Abstract
At the most general level of abstraction, this chapter offers an interpretation of medieval Christian epic, but in a series of telescoping focal projections, the topic is made more specific: medieval Christian epic > the discourse of the Other in such texts > Muslims as that Other > the Muslim Other in medieval German epic > the Muslim Other in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s two early thirteenth-century epics, Parzival.and Willehalm. It approaches this telescoping range of issues and contexts through the controlling motif of metamorphosis.as a mandatory operation performed on Muslims who appear in such texts. Issues in the texts prompt tactically focused “digressions” that often veer momentarily away from the texts in order to lead via a richer contextualization back to them. As a mode of literary analysis, it is nonstandard in Germanistik;.but it is, I hope, appropriate and effective here.
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Notes
Lisa Lampert, “Race, Periodicity, and the (New-)Middle Ages,” Modern Language Quarterly 65 (2004): 396 [391–421].
Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 39 [39–56].
Steven A. Epstein, Purity Lost: Transgressing Boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1000–1400 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), especially p. 183.
Marion E. Gibbs, Wîplîchez wîbes reht: A Study of the Women Characters in the Works of Wolfram von Eschenbach (N.P.: Duquesne University Press, 1972), p. 88.
Amy G. Remensnyder, “Christian Captives, Muslim Maidens, and Mary,” Speculum 82 (2007): 662 [642–77].
On the “foreign-ness” of Belakâne, see David F. Tinsley, “The Face of the Foreigner in Medieval German Courtly Literature,” in Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 45–70.
On the function of tears in medieval epic, see Lydia Miklautsch, “Waz touc helden sah geschrei? Tränen als Gesten der Trauer in Wolframs Willehalm,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 10 (2000): 245–57.
Eva Parra Membrives, “Alternative Frauenfiguren in Wolframs Parzival: ZurBestimmungdes Höfischen anhand differenzierter Verhaltensmuster,” German Studies Review 25 (2002): 40, 44 [35–55].
Henry Kratz, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival: An Attempt at a Total Evaluation (Bern: Francke, 1973), pp. 541 and 572.
Hilda Swinburn, “Gahmuret and Feirefiz in Wolfram’s Parzival,” Modern Language Review 51 (1956): 196 [195–202].
The text is edited by Franz H. Bäuml, Kudrun: Die Handschrift (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969), here st. 580–5.
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© 2011 Jerold C. Frakes
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Frakes, J.C. (2011). Mandatory Muslim Metamorphosis in Middle High German Epic. 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_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119192_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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