Allegory and the Poetic Self: First-Person Narration in Late Medieval Literature, ed R. Barton Palmer, Katharina Philipowski, and Julia Rüthermann. Gainesville, Tallahasse, et al.: University Press of Florida, 2022, vii, 316 pp.

Abstract

Narratologically speaking, the emergence of the poetic “I” in late medieval and early modern European literature constitutes a major benchmark of a long-term paradigm shift which ultimately transcended into the Baroque novel written entirely from the first-person perspective, such as the anonymous Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes (1552) and Grimmelshausen German Simplicissimus (1668). However, already high medieval romances such as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (ca. 1205) or allegorical narratives such as Hartmann von Aue’s Klagebüchlein (ca. 1180) contain remarkable elements of the playful engagement with the own self. Those are, unfortunately, not even mentioned by any of the contributors to the volume under review here. We also should not forget the strong development of autobiographical poetry in the fifteenth century (cf. A. Classen, Autobiographische Lyrik des europäischen Spätmittelalters, 1991), such as by Oswald von Wolkenstein, Christine de Pizan, Thomas Hoccleve, and Michel Beheim (none of them is considered here). However, the present project excellently edited by two German and one American scholar, aims at the analysis of the conjunction of allegory with the first-person pronoun mostly in late medieval French, some Italian, German, and Spanish allegorizing verse narratives, often in the form of the dream allegory. As the editors emphasize, the exploration of the poetic “I” takes place within a literary discourse, it represents an experimental process, and it reflects the very nature of fictionality (meta-fictionality), which can easily lead to the splitting of the poetic self. Whether this justifies them to call this development transgressive, “oscillating between story and discourse” (15), might be questionable, however.