Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages. The German tradition, 800-1300, in its European context by Walther haug (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS105 than the geographical limitations, however, are the temporal boundaries, which are in no way suggested by the book's title. Because the articles are limited to topics that deal, by and large, with the period from 1200 to 1500, the reader is given no real opportunity to compare how issues of community fot women might have changed from the early to the later medieval period. Overall, however, the book is stimulating, edited with care, and beautifully printed. Scholars inrerested in the topic ofwomen in the Middle Ages will find this a welcome addition to their libraries. JUNE HALL McCASH Middle Tennessee State University Walther haug, Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages. The German tradition, 800-1300, in its European context, trans. Joanna M. Catling, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv, 426. isbn: 0-521-34197-3 $74-95The only regret one can possibly have about this excellent study is that a full decade passed between the publication ofits German original, Literaturtheorie im Deutschen Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985; rev. ed. 1992), and the publication of this English translation. However, the great care taken by Joanna Catling in Englishing Walther Haug's dense and complex academic German prose as well as an impressive editorial accuracy (one single typo on well over 400 pages, including a 36-page bibliography!) make the belated appearance of the volume all worth while. In a way, this book is a final curtain call for the kind of medieval philology institutionalized by Ernst Robert Curtius's famous Europäische Literature und Lateinisches Mittehlter (1948). Curtius shaped what he saw as an unbroken chain of literary topoi from classical poetic theory onto the middle ages and modernity. Haug, more interested in the dialectics ofhistorical development than in supporting a theory ofcultural continuity (so appealing to medievalists in the 1940s and 1950s), challenges the apparent weaknesses oftraditional topos investigations and focuses on the 'masking effect' by which a medieval poet was capable ofexpressing highly individualized and situation-specific messages 'under the disguise of conventional topoi' (p. 12). [For a more detailed discussion on the relationship between Curtius and Haug, see my forthcoming essay, '"Cleansing" the Discipline: Ernst Robert Curtius's Medievalist Turn,' in Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honor ofLeslieJ. Workman, ed. by Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998).] Haug wants to avoid a simplistic extrapolation of medieval Latin treatises on poetic theory to the vernacular texts of the high and late middle ages. Therefore, he gleans the material necessary for establishing something like a poetics ofthe medieval narrative from the literary authors' own theoretical statements which are usually woven into the outwardly formulaic fabric of prologues (and epilogues). The investigation moves from Old High German and early Middle High German authors and texts 1?6ARTHURIANA (Otfried von Weissenburg, Annolied, Ludwigslied, Kaiserchronik) to the Rolandslied, bridal quests, the Alexander romance, Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Straßburg, Konrad von Würzburg, and Albrecht, the author of the Jüngerer Titurel. With each case study, Haug examines the varying relationship between tradition and innovation, topos and individual thematic intention. His numerous findings in the more explicitly programmatic passages are supported by observations on the meaning-carrying structural code of the main body of the text, an artistic device meant to gear medieval audiences toward a specific, implied/implicit interpretation.This successful strategy results in a new and fascinating view of the distinctive character of medieval vernacular literature: born out of the fertile, early medieval tension between classical rhetoric and poetics on the one hand and the Christian tradition of reading the world and the Word on the other, high medieval vernacular literature increasingly found its independent aesthetic path in highly experimental, fiction-oriented forms of expression. The twelfth-century Arthurian romance, free from fulfilling extraliterary givens ofsecular history or salvation history alike, sought to establish meaning through a particular innerliterary fictional model which, beginning with Chretien's Erec andEnide, 'experiments with and explores its possibilities and limitations until a crisis point is reached and the type disintegrates' (p. 92). This process of disintegration—supported by a tendency among audiences which had probably never stopped...