Abstract
T his multidisciplinary collection of essays draws on various theoretical approaches to explore the highly visual nature of the German Middle Ages and to expose new facets of old texts and artifacts. The term visual culture has been used in recent years to refer to modern media theory, film, modern art, and other contemporary representational forms and functions.
swer niht fîrbaz chart verneinen,
der sol da bi ouch bilde nemen [ …].
swer niht enchan
versten, daz ein biderb man
an der schrift versten sol,
dem si mit den bilden wol.
der pfaffe sehe die schrift an.
so sol der ungelerte man
die bilde sehen, sit im niht
die schrift zerchennen geschult.
—Thomas în von Zerclaere, Der Wescfe Gist, 1984, 1703–1704; 1711–1718
[Whoever is unable to comprehend otherwise should learn by looking at images [ …]. Whoever cannot understand what a good man should understand from writing is well served by images. Just like the priest looks at words, thus should the unlearned man look at images, since writing does not reveal itself to him.] [Translations my own unless otherwise noted.]
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Notes
Chris Jenks, ed., Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1995)
Nicolas Mirzoeff, ed., An Introduction to Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1999)
Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 1998).
See also Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
See Joachim Bumke, Courtly Culture: Literature and Sodety in the High Middle Ages (1991; repr. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2000), who discusses many of these changes and innovations.
See Horst Wenzel, Hören und Sehen: Schrift und Bild (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1995).
Pope Gregory I, Gregorii I papae Registrum Epistolarutn, ed. Ludwig Hartmann, MGH: Epistolae, vol. 2, no. 270 (Berlin, 1899).
Some of the most important collections of essays in German are as follows: Christel Meier and Uwe Ruberg, eds., Text und Bild: Aspekte des Zusammenwirkens zweier Künste in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1980)
Wolfgang Harms, ed., Text und Bild, Bild und Text, DFG Symposium 1988 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990)
Klaus Dirscherl, ed., Bild und Text im Dialog (Passau: Wissenschaftsverlag Rothe, 1993). Two important studies that served as touchstones for a previous generation of scholars are Wolfgang Stammler, Wort und Bild: Studien zu den Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Schrifttum und Bildkunst im Mittelalter (Berlin: Schmidt, 1962)
F.P. Pickering, Literatur und darstellende Kunst im Mittelalter (Berlin: Schmidt, 1966).
See also F.P. Pickering, Essays on Medieval Literature and Iconography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
There are a few exceptions, such as: Sarah Westphal, Textual Poetics of German Manuscripts, 1300–1500 (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993)
Joan A. Holladay Illuminating the Epic: The Kassel Willehalm Codex and the Landgraves of Hesse in the Early Fourteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996)
James A. Rushing, Jr., Images of Adventure: “Ywain” in the Visual Arts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). Joachim Bumke’s seminal study of courtly culture (Courtly Culture) has recently been translated into English and has already found tremendous resonance in the scholarly community. The work of C. Stephen Jaeger and Jeffrey Hamburger has also crossed disciplinary divides and been widely recognized in the field of Medieval Studies.
See, for example, Herbert Grundmann, “Litteratus-illitteratus: Der Wandel einer Bildungsnorm vom Altertum zum Mittelalter,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 40 (1958): 1–65.
For two recent studies on the two-fold reception of medieval English literature, see Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Nancy Mason Bradbury, Writing Aloud: Storytelling in Late Medieval England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
Dennis Green, Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German Literature, 800–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
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© 2005 Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel
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Starkey, K. (2005). Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages. In: Starkey, K., Wenzel, H. (eds) Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05655-9_1
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