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"Classen, Albrecht"
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Dignified, Powerful, and Respected Old People in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: The Worthy Hero and the Wise Old Person Versus the Old Fool
To understand the topic of old age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, we can draw much information from relevant literary texts among other sources because the poets operated with general notions commonly subscribed to by their audiences. Old people appear in many different roles already in the pre-modern world, but here the focus will rest mostly on worthy, dignified, mighty, and even ferocious old warriors in heroic poetry. Those stand out because of their strength, their knowledge, their resolve, their wisdom, and their extensive and varied abilities, but this does not automatically mean that they were flawless. To round off this entry, the attention will finally turn to remarkable examples of old but highly respected people in the verse narratives by the German poet Heinrich Kaufringer, in Boccaccio’s Decameron, a harbinger of the Italian Renaissance, in Christine de Pizan’s didactic writings, and in the Old Norse Njál’s Saga.
Journal Article
Intertextuality Is the Name of the Game: Melusine–Undine–Theophrastus Paracelsus–Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué–Christian Petzold: Water Spirits Are with Us, Throughout Time
The concept of intertextuality often remains a catchphrase for many different phenomena, but it is really a crucially important concept involving all narrative processes from the past to the present. What writer would not borrow from a plethora of sources, whether s/he does it deliberately or unconsciously? In fact, we could identify literature as an infinite fabric of narrative threads, and the more closely we examine a literary work, and the denser its composition, the more we can recognize the essential weave it is composed of. This can be powerfully illustrated in the case of the many different narratives involving the water nixie Undine (or Melusine), who was already popular in the Middle Ages, then was discussed in the sixteenth century, subsequently entered the fantasy of Romantic writers, and has most recently become the subject of a major modern movie. The cultural-historical arc from the past to the present powerfully demonstrates the fundamental working of intertextuality on both the vertical and horizontal axes. Writing, whether creative or factual, constantly operates within a web of narrative exchanges. On this basis, we are on firm ground when we claim that ancient or medieval literature is just as important for us today as nineteenth- or twentieth-century literature as a source of inspiration and influence, shaping both our worldview and value system and this through an intertextual chain of narratives. Of course, we move (hopefully) forward in our own time, but many of the analytic tools available to us are historically grounded.
Journal Article
Perspicuity, Acuity, and Illuminating Vision: Medieval and Early Modern Optics, Religion, and Literary Reflections of the Gaze in Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, Walter Map, Hartmann von Aue, the Melusine Romances (Jean d’Arras), and Froben Christoph von Zimmern
Medieval literature often seems to be a remote, irrelevant, incomprehensible world of narrative texts lost in heroic, religious, or courtly themes, limited to stories about King Arthur, courtly lovers, military heroes, and religious martyrs, saints, and prophets. In reality, as any expert can easily confirm, when we turn our full attention to pre-modern literature from across Europe (and also other parts of the world), we can often recognize the true extent to which poets utilized their narratives for spiritual, philosophical, religious, scientific, and medical explorations that have much to tell us today and prove to be deeply meaningful in a timeless manner. One key aspect, which was shared among virtually all medieval artists, poets, and theologians, consisted of the unique experience by an individual who is entitled through a physical opening to see into the depth or the height of all existence and can thus discover a wholly different world. Through this motif of the gaze, an entire epiphanic realization can set in, which thus quickly transforms the purely entertaining narrative medium into a narrative catalyst of profound spiritual experiences, helping the individual to gain inspiration from the Godhead (e.g., mysticism). Indeed, numerous times, medieval poets employed the motif of the visionary gaze, developed in very concrete terms, to trace and explain the process of perspicuity and accompanying acuity which ultimately leads to new intellectual, emotional, and religious understandings and experiences. While many intellectuals already embraced this notion of a visionary concept of spiritual comprehension, it might come as a surprise that secular and religious poets also operated quite intentionally with the concept of a hole in the wall or some other opening as a springboard for intellectual and spiritual experiences, directly drawing from the concepts of the optical sciences as understood at that time. Oddly but highly significantly, Christian and pagan notions tend to intersect in those narrative moments, particularly in late medieval literature, merging the visionary experience with the monstrous within human society, associating the gaze with the erotic and religious dimension.
Journal Article
The Discourse of Courtly Love in Medieval Verse Narratives
This encyclopedic entry explores the vast field of courtly love poetry, romance, and other related genres, tracing the development of this topic across medieval Europe and discussing some of the major contributors. The focus rests on the element of discourse because so many different poets have made their voices heard and debated from many different perspectives the meaning, impact, and consequence of courtly love on the individual in ethical, social, moral, religious, economic, and even political terms. Courtly love is to be understood as a literary discourse on the mostly esoteric pursuit of love as a way of life for members of the high medieval aristocracy, finding vivid expression in poetry, short verse narratives, and romances.
Journal Article
Absurdity in Medieval Literature? Der Stricker’s Pfaffe Amîs as a Transgressive Literary Enterprise Long before Modernity
Although the concept of the Absurd seems to be characteristic only of modernity, especially since WWII, we face the intriguing opportunity to investigate its likely first emergence in the early thirteenth century in Der Stricker’s Pfaffe Amîs (ca. 1220). While the narrative framework insinuates that meaning and relevance continue to be the key components of the priest’s life, especially because he constantly seeks new sources of income for his own generosity and hospitality, his various victims increasingly face absurd situations and are abandoned even to the threat of insanity and death. The analysis of the verse narrative suggests that the protagonist begins to embrace crime and violence as the norm for his operations as a fake merchant. Thus, in some of the episodes of this famous Schwankbuch, elements of the absurd become visible, creating considerable irritation and frustration, if not horror and desperation, among the priest’s innocent victims.
Journal Article
The Emergence of Rationality in the Icelandic Sagas: The Colossal Misunderstanding of the Viking Lore in Contemporary Popular Culture
For a long time now, Old Norse literature has often been colonized and misappropriated by modern right-wing political groups for their own ideology, symbolism, and public appearance. A critical reading of Icelandic sagas, however, easily demonstrates that those public strategies are very short-sighted, misleading, and outright dangerous for our democratic society. To stem the flood of misinformation regarding the Viking world and its literature, this article joins a small but forceful chorus of recent scholars who are hard at work deconstructing this politicization of saga literature by way of offering new readings of those texts in which the very Viking ideology is actually exposed by the poets, rejected, and supplanted by new forms of social interactions predicated on a legal system and an operation with rationality in the public sphere.
Journal Article
The forest in medieval German literature
By pursuing an ecocritical reading, The Forest in Medieval German Literature examines passages in medieval German texts where protagonists operated in the forest and found themselves either in conflictual situations or in refuge.
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