’s Armer Heinrich
Presenter: Paula Swan-Jackowski, Purdue University
Calumet
Presider: Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand
New Research in Medieval German Studies II:
Session 136 Thursday, 8 May, 3:30 p.m. Valley I, 105
Organizer: Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand, Goshen College
Paper 1) Weighing Kriemhild’s Revenge: The Forgotten Role of Keening
Presenter: Madelon Köhler-Busch, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Paper 2) Brunhild’s Smile: Emotion and the Politics of Gender
in the Nibelungenlied
Presenter: Kathryn Starkey, University of North Carolina-Chapel
Hill
Paper 3): Kriemhild: Omnia Mala Fuerit
Presenter: William Layher, Washington University in St. Louis
Presider: Sara S. Poor, Princeton University
New Research in Medieval German Studies III:
Session 206 Friday, 9 May, 10:00 a.m.
Fetzer, 2020
Organizer: Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand, Goshen College
Paper Title 1): Defining Identity and Space in the Nibelungenlied
and Anselm Kiefer’s Der Nibelungen Leid
Presenter: Rasma Lazda-Cazers, University of Alabama
Paper Title 2): Iwein Fortunatus: A New Look at the Schmalkalden
Murals
Presenter: Susanne Hafner, University of Texas-Austin
Paper Title 3): Economic Ethics and the Noble Merchant in
Flore und Blanscheflur
Presenter: Katja Altpeter-Jones, Duke University
Presider: Scott Pincikowsiki, Hood College
New Research in Medieval German Studies IV:
Session 363 Friday, 9 May 3:30 p.m. Sangren
3308
Organizer: Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand, Goshen College
Paper Title 1) Tristan’s Anger
Presenter: Ann Marie Rasmussen, Duke University
Paper Title 2) Isolde’s Ambiguous Oath, Duplicity in the Orchard,
and the Ambiguity of the Gods
Presenter: Patricia McGurk-Engen, University of Minnesota-Twin
Cities
Paper Title: The King is Crying: Diu Klage and the Appropriateness
of Masculine Grief
Presenter: Sean Lawing, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Presider: Rebecca L.R. Garber, Independent Scholar
SMGS at the International Medieval Congress at the University
of Leeds 2003
New Research in Medieval German Studies: Emotion as Power and
Authority
Session 1019 Wednesday, 16 July, 09: 00 a.m. Bodington: Woodsley
Common Room
Organizer: Ernst Ralf Hintz, Fort Hays State University, Kansas
Paper Title 1019-a: der keiser habe undanc: The Authority of Emotions
in Herzog Ernst, 1170-1957
Stephen Mark Carey, Department of German Studies, Emory University
Paper Title 1019-b:
Emotion and the Establishment of Power in the Old Swedish Hærra
Ivan and Chrétien’s Yvain
Joseph M. Sullivan, Department of Modern Languages, University
of Oklahoma
Paper Title 1019-c: Emotions as Power and Authority in Priester
Wernher’s Driu liet von der maget
Ernst Ralf Hintz, Department of Modern Languages, Fort Hays State
University
Presider, Ernst Ralf Hintz
Fort Hays State University
On behalf of SMGS, I would like to thank everyone who submitted
abstracts for consideration by our Executive Committee. There
were a number of excellent abstracts that regrettably could not
be included for thematic reasons, date of submission, and the
consensus from the Business Meeting to limit sessions to three
papers each. Abstracts that could not be added to the SMGS program
were recommended for general sessions.
Table
of Contents
New Books Round
Table:
Interview and Discussion
This well-received event gives all interested
scholars the opportunity to meet with the author of a recent book
in medieval German studies to discuss the new research in a personal,
informal setting. A wine and beer reception will accompany the
discussion to be held this year on Friday, May 9, 8:00 p.m.
Our venue is Fetzer 2016.
Organizer: Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand (Goshen College)
Moderator: Ernst Ralf Hintz (Fort Hays State University, Kansas
Our author for 2003 is Robert G. Sullivan (University of
Massachusetts at Amherst), who will speak about his new book:
Justice and the Social Context of Early Middle High German
Literature, New York and London: Routledge, 2001, ISBN 0-415-93685-3-2<
Round Table 2003 is also in honor of the outgoing Co-President
of SMGS, Francis G. Gentry, editor of the Routledge Series, Studies
in Medieval History and Culture, in which our 2003 book has
appeared.
- Back to Top
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The
SMGS Review
Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia. Edited
by John M. Jeep.
New York/London: Garland, 2001.
It seems only appropriate that John
Jeep chose the Abrogans as the subject for the first of
three entries contributed by him to the rich and reliable Medieval
Germany: An Encyclopedia. Not unlike the Latin-Old High German
glossary, which presented the scholarly community of its time
with an alphabetical listing of key foreign terms and their meanings,
Jeep’s Medieval Germany provides A-Z coverage of the German
and Dutch Middle Ages for English-language students and researchers.
Together with “Aachen,” the Abrogans introduces a collection of 647
entries on “major persons, places, historical occurrences, artistic
and technological accomplishments, intellectual developments,
and daily life” (p. xxiii) from roughly C.E. 500 to 1500. Joining
Jeep on the project are the associate editors Michael Frassetto
(History), Edward R. Haymes (Literature), Joan A. Holladay (Art),
and Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden (Literature), assisted by Geert
H.M. Claassens (Dutch), Francis G. Gentry (Literature), Donna
Mayer-Martin (Music), Frank Tobin (Philosophy and Religion), and
Jan Ziolkowski (Latin) as contributing editors. Of these, Ed Haymes
deserves special mention for having initiated the project and
selected many of the contributors before passing on the direction
of the project to Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden, who in turn handed
matters over to Prof. Jeep. Nearly 200 additional scholars from
North America and Europe joined the editors in the composition of individual entries,
and all are to be congratulated on having produced an authoritative
handbook on a particularly broad subject.
The encyclopedia is well organized,
allowing easy access to desired information. The volume begins
with an alphabetical list of all entries, followed by a list
of entries according to the following categories: “Art and Architecture,”
“Daily Life,” “Education,” “Language,” “Law,” “Literature,”
“Low Countries, Dutch,” “Music,” “Persons,” “Philosophy,” “Places
and Place Study,” “Religion and Theology,” and “Women, Gender,
and Families.” A single entry appears under all appropriate
rubics, so that a reader interested in Hildegard von Bingen,
for example, will find her listed as an author, a musician,
and a religious figure, in addition to obvious listings under
“Persons” and “Women.” Additionally preceding the entries themselves
are a brief introduction by Jeep, lists of abbreviations and
contributors, and three maps that capture Central Europe at
key points in its development: The Treaty of Verdun, the Hohenstaufen
Kingdom, and the Habsburg Empire of Charles V. Most importantly,
the book closes with a comprehensive index, indispensable for
locating information on topics without a separate entry. The
Heliand, for example, is found under “Bible Epic, Saxon”;
Herzog Ernst and König Rother are both discussed
under “Spielmannsepen.” Similarly, the index leads the reader
searching for information on Wolfger von Erla, who is absent
from the Nibelungenlied entry and is paraphrased only
as the “Bishop of Passau” in the discussion of Walter von der
Vogelweide, to the entry on “Patronage.”
As is apparent from the editors’ individual fields
of expertise, the encyclopedia aims at near comprehensive coverage
of most major subject areas. The selection of topics is well balanced,
although music seems to fare less well than literature, history,
or art. While there were entries I missed, as noted below, I was
at the same time delighted to find unexpected topics such as “Diet
and Nutrition,” “Iconographies, Innovative,” “Onomastics,” “Pregnancy
and Childbirth,” and my own personal favorite, “Dendrochronology.”
The entries are, with few exceptions, concise and accurate. All
close with a general bibliography and cross-references on related
topics.
It is, of course, notoriously difficult for a work
of such breadth to satisfy each individual user completely. Approaching
the encyclopedia primarily as a literary historian working on
the boundary between the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance,
I found the coverage of fifteenth-century subjects to be slightly
uneven. While artists such as Tillmann Riemenschneider, Martin
Schongauer, and Michael Wolgemut receive coverage, as they should,
authors such as Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken and Thüring von
Ringoltingen are virtually absent, each only briefly mentioned
once in non-related entries. The entry on “Liederhandschriften,”
oriented towards Minnesang and Sangsprüche, could
be expanded to include the rich urban song production of the 1400s.
Moreover, with the exception of Rudolph Agricola, none of the
early humanists active before 1500 are treated. As their works
look forward (or back beyond the Middle Ages to antiquity), this
is of course understandable, but given the importance of Johann
von Neumarkt’s Prague humanism for Johann von Tepl’s Ackermann
aus Böhmen (which earned an entry), I would have
welcomed the inclusion of Niklas von Wyle, Albrecht von Eyb, Heinrich
Steinhöwel, and Peter Luder, who in their own way carried on Neumarkt’s
legacy. And as with the Ackermann, the mix of medieval
and humanist elements in Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff
(1494) would have also seemingly warranted discussion, especially
since Brant’s patron Emperor Maximilian I is given extensive coverage.
Of course, such criticisms are rooted in the difficulties inherent
in general periodizations, which are ultimately symptomatic of
the field as a whole, not of any one reference work.
The editors are to be commended for their inclusion
of gender-related topics. There are also substantial entries
on “Jews” and “Jewish Art and Architecture,” but unfortunately
nothing on related literary authors and works, such as Süßkind,
Dukus Horant, or Widuwilt, the Jewish adaptation
of Wirnt von Grafenberg’s Wigalois. And although the
editors could not have anticipated recent events before the
volume went to press in 2001, it would have been equally fitting
to include an entry on Islam and its portrayal by Wolfram and
others in addition to the entry on “Crusades.”
Should the press publish a second edition of the work
(and I hope it enjoys the sales figures to warrant such a step),
I have the following suggestions for further entries in addition
to those mentioned above. Although information on these subjects
can sometimes be found through the index, they are to my mind
significant enough to warrant separate treatment: Ambraser
Heldenbuch, antiphons, Benediktbeuern, Cambridge Songs,
cathedral schools, chapbooks, confraternities, Einhard, hagiography,
Helfta, Landgraf Hermann von Thüringen, Diu Klage, liberal
arts (trivium, quadrivium), Liederbuch der Clara Hätzerin,
Neidhartspiele, neumes, Notker Balbulus, numismatics,
psalters, sequences, and Vagantenlyrik. I would also
recommend additional blind entries (i.e., “’Herzog Ernst’: see
‘Spielmannsepen’”) for all authors, artists, or works discussed
solely under generic entries such as “Arthurian Literature,
German,” “Drama, Passion Plays,” “Gothic Art and Architecture,”
and “Liturgy, Music.”
Prior to the publication of Medieval Germany: An
Encyclopedia, my most frequently consulted reference work on
the German Middle Ages was the second edition of the Verfasserlexikon.
While I will continue to refer to the latter work for my research,
its usage has always presented two difficulties: 1) I cannot
afford a copy for my home library, and 2) I cannot refer colleagues
or students to the work unless they are fluent in German. Medieval
Germany has alleviated both of these problems and is well on
its way to becoming one of the most frequently consulted books
on my shelf.
Glenn Ehrstine (University of Iowa)
The next SMGS Review will appear in the Late Summer/Fall edition.
Manfred Kern (Universität Salzburg) will review a recent book
by Christoph J. Steppich, Numine afflatur: Die Inspiration
des Dichters im Denken der Renaissance, (Bamberger Schriften
zur Renaissanceforschung 39), 2002. ISBN 3-447-04531-0
New
Contributions to the Field by SMGS Members
Helmut Brall-Tuchel(Universität Düsseldorf)
has a contribution entitled: “Apokalypse und Endzeit: Anmerkungen
zur mediävistischen Forschung,” In: Jahrbuch der Oswald von
Wolkenstein Gesellschaft, eds. Sieglinde Hartmann and Ulrich
Müller, Vol. 13, Frankfurt am Main, 2001/2002, 61-76.
Nigel Harris(University of Birmingham, UK) has a recent
contribution, “God, Religion, and Ambiguity in Tristan,” In:
A Companion to Gottfried von Strassburg’s “Tristan,”
ed. Will Hasty, Camden House, 2003, 113-136.
Sieglinde Hartmann (Universität Frankfurt) has two contributions:
“Vom Mittelalter zum dritten Jahrtausend: Brauchen wir das Mittelalter
für unsere Zukunft?” 219-38, as well as “Ein neues Bildzeugnis
Oswalds von Wolkenstein? Die Schutzmantelmadonna von
le Puy-en-Velay und das Marienlied In Frankereich. Mit
einer kostümgeschichtllichen Untersuchung von elisabeth Vavra,”
297-332, In: Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein Gesellschaft,
eds. Sieglinde Hartmann and Ulrich Müller, Vol. 13, Frankfurt
am Main, 2001/2002.
Will Hasty(University of Florida) has edited A Companion
to Gottfried von Strassburg’s “Tristan,” Camden House, 2003
In: Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture.
ISBN: 1-57113-203-1. Will Hasty has also contributed: “Performances
of Love: Tristan and Isolde at Court,” 169-82.
Sidney M. Johnson (Indiana University, emeritus)
has a recent contribution, “This Drink Will Be the Death
of You: Interpreting the Love Potion in Gottfried’s Tristan,”
In: A Companion to Gottfried von Strassburg’s “Tristan,” ed.
Will Hasty, Camden House, 2003, 87-112.
Ulrich Müller (Universität Salzburg) has contributed
“The Modern Reception of Gottfried’s Tristan and the
Medieval Legend of Tristan and Isolde,” In: A Companion
to Gottfried von Strassburg’s “Tristan,” ed. Will Hasty, Camden
House, 2003, 285-304. Further, Ulrich Müller has a contribution,
“Minnesang — eine mittelalterliche Form der Erlebnislyrik: Essai
zur Interpretation mittelalterlicher Liebeslyrik,” In: Das
Literarische Leben — Rollenentwürfe in der Literatur des Hoch-
und Spätmittelalters, Festschrift für Volker Mertens zum 65.
Geburtstag, eds. Matthias Meyer and Hans-Jochen Schiewer,
Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, 2002, 597 –617.
Katharina Philipowski (University of Illinois) has a
recent article: “die welt dye ist gar seczsam czu erkennen.”
Von der Unlesbarkeit der Welt in der Dichtung des späten Mittlealters
In: German Studies Review, Vol. XXVI, Number 1, February
2003, 81-104.
Ann Marie Rasmussen (Duke University) has co-edited together
with Anne L. Klinck a valuable collection of interdisciplinary
essays: Medieval Woman’s Song: Cross-Cultural Approaches,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. ISBN:
0-8122-3624-6. Ann Marie Rasmussen’s individual contribution
is entitled: “Reason and the Female Voice in Walther von der
Vogelweide’s Poetry,” 168 – 86. A contribution from her appears
in A Companion to Gottfried von Strassburg’s “Tristan,”
ed. Will Hasty, “the Female Figures in Gottfried’s Tristan
and Isolde.”137-58. She also has a recent journal
article: “Gendered Knowledge and Eavesdropping in the Late Medieval
Minnerede,” In: Speculum 77, No.4, 2002, 1168-94.
Paola Schulze-Belli (University of Trieste) has a contribution
entitled: “Oswald’s St Mary’s Songs: Religious or Courtly Poetry?”
In: Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein Gesellschaft,
eds. Sieglinde Hartmann and Ulrich Müller, Vol. 13, Frankfurt
am Main, 2001/2002, 279-96.
Christoph J. Steppich (Texas University) is the author
of a recent book: Numine afflatur: Die Inspiration des Dichters
im Denken der Renaissance, (Bamberger Schriften zur Renaissanceforschung
39), 2002. ISBN: 3-447-04531-0
Alois Wolf(Universität Freiburg) has a recent contribution,
“Humanism in the High Middle Ages: The Case of Gottfried’s Tristan,”
In: A Companion to Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan,
ed. Will Hasty, Camden House, 2003, 23-54.
Selected
Recent Titles of Interest for Medieval German Studies
The following annotated bibliography makes
no attempt at being comprehensive. It strives simply to offer
a selection of recent academic books that may be of interest
to teacher-scholars in medieval German literature, art and cultural
history. The books are listed alphabetically according to author(s)
or editor(s). The summaries included here are taken from a variety
of journals specializing in book reviews including Choice,
a monthly magazine for acquisitions librarians published by
the Association of College and Research Libraries, and Speculum,
the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, and H-Net Reviews
in the Humanities & Sociology (www.h-net.msu.edu) as indicated.
Hartmann von Aue, Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Lyric
Poetry: The Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue, trans. Frank
Tobin, Kim Vivian, and Richard H. Lawson. University Park, Pa.:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii, 329. $65
(cloth); $22.50 (paper).
In the opening verses of his last romance, Iwein, completed
sometime around 1200, Hartmann von Aue identifies himself with
a description that has become one of the most frequently cited
passages from medieval German literature of the early-thirteenth-century
Blütezeit (translated in the above volume): “There was
an educated knight who read books, and when he had nothing better
to do with his time he also wrote poetry. He devoted his best
energies to everything that people like to hear” (p. 237). This
new translation of Hartmann’s complete works will no doubt ensure
that those energies will continue to reach a broad audience
in the twenty-first century as well. Hartmann (ca. 1170 – 1215)
indisputably occupies a central place in the medieval German
canon. As the first German translator and adapter of Chrétien
de Troyes, Hartmann not only created the genre of Arthurian
romance in vernacular German but also set a literary standard
for his later contemporaries . . . in a variety of forms.
For the first time, Hartman;s works can be presented
to the English-speaking audience in their entirety, with each
of the three authors (Frank Tobin, Kim Vivian, and Richard Lawson)
contributing translations to the volume: the Lament (Klage)
and lyric poetry (Tobin), the tales of Gregorius (Vivian)
and of Der arme Heinrich (Tobin), and the
romances Erec (Vivian) and Iwein (Lawson). The
volume has a general introduction that sets Hartmann’s work
in the appropriate context of Germany in the late twelfth and
early thirteenth centuries. Furthermore, each translation has
an introduction of its own; these commentaries (particularly
useful in the lyric section) give a brief yet comprehensive
overview of the text and its history in addition to treating
topics of current scholarship. The authors provide a good variety
of notes in the translations: while cultural notes illuminate
aspects of medieval society such as the existence and role of
ministeriales (p. 217, n.2), other notes highlight significant
comparisons between Chrétien and Hartmann, identify biblical
references in specific passages, and point the reader to recurring
themes or phrases in Hartmann’s other works. Because all the
texts are contained in a single volume, references and resonances
among them can be followed easily. As translators, the authors
take care to discuss issues of translation and phrasing. Frank
Tobin, for instance, explains the Middle High German wordplay
in “all lands [alliu lande] and foreign [ellende]
to me” in the Lament (p. 25, n. 23), whereas Kim Vivian
glosses the use of “French style” to render kerlingisch
in Erec (p. 72. N. 45). While the specialist might desire
greater detail, the notes cover enough material to ensure that
readers at all levels, including the novice as well as the medievalist
and the Germanist, will find information of interest and of
value. One fortunate addition in the present edition is the
consistent use of line numbers, referring to the verse originals,
which are a tremendous aid in comparative work.
The translations are remarkably consistent, both
in tone and in style, and the notes have been seamlessly referenced
from one text to the next. Until now, translations of Hartmann
have been available, but they have been products of individual
scholars, published in single volumes and variously in prose
(notably J. W. Thomas and Michael Resler) or in verse (Patrick
McConeghy). The present translation offers the advantage of
prose in that it creates an accurate yet “vigorous” (p. xii)
and very readable translation, as the authors hope; readers
who wish to experience further the transparent clarity of Hartmann’s
“crystalline” verses (to quote the praise of Gottfried von Strassburg
in Tristan) are supplied with the ample notes and the
representative bibliography (primarily English-language) to
do so. In conclusion, this volume will give a broad audience
long-awaited access to one of medieval Germany’s most significant
poets as an excellent addition to introductory courses in medieval
studies, as a fine acquisition for general library collections,
and as essential (and enjoyable) reading for all medievalists
who are not yet familiar with the work of Hartmann von Aue.
Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand (Goshen College)
Speculum 2003, Vol. 78. No.1, 190–91.
Brian Murdoch, Adam’s Grace: Fall and Redemption in
Medieval Literature. Woodbridge, Eng.,/Rochester, N.Y.:
Boydell and Brewer, 2000. Pp. xi, 205. $60.
Brian Murdoch’s Adam’s Grace explores a number of medieval
narratives that tell the story of the simultaneity of the Fall
and the promise of grace. This idea appears in medieval exegesis
of Gen. 3.15’s supposed promise to Eve, in the Eva/Ave pun common
in the period, implicitly in St. Paul’s portrait of Christ as
the second Adam, and in the Vitae Adae et Evae/Holy Rood
legends that establish the pattern for most of the works analyzed
in this book. While the Vitae/Holy Rood stories are complex
and go through many versions, this review requires only a simplified
summary of the two often-connected legends concerning Adam’s
later life and the genealogy of the cross. In these legends
Adam and Eve, after a period of hardship outside of Eden, attempt
to regain Paradise by doing penance through fasting in a river
surrounded by a supportive natural world. Adam finishes his
penance while Eve, again tempted by the devil, stops hers, prompting
Adam again to confront the envious tormenter who tells of his
own Fall. After Cain and Abel, Seth returns to Paradise to try
to gain an oil of mercy but is told that mercy will come only
with Christ’s work. He then receives three seeds or twigs from
the Tree of Life (sometimes he also sees the Christ Child or
Mary in the tree). In the Holy Rood legend that sometimes continues
the story, the rods or seeds from the Tree of Life, now united
to make a new tree, receive Moses’ and David’s care and grow
to be a tree selected for Solomon’s temple. However, Solomon
cannot incorporate the tree in the new building, and it remains
in the pool of Kidron until its use at the time of the Crucifixion.
The narrative develops over time as some of the details of this
material appear to go back to the patristic period and some
only to the high Middle Ages.
In treating of the narratives from the latter period
Murdoch focuses on a few texts intertextually related to the
Vitae/Holy Rood material: the various lives of a fictional
Pope St. Gregory, notable for incest, penance on a rock in the
sea, and a miraculous elevation to the papacy; Wolfram’s Parzival;
the medieval leprosy texts arguing that the blood of innocents
can cure the disease, especially as found in the lives of Pope
St. Sylvester and a leprous Constantine; and the medieval Adam
plays that incorporate bits of the Vita Adae/Holy Rood
material directly or by way of indirect statement. The last
chapter looks at what happens to the Adam story in the post-Reformation
plays.
Murdoch’s book reflects an enormous range of reading,
from Greece and Syria to Cornwall and Ireland. He has a good
understanding of the interaction between Latin and vernacular
traditions, between exegetical and literary metaphor, and between
text and intertext. He shows the complex affiliations among
the materials discussed—sometimes in syntax overly complex for
my taste. One can find much good sense in the discussion of
the Grail as gateway to Paradise or the leprosy/blood opposition
figuring sin/redemption. I could go on commending parts of the
book that make cogent and useful points. However, reviews exist
to create a discourse with the reviewed. Since Murdoch is dealing
with intertextuality, it would have been helpful if he had specified
how one discerns what counts as an intertext, an elaboration,
or an analogous structure. Clearly the Adam material discussed
related to the Vita Adae/Holy Rood stuff. However, in
Murdoch’s accounts, Gregory’s incests are variants of Adam’s
sin, his blindness is Adam’s blindness, and his repentance on
a rock in the sea is a variant of Adam’s on a rock in the river.
The happy conclusion of the story is, so to speak, predicted
in the pattern of the Vitae/Rood narrative. But such
a conclusion is not an evident one. One may ask whether the
Gregory story is reenacting the Adam story in any special sense
beyond that of all falls, penances, and redemptions; the rock
in the river and that in the sea are not very similar as icons.
Again, while the Parzival section contains much brilliant
and persuasive criticism, one gets little evidence that the
legendary Adam’s story is in the Parzival story consistently
as an underlying paradigm. This is not to blame Murdoch, but
to say that we in the literary –critical community need a better
sense of what, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, is simply “seeing”
and what is “seeing as”: what kinds of meanings are implicit
in the text of the work, what kinds appropriate the text to
patterns of significance that are available to the period but
are not necessarily signposted in the work, and what kinds impose
on it meaning wholly unavailable to the time and its metaphoric
languages. None of these kinds of reading is “wrong,” but they
should be identified as different exercises in our critical
work. Fortunately, Murdoch largely stays within the text or
within the period and the semantic possibilities available to
it.
The depth of Murdoch’s knowledge of the material with which
he deals makes one wish that he would have explored other works.
. . . However, this and all other caveats that I might offer
are minor items. To demand more from this work would be ungracious.
Paul A. Olson (University of Nebraska)
Speculum 2003, Vol. 78, No.1, 235-36.
Ursula Peters, Text und Kontext: Die Mittelalter-Philologie
zwischen Gesellschaftgeschichte und Kulturanthropologie.
(Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vorträge,
G 365.) Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000. Paper. Pp. 41.
Behind this slim but instructive and substantial academy publication
looms the shadow of Kulturwissenschaft, the elusive concept
that has come to frame German academic debates on the future
of the traditional philologies. Intended originally as a replacement
for Geisteswissenschaften, the plural Kulturwissenschaften
used to describe the array of academic disciplines that the
American system classifies as humanities and social sciences.
It appears, however, that the rise of cultural studies (whatever
that may mean) in Britain and the United States has infused
the singular form with new meaning, creating the vision (or
specter) of an all-encompassing superdiscipline that promises
(or threatens) to condemn many of those individual disciplines
to ancillary roles, if not oblivion. Among medievalists, Walter
Haug has most forcefully broken a lance in defense of the conceptual
integrity of texts and of literary studies as an autonomous
enterprise. Ursula Peters, long a keen and circumspect observer
and critic of methodological trends and fashions in the field,
has formulated a response that enlists the very history of German
medievalist scholarship in support of at least qualified acceptance
of Literaturwissenschaft as Kulturwissenschaft.
(The most recent addition to the fast-growing bibliography on
this topic is more detailed, but also considerably less sophisticated:
Helmut Birkhan, “Der Traditionsraum der altdeutschen Literatur
in kulturwissenschaftlicher Sicht,” in Akten des X. Internationalen
Germanistenkongresses, Wien 2000, 1. ed. P. Wiesinger [Bern,
2002], pp. 65 – 96.)
Unlike their modernist colleagues, Peters argues,
German medievalists have always operated with a very broad definition
of their textual base (Schriftum) in the larger context
of cultural history, hence, for example, the habitual insistence
on social context and function. More recently, the (admittedly
contested) concept of “alterity” has reaffirmed the “pre-autonomous
character” (p. 9) of medieval literature and its resistance
to decoding in modern aesthetic terms. Finally, the recognition
of orality and oral traditions as major modes of literary communication,
which has its own pre-Parry/Lord history in German scholarship,
has also brought into view specifically medieval symbioses of
oral and written as constituents of text. (What might have been
added here is the gradual recovery of the visual dimension of
textual and literary traditions that also began at least a hundred
years ago.)
So, medievalists have a long history of viewing their
subject in the parameters of Kulturgeschichte or Geistesgeschichte,
as Peter’s subtitle puts it, and Peters proceeds to fit into
this framework the various methodologies that have been tried
out, adopted, or adapted in more recent times, beginning with
the history of mentalities, which, incidentally, Peters herself
has rejected as a tool appropriate to literary studies, and
ending with cultural anthropology, the other subject of her
subtitle. The rest of the paper (pp. 20 – 41) traces these methodological
twists and turns through a few concrete examples and concludes
that the anthropological perspective can and indeed should be
adjusted to respect the “special status” of literary texts,
the “reformulation” of cultural symbols that constitutes the
integrity of the literary process (p. 39).
Of course, Kulturwissenschaft is a program
and not a methodology, and some such new version of the “anthropologic
turn” (p. 20) may seem the best choice among current approaches
to furnish theoretical underpinning. And Peters is right: on
the whole, medievalists are indeed quite well attuned to interdisciplinary
outreach. Some have no doubt discovered already that they have
been practicing some form of Kulturwissenschaft all along.
Still, I have my doubts. This “möglichst umfassende Kontextualisierung”
(p. 39) could easily turn out to be a seriously stifling embrace.
Intellectual concerns aside, as anyone who has recently visited
a German university knows, there is a strong sense that normal
and healthy internal evolutions are being overtaken by waves
of isms and an institutionalized free-for-all that threatens
academic identities across the board. And where the state bureaucracy
is firmly in control of higher learning, even short-lived academic
debates can (and in this case do) have important long-term consequences,
structural as well as financial.
To an outsider, the most striking feature of the current situation
is the way in which German Germanists in particular have borrowed
indiscriminately, it seems, one idea after the other from other
disciplines and other academic cultures, while some of the most
original work done by German medievalists is virtually ignored
on this side of the Atlantic (a topic that comes to mind is
memoria). As information flows ever more freely, what
is still lacking is a transatlantic conversation about what
we do, why we do it, and why we do it in such different ways.
Michael Curschmann (Princeton University)
Speculum, Vol. 78, No.1, 247-48.
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News
from Colleagues
Alexandra Stirling-Hellenbrand (Goshen
College) has accepted a new position as Associate Professor
and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures
at Appalachian State University in Boon, North Carolina.
The SMGS Newsletter & Review is written and edited by Ernst
Ralf Hintz, Dept. of Modern Languages (German), Fort Hays State
University, 600 Park St., Hays, Kansas 67601-4099, U.S.A. Fax
(785) 628-5693. E-mail: ehintz@fhsu.edu. The next edition
will appear in August. Please send contributions in German,
English or French by August 15, 2003, using the attached information
update form.
On behalf of Edward Haymes, Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand
and the Society for Medieval German Studies,
Best wishes to you all for the spring,
Ernst Ralf Hintz
(SMGS) Group at Kalamazoo
Please return to:
Ernst Ralf Hintz
Department of Modern Languages Fax: (785) 628 - 5693
Fort Hays State University E-mail: ehintz@truman.edu
Hays, Kansas 67601-4099 U.S.A.
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