Horst Wenzel

Visual culture and the German Middle Ages

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.

The Visuality of German Courtly Literature

Abstract The privileging of sight has often been regarded as one of the markers of modernity. Visual modes of representation and perception, however, are central to pre-modern culture, which not only privileged vision over other forms of reception and cognition but also gave rise to numerous discourses on identity that appear in the works of medieval secular poets, theologians, and scholastics. Medieval people communicated by using all of their senses, but primarily by watching and hearing one another. Space, presence, and sensory stimuli were essential to human interaction. In courtly society in particular the choreography and representation of bodies was crucial for self-representation and identity. Indeed, there appears to be a visual turn at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century that goes hand in hand with the development of an aristocratic courtly culture, innovations in architecture, fashion, literature, and literary transmission. This essay examines some key scenes in vernacular literary texts (Gottfried von Strassburg, Heinrich von Veldeke, Konrad Fleck, Thomasin von Zerclaere, Wolfram von Eschenbach) and some images that reveal the complex medieval notion of visuality and its importance for courtly culture.