German literature of the High Middle Ages

Abstract

Medieval Literature and Culture Hasty, Will, ed. German Literature of the High Middle Ages. Rochester: Camden House, 2006. 352 pp. $75.00 hardcover. German Literature of the High Middle Ages (GLHMA), edited by Will Hasty, is the third volume in the Camden House History of German Literature. It offers an excellent overview of the literature of the late 12th- and 13th-century Blutezeit, broadly defined. Hasty's introduction expertly locates the Blutezeit in its historical context and establishes a framework for the discussions to follow. 18 chapters, intelligently enough, are organized in different ways for different topics. Where appropriate, chapters are dedicated to authors, with, for example, Albrecht Classen on Heinrich von Veldeke, Rodney Fisher on Hartmann von Aue, Michael Resler on Der Strieker, and so forth. In one case, other material is sensibly added to an author-based chapter-that is to Rudiger Krohn's contribution on Gottfried von Strassburg and the Tristan Myth. In other cases, chapters are devoted to lyric and narrative traditions, with Nigel Harris on didactic poetry, Hasty on Minnesang, Susan Samples on The German Heroic Narratives, and Sara Poor on Early Mystical Writings. Samples's chapter may be the only one where the organization is questionable: a single chapter on all heroic narratives from the Alexanderlied through the Nibelungenlied and Kudrun is perhaps overburdened. two chapters on non-literary topics-Charles Bowlus on politics and society and William H. Jackson on violence-take a literature-oriented audience into fascinating areas that are crucial for defining the situation in which the literature was produced, yet often neglected in literary discussions. literary chapters generally provide excellent introductions to the major works of the period. Each chapter provides a good survey of what is known about the author, work, or body of works, and the contributors to GLHMA generally do an excellent job of distinguishing what is known and knowable from what must remain speculative, as well as of introducing the reader to important issues in the scholarship. chapters are somewhat uneven, as is inevitable in an undertaking of this kind. This unevenness involves a distinction between a group of chapters that are written by leading specialists on their topics, often by authors of recent monographs, and other chapters that are written by scholars who have not particularly specialized in the topic, and make no pretense of offering anything but surveys of the knowable facts, the main issues, and the trends in scholarship. …