Annika Goldenbaum's revised dissertation, a study of this enigmatic, nearly 10,000-line satirical poem from the turn of the fourteenth-fifteenth century, is an apt contribution to a series titled Literatur–Theorie–Geschichte. Constructing a theoretical framework through which the literary-historical dimensions of the text provide coherence to an intentionally unclear narrative and form, the book effectively applies sociological/sociolinguistic lenses to previous narratological investigations of the text and suggests a functional interpretation bridging incompatible generic assignations and a history of scholarly dispute about which conflicting conventions and expectations undermined the other. In this sense, the analysis offers a way of thinking through one dilemma, even if it raises other questions in the process.In five chapters (three body chapters plus an introduction and summary), the study in the broadest sense discusses knowledge transfer and modes of didactic communication in the “literary explosion” of the Late Middle Ages (Hugo Kuhn) from epistemological, linguistic, literary, and historical perspectives. A dual heuristic model with a micro- and macro-level focus centers on the concept of a Krisenexperiment—a breaching experiment in English ethnomethodological terms, which investigates reactions to violations of norms or expectations. The first stage consists of demonstrating in the text a continual drafting and destruction of the constitutive structural elements of didactic communication; a second stage posits that the hermeneutic labors of the text recipient in encountering violations of expectations itself constitutes a process of knowledge generation about knowledge, a reflexive, (re)generative space between scholastic and synodal discourse in the Late Middle Ages.Already before further investigation is possible, it is necessary to grapple with the choice (here viewed as false) previous studies have presented between a personal or small-scale model of scholastic, practical philosophy, or a narrative—a bawdy, grotesque Schwank—inverting the courtly marriage tale for a cast of peasant characters which happens to include a variably integrated series of catalogues and didactic passages. That the work resists coherent interpretation, if not also risks oversignification, in its complexity of correspondences and expectations in form, poetics, function, and genre, is clear. Goldenbaum's position that the Ring is a didactic text construed in the form of a peasant Schwank is less clear on the basis of previous research but convincingly argued within the framework of intentional norm violation developed here. Notably, the two-color encoding of serious endeavors (red) and satirical or entertaining content about rustic life (green) in the text without direct parallel in the wider tradition of premodern didactic literature appears intentionally inconsistent or incoherent and provokes mistrust in potential audiences: “Der Ring ist ein gelehrter Text, der nicht belehrt. Er enttäuscht nicht nur viele der zunächst aufgerufenen Erwartungen, er spielt sie auch gegen den Rezipienten aus” (The Ring is a learned text that does not teach. It not only disappoints many of the expectations initially raised, it also plays them off against the recipient) (p. 11). The present study proceeds from reconstruction, on new-philological grounds, of the textual recipient, rather than positing confusion or incoherence first from the perspective of a hypothetical reader.Surviving in a lone manuscript, Cgm 9300, BSB Munich, the Ring as it has been transmitted is probably close to the original composition on the basis of codicological evidence and dates to the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth century in the Bodensee area, which provides a chronological and sociopolitical frame of reference for analysis (e.g., rivalry between rural and urban social groups). Displaying a mixture of linguistic (Alemannic/Swabian alongside Bavarian forms) and structural elements (prosimetrum), the work perhaps also implicates the political conflicts between local farmers (Alemannic/Swabian speakers) and Austrian nobles (speakers of Middle Bavarian dialects), as noted in scholarship. Throughout the rest of the study, however, the allusive and genealogical structural and linguistic connections to other works and generic traditions provide grist for the analytical mill, rather than the potential for a localized interpretation.Chapter two suggests that the sociology of knowledge is a possible key to deciphering complexity in communication-based epistemological discourse. The author is careful to spare medieval literature a narrow ascription of fictionality opposite functional, scientific (wissenschaftlich) texts and recites a litany of recent literary-theoretical justifications for complicating taxonomic assessment of the text. For example, Joseph Vogl, among other theorists, supplies the call to uncouple or dealign knowledge and literature from the same phenomenological plane, because they are not comprehensible as opposites. Individual episodes checked for sources, analogies, and coherence have in the past led to a dichotomy (Dichtung/Didaxe) in which the work as a whole is hierarchized in either direction between didactic and Schwank narrative genres, granting the Ring one of two central purposes interrupted or undermined by the other. Goldenbaum addresses the “aporetic whole” (p. 30, the reviewer's formulation) in an attempt to extend analysis to how the text provokes contradictions and unexpected situations or processes in the recipient. Part of this questioning requires resisting a universalizing understanding of medieval literature as wissensvermittelnde Literatur, an always pragmatic Schriftlichkeit with instructive interpretations, which risks losing metadiscursive potential on the difference between genres and text types. Such a conceptual expansion leads to the point of analytical frivolity if carried too far. In order to evade this snare, it is vital to ascertain precisely what is literary in the didactic and what is didactic in the literary, as well as to examine the literary treatment of didactic communication, i.e., the metadiscourse. Turning to Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, this study asks these questions via a sociolinguistic process of the construction of knowledge in a communicative, interaction-based framework.Arguing that didactic communication creates via asymmetries the horizon of expectations that—narratively and cognitively—constitutes types/situations of communication, chapter 3 comprises the bulk of the study (pp. 51–207). Violations proceeding from the asymmetries of the socially differentiated distribution of knowledge in the text are demonstrated by examples where codicological organization (the mise en page) of genre conventions fails to adhere to expectations. A long discussion with color figures illustrating the trajectory and realization of didactic textual organization on the basis of other manuscripts, texts, and genres follows, charting the various correspondences and echoes in the Ring. Readers have transferred conventional structural markers of moral-didactic, scholastic texts to the Ring manuscript, which defies conventions from rubrication to internal coherence regularly. Traces of this diagrammatic practice of textual marking known from manuscripts on the virtues appear in Cgm 9300, where orientation from a community of readers provides the missing framework. The Ring also seems to provoke in modern scholars a diagrammatic impulse to order knowledge according to graphic conventions (see the figures on pp. 74–77). In the author's reading, intentional obscuring of orienting markers elides the “known” and “to be known,” producing in the text a lack of accountability “repaired” by readers’ interpretations and engagements with it.The difficulties of genre assignment provide another angle for discussing the structural and thematic boundaries transgressed by the Krisenexperiment of the Ring: encyclopedia, Hausbuch, speculum regale, florilegia of various types, and Wissensliteratur generally may supply points of entry but do not exhaust or even explain the dimensions of anthologization. Goldenbaum suggests that the fundamental Unordnung in the text functions as an intentional strategy to disrupt conventions, forms, and expectations, among other methods by setting up expectations of a moral-didactic form at the outset and offering instead a smaller-focused, narrative form from another genre. More specific generic interventions demonstrate deliberate inversions and uses of the Minnelehre, the oeconomica tradition on marriage versus a clerical discourse (describable as a meta-Schwank on the incompatibility of the systems), and the Ritterspiegel, from which a discourse on war is borrowed and which, alongside the use of other juridical sources, establishes grounds for well-known figures from heroic epic elements to appear.More significantly, a comprehensive investigation of sources lays bare the Ring's early translation (and fictionalization) of various areas of knowledge and attendant discursive structures into the vernacular, which otherwise primarily circulated in learned Latin texts until the end of the fifteenth century. This is, however, not clear in the text itself: the untrustworthiness of narrators and bearers of knowledge, and thus the narrative itself, surfaces throughout. One solution, championed here, is that didactic communication fails because of class-based incompatibilities between interlocutors. Communicative situations are discussed above all in terms of proverbial, sentential frames (e.g., modelled on virtue paradigms) that express temporal fluidity. This is an application of, among other researchers of paroemiological discourse, Wernfried Hofmeister's Sprichwortartige Mikrotexte, which illustrates how the micro-level of phraseology can shape the macro-level structure of the text and genre. This section contains more textual passages and analyses than any other part of the study and profitably applies theoretical advances in linguistic surface phenomena to broader questions of literary form.Chapter 4 returns to the purpose of the text within the framework developed in the previous chapters, arguing that irritation and knowledge exemplify the metadiscursive function of the Ring. If there is “system-theoretical and linguistic-hermeneutic” value in disruption (p. 209), communicative processes and structures can be revealed in the operational space of the text, in which readers are free to interpret processes of knowledge generation and sharing. The composer pushes modes of didactic writing, knowledge creation, and transmission to their limits in order to unveil the mechanisms according to which the system of knowledge and its distribution functions. However, the text cannot escape tradition, and appears firmly traceable to a late medieval Aristotelian theory of knowledge.Returning to the text's classification, Goldenbaum concludes that the Ring is a Schwank in the wider sense of a text that represents second-order discourse to the reader, in this case an example of didactic texts’ potential to signify, produce, and disseminate knowledge. If this study does not overinterpret or oversystematize inconsistencies with perceived expectations on the evidence of a single manuscript, the implications are significant, perhaps moving the boundary of a—however problematically designated—more modern form of literary metadiscourse on knowledge to the early fifteenth century. Ultimately, the discourse-analytical, sociological conceptual framework and application of a wide range of literary-theoretical approaches offers a suggestive model for didactic literature and interprets Wittenwiler's Ring beyond dead-end dichotomies and impenetrability.