Abstract
Before proceeding to the material from Germany that is relevant to the construction of a discourse of the Muslim Other in the Middle Ages, it is first necessary to theorize such an analysis. While that might be accomplished in other subfields of medieval studies with a requisite bow and nod to the appropriate foundational texts, such is not quite the case in medieval German studies, where that theorization has not yet been comprehensively executed. Thus, in attempting to contribute to that ongoing process, the following pages will tread some familiar ground for many readers, but will ultimately, I hope, make possible more adequately contextualized readings of the literary texts from medieval Germany that form the object of the study in succeeding chapters.
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Notes
Unless we countenance the historicity of the Old Norse Groenlendinga páttr and its inclusion in the crew that sailed to Vínland (by scholarly consensus now identified as Newfoundland) of Tyrkir, the suðmaðr [German], who participated in the confrontation with Native Americans in the tenth century; text edited by Halldór Hermannsson, The Vinland Sagas, Islandica 30 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1944). See Jerold C. Frakes, “Vikings, Vinland and the Discourse of Eurocentrism,” Jowmal of English and Germanic Philology 100 (2001): 157–99. Needless to say, that encounter had no effect on the development of a German representation of the non-European Other.
On the political motivations (papal and otherwise) for the Crusades as the primary military expression of this conflict, see, especially for his focus on the German literary tradition, Wolfgang Spiewok, “Die Bedeutung des Kreuzzugserlebnisses für die Entwicklung der feudalhöfischen Ideologie und die Ausformung der mittelalterlichen deutschen Literatur: Vom Dogma zur Toleranz,” Weimarer Beiträge 9 (1963): 669–83.
In general on this topic, see Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1960); and R.W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). The most important work on this specific topic is in the field of art history, the monumental The Image of the Black in Western Art, ed. Ladislas Bugner (New York: William Morrow, 1976–199), especially vol. 2: From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery” (New York: William Morrow, 1979); and the likewise exhaustive P. Bancourt, Les muselmans dans les chansons de geste du cycle du roi, 2 vols. (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1982). More recently, see also Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Jürgen Brummack, Die Darstellung des Orients in den deutschen Alexandergeschichten des Mittelalters (Berlin: Schmidt, 1966); John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
This tripartite definition is based on Lucy K. Pick, “Edward Said, Orientalism and the Middle Ages,” Medieval Encounters 5 (1999): 265–6.
Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 129.
John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 280–81.
Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran Cruz, “Popular Attitudes towards Islam in Medieval Europe,” in Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other, ed. David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), pp. 55–6 [55–81]. She also remarks: “On the other hand, it is also the case that many of the most ill-informed views of Islam in the Middle Ages were precisely those that gave rise to legendary and long-lived images and prejudices that have continued to inform European attitudes.” Thus while medieval attitudes were not monolithic, modern attitudes have often developed directly from the least informed medieval ones.
Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1988), pp. 10–11.
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974), especially chapter one, “Medieval Prelude,” pp. 14–63.
Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Aeschylus’ ∏έρσαιis edited by Martin L. West, Aeschylus, Persae (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1991). See also Thomas Harrison, The Emptiness of Asia. Aeschylus’ Persians and the History of the Fifth Century (London: Duckworth, 2000), and Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
J.R.S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
See especially the “Einleitung” to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, 2nd ed., vol. 9 of Werke, ed. Karl Hegel (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1840), pp. 3–135.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 9–10.
See especially Rudolf Wittkower, “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 159–97, and Roy A. Wisbey, “Marvels of the East in the Wiener Genesis and in Wolfram’s Parzival,”.in Essays in German and Dutch Literature, ed. W.D. Robson-Scott (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1973), pp. 1–41.
Lynn Tarte Ramey, Christian, Saracen and Genre in Medieval French Literature (New York: Routledge 2001), pp. 35 and 38.
David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto, Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), p. 3.
See especially Rana Rabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 14–36. There is also a growing body of work specifically on the eroticization of the colonial woman; see especially the essays in the section “Theorizing Gender,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 196–267.
Franz H. Bäuml, ed., Kudrun: Die Handschrift (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969), here st. 583, 3. See below in chapter four and especially the examples analyzed by Alfred Ebenbauer, “Es gibt ain mörynne vil dick susse mynne: Belakanes Landsleute in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 113 (1984): 16–42.
Norman Daniel, Heroes and Saracens: An Interpretation of the Chansons de Geste (Edinburg: Edinbugh University Press, 1984), pp. 9–10.
See, for instance, Roswitha Wisniewski, Kreuzzugsdichtung: Idealität in der Wirklichkeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), p. 130.
Homi Bhabha, “Frontlines/Borderposts,” in Displacements: Cultural Identities in Questions, ed. Angelika Bammer (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), p. 271 [269–72].
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1–2.
Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
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© 2011 Jerold C. Frakes
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Frakes, J.C. (2011). Discourses of the Muslim Other. In: Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses of the Muslim Other in Medieval Germany. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119192_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119192_2
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