Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde

by Jutta Eming (Editor), Ann Marie Rasmussen (Editor)

Overview

More than any other secular story of the Middle Ages, the tale of Tristan and Isolde fascinated its audience. Adaptations in poetry, prose, and drama were widespread in western European vernacular languages. Visual portrayals of the story appear not only in manuscripts and printed books but in individual pictures and pictorial narratives, and on an amazing array of objects including stained glass, wall paintings, tiles, tapestries, ivory boxes, combs, mirrors, shoes, and misericords.

The pan-European and cross-media nature of the surviving medieval evidence is not adequately reflected in current Tristan scholarship, which largely follows disciplinary and linguistic lines. The contributors to Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde seek to address this problem by opening a cross-disciplinary dialogue and by proposing a new set of intellectual coordinates—the concepts of materiality and visuality—without losing sight of the historical specificity or the aesthetic character of individual works of art and literature. Their theoretical paradigm allows them to survey the richness of the surviving evidence from a variety of disciplinary approaches, while offering new perspectives on the nature of representation in medieval culture. Enriched by numerous illustrations, this volume is an important examination of the story of Tristan and Isolde in the European context of its visual and textual transmission.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268041397
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	05/30/2012
Edition description:	1
Pages:	372
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Kathryn Starkey is associate professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Jutta Eming is professor at the Institute for German and Netherlandic Philology, Free University, Berlin.

Ann Marie Rasmussen is professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, Duke University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

List of Illustrations ix

Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde Jutta Eming Ann Marie Rasmussen Kathryn Starkey 1

Part I Courtly Bodies, Seeing, and Emotions

1 The Light of Courtly Society: Blanscheflur and Riwalin Jan-Dirk Müller 19

2 How to Find Love in Literature: Reading Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and His Cave of Lovers Haiko Wandhoff 41

3 Why Do Tristan and Isolde Make Love? The Love Potion as a Milestone in the History of Sexuality James A. Schultz 65

4 Seeing Love in the World of Lovers: Late Medieval Love Literature as a Fulfillment of Gottfried's Tristan Ludger Lieb 83

Part II Media, Representation, and Performance

5 From Myth to Emblem to Panorama Michael Curschmann 107

6 Framing Tristan-Taming Tristan? The Materiality of Text and Body in Hans Sachs's Tragedia Elke Koch 130

7 Time, Space, and Mind: Tristan in Three Dimensions in Fourteenth-Century France Amanda Luyster 148

8 Tristan Love: Elite Self-Fashioning in Italian Frescoes of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries Klaus Krüger 178

Part III The Visual Culture of Tristan

9 Discourses of Curiosity: The Materiality of Meaning in Edition Studies and Cultural Studies Martin Baisch 203

10 Textual Worlds-Pictorial Worlds: Interpreting the Tristan Story in Illuminated Manuscripts Elke Brüggen Hans-Joachim Ziegeler 223

11 Specific and Generic Scenes in Verse Tristan Illustrations Stephanie Cain Van D'Elden 269

12 The Artistic Context of Some Northern French Illustrated Tristan Manuscripts Margaret Alison Stones 299

List of Contributors 337

Index 342

Editorial Reviews

"This is a major collection of essays that gives new direction to the study of one of the most important poets of the Middle Ages and one of the most fascinating works of literature from the period." —C. Stephen Jaeger, University of Illinois

"Comprehensive and cutting edge, Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde defines the moment in the history of Tristan scholarship. The essays, gathered from both sides of the Atlantic, enrich and expand the key concepts of materiality and visuality to account for the proliferation of the Tristan story in an astonishing range of media. [Enhanced by an outstanding bibliography] the collection gives scholars in several disciplines the tools to explore the productive connections between the verbal and the visual in medieval culture." —Sarah Westphal-Wihl, Washington University in St. Louis

"Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde successfully opens up the conversation between literary historians and art historians on its intended subject, and as such is an original contribution to the field. The editors are well-versed in past and current medieval, and specifically Tristan, scholarship and their substantial introduction lays out the methodology behind the investigation as well as the structure of the book." —Denise Della Rossa, University of Notre Dame

“[This volume] represents a further step in the integration of material and visual culture as a useful interdisciplinary hermeneutic.” —Comitatus

“This collection of twelve essays is both traditional and innovative in the ground it covers and the approaches taken by its editors and authors. . . . [It] is in many ways representative of the kind of contemporary medieval literary studies that are taking us beyond the merely textual into the broader spheres of cultural context. For that reason, among others, it is a welcome addition to scholarship.” —Journal of English and Germanic Philology

"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. . . . 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 Sach" —Arthuriana

“The story of Tristan and Isolde held a special fascination for people all over Western Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, and this fascination is documented in numerous works of literature as well as pictures and pictorial narratives. Yet although this extensive corpus has been studied by literary scholars on the one hand and by art historians on the other, there has not been much dialogue between the two disciplines. . . . Hence the rationale for this volume, which brings together twelve contributions by experts from art history and literary studies with the aim of stimulating an interdisciplinary dialogue that, it is hoped, will lead to a keener awareness of the relations between the verbal and the visual in medieval culture.” —Speculum

“The editors are to be congratulated for a thought-provoking introductory essay and for producing a collection that conveys current thinking about some of the many aspects and manifestations of the story of Tristan and Isolde.” —The Medieval Review

“As this volume nicely illustrates, with the help of new theoretical concepts (visuality, materiality) there emerge possibilities to tease new meanings out of texts/manuscripts that have been discussed for a long time.” —The Comparatist

From the Publisher

“This collection of twelve essays is both traditional and innovative in the ground it covers and the approaches taken by its editors and authors. . . . [It] is in many ways representative of the kind of contemporary medieval literary studies that are taking us beyond the merely textual into the broader spheres of cultural context. For that reason, among others, it is a welcome addition to scholarship.” —Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 113 no. 1 (Jan. 2014)

Journal of English and Germanic Philology

“[This volume] represents a further step in the integration of material and visual culture as a useful interdisciplinary hermeneutic.” —Comitatus, vol. 44 (Sept. 2013)
 
 

Comitatus

"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. . . . 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 Sach" —Arthuriana

Arthuriana