Water in Medieval Literature by Albrecht Classen

Author:Albrecht Classen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

NOTES

1. To put things into the right perspective regarding the online information nowadays available, with all its advantages and disadvantages, the article on Wolfram in Wikipedia is quite good, but would need considerable expansion and more detailed information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_von_Eschenbach; the German version offers a different selection of research literature and additional information: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_von_Eschenbach; see also Martin Schuhmann, “Wolfram von Eschenbach,” Mediaevum.de (2003): http://www.mediaevum.de/autoren/wolfram_von_eschenbach.htm (all three last accessed on July 20, 2016). Subsequently I will not rely on those sources and draw from the relevant Wolfram research, which is abundantly available. Quite often the entries in Wikipedia.com are actually impressive, but in the present case they do not live up to the expectations.

2. See, for instance, the excellent volumes published by the Wolfram Gesellschaft, Wolfram-Studien. The two-volume reference work, Wolfram von Eschenbach: ein Handbuch, ed. Joachim Heinzle (2011) proves very useful especially for students: Heiko Hartmann, Einführung in das Werk Wolframs von Eschenbach (2015). Older research was well summarized by Henry Kratz, Wolfram’s Parzival: An Attempt at a Total Evaluation (1973)—today, unfortunately, mostly ignored—and Joachim Bumke, Wolfram von Eschenbach. 8th, completely rev. ed. (1964/2004); see now also Michael Dallapiazza, Wolfram von Eschenbach (2009). This list could be easily expanded by hundreds of relevant titles. Water, however, never appears as a narrative entity relevant for the understanding of Wolfram’s romance.

3. Christopher R. Clason, “The Liquids in Gottfried’s Tristan und Isolde” (forthcoming).

4. Clason, “The Liquids in Gottfried’s Tristan und Isolde” (forthcoming).

5. Anne Scott, “Lodestone and Litmus Test: Aqueous Presentations of Emotional Experience in Medieval and Renaissance Literature” (forthcoming).

6. Debra L. Stoudt, “Elemental Well-Being: Water and Its Attributes in Selected Writings of Hildegard of Bingen and Georgius Agricola” (forthcoming).

7. Marion E. Gibbs and Sidney M. Johnson, “Wolfram von Eschenbach” (2006), 74–109.

8. http://www.handschriftencensus.de/werke/437; http://www.handschriftencensus.de/werke/440; http://www.handschriftencensus.de/werke/439 (last accessed on July 6, 2016).

9. http://www.handschriftencensus.de/werke/438 (last accessed on July 6, 2016).

10. For a summary of the relevant studies, see now Albrecht Classen, “Wolfram von Eschenbach,” Oxford Bibliographies, online (an extensive commented bibliography on this poet): http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195396584/obo-9780195396584-0163.xml?rskey=JnnNSa&result=1&q=Wolfram#firstMatch (last accessed on July 7, 2016). Although the number of relevant studies on Wolfram and on his Parzival is just legion, there does not seem to have been any interest in the role of water in his work from an ecocritical, but then also symbolic, religious, and philosophical perspective.

11. The unease with which scholars of pre-modern literature cope with ecocritical questions is clearly represented in the contributions to Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare, ed. Thomas Hallo, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber. Early Modern Cultural Studies (2008). The Introduction by Raber and Hallock highlights more problems than to offer solutions, and profiles the tenuous position of ecocritics vis-à-vis older literature since there seems to be a big hurdle in grasping the factual relationship between humans and nature in narratives or visual art works. The issue raised here pertains to the tension between the construction of our perception and the “natural” reality.

12. For an excellent recent structural and semantic analysis, see now Julia Richter, Spiegelungen: Paradigmatisches Erzählen in Wolframs ‘Parzival’ (2015).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.