Politik und Poetik

Abstract

The article examines the relationship between ›literature‹ and ›politics‹; it focuses on medieval poetry that was produced in the context of partisanship and factional strife. Such texts, it is argued, must not be analysed in a purely ›literary‹ approach – nor in a purely historical one either. Instead, we should study these works from a double perspective which accounts for both their political functions and their artistic character – thus producing closer insights into the literary qualities as well as the historical significance of the respective texts. The article illustrates these general reflections by a close reading of several poems written by Rutebeuf (floruit ca. 1250–1280) in the context of the so-called Mendicant controversy at the University of Paris. It first discusses the short-comings of Michel-Marie Dufeil’s historico-biographical reading of the poems in question. In a second step, it argues that we cannot reasonably understand Rutebeuf’s polemics as a kind of ›autotelic‹ literary play (as proposed by Claudio Galderisi) either. Instead, the article tries to situate Rutebeuf’s poems in different echo chambers which dominate the public sphere of the 13th-century French kingdom – thus producing a fresh look on various intertextual references which have hitherto passed unnoticed.