Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde ed. by Jutta Eming, Ann Marie Rasmussen, and Katheryn Starkey (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde ed. by Jutta Eming, Ann Marie Rasmussen, and Katheryn Starkey Joan Tasker Grimbert jutta eming, ann marie rasmussen, and katheryn starkey, eds., Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Pp. 355. isbn: 978–0–268–04139–7. $45. This fine and gorgeously illustrated collection of twelve essays grew out of a conference held at Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2007. Noting that the Tristan legend is the most widely depicted secular story of the Middle Ages and that it is both pan-European and cross-medial, the editors invited medievalists from different fields to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue on the twin themes of visuality and materiality. Although these themes overlap, ‘visuality’ refers to depictions conveying specific meanings and to images, objects, performance, and processes of visually perceiving, while ‘materiality’ refers to objects, manuscripts, and places on and in which the story appears, as well as the construction of space, objects, bodies, and material signs. Although the title and the editors’ goals strongly imply that the essays will range over several ‘national’ literatures, the volume is resolutely and unapologetically German-centric and focused squarely on Gottfried von Strassburg: eleven of the thirteen contributors are from departments of German, and six of the essays are on Gottfried, with one other on Hans Sachs. The volume begins with an excellent introduction in which the editors provide a rationale for their project, define their two key terms, offer a brief survey of critical trends used to interpret the legend, and describe the various essays, underscoring links among many of them. The essays in part I, ‘Courtly Bodies, Seeing, and Emotions,’ reframe the classical debates on Gottfried by underscoring the importance of seeing and visualization in the representation of love in his poem. Asserting that visuality is the core of courtly life, Jan-Dirk Müller (‘The Light of Courtly Society: Blanscheflur and Riwalin’) claims that the love of Tristan’s parents, unlike that of Tristan and Isolde, is called leal because it confirms what everyone can see. In ‘How to Find Love in Literature: Reading Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and His Cave of Lovers,’ Haiko Wandhoff seeks to show that the re-creation of the love grotto is a mise-en-abyme of a work in which Gottfried and Tristan find love through artistic endeavors, and the reader does so by refined interpretation. James A. Schultz (‘Why Do Tristan and Isolde Make Love? The Love Potion as a Milestone in the History of Sexuality’) argues that neither Eilhart nor Gottfried cares why their protagonists fall in love and seek consummation; refusing to treat these questions, the authors use the love potion to [End Page 129] mark their distance from medieval doctors and theologians, who invoke, respectively, ‘appetites’ and ‘concupiscence’: for them, the cause of love is simply love. Ludger Lieb (‘Seeing Love in the World of Lovers: Late Medieval Love Literature as a Fulfillment of Gottfried’s Tristan’) examines Minnereden (discourses on love) to show how, by making love visible through personification, allegory, and symptoms, they extend and elaborate core concepts of Tristan’s love, as set forth explicitly in Gottfried’s prologue. Part II, ‘Media, Representation, and Performance,’ explores the reshaping of the legend for different media. Michael Curschmann (‘From Myth to Emblem to Panorama’) traces the legend from the earliest French verse poems through its crystallization in a single image (the orchard scene) to its change of medium and focus in Malory’s ‘Arthuriad’—and already, I would argue, in the French Prose Tristan—and finally to Swinburne’s 18th-century epic renewal of the legend, which infuses it with some of the original energy. Elke Koch (‘Framing Tristan—Taming Tristan? The Materiality of Text and Body in Hans Sachs’s Tragedia’) describes the strategies that Sachs uses in dramatizing the prose Tristrant and Isalde to represent love as a dangerous drive that he ‘contains’ by limiting all commentary to the prologue and epilogue, where the herald provides an explicitly moral and repressive view. Amanda Luyster’s title, ‘Time, Space, and...