Grace Walsh // Staging Storytelling Images: Transmediality, Performance, and the Arts of German Romance in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
Beginning around 1200, a growing canon of chivalric romance entered into the German vernacular and began to transform the cultural landscape of secular society. Authors such as Gottfried von Strassburg, Hartmann von Aue, and Wolfram von Eschenbach presented exciting fictive worlds and models of ethical conduct that remain emblematic of their historical moment and social context. Most audiences would have become familiar with these stories as spectators rather than readers, through live recitation and theatrical performance. Despite longstanding scholarly focus on manuscripts, a monumental object record also survives to demonstrate the role of the visual in literary dissemination. From the Iwein frescoes at Schloss Rodenegg in Südtirol, to Parzival cycle in Konstanz, to the finely worked Tristan und Iseult tapestries produced in the convent of Wienhausen, evidence shows that those with means increasingly selected literary topics to adorn the very spaces in which performances unfolded. In these spaces images were multivalent, with the agency to operate simultaneously as static illustrations, theatrical backdrops, animated co-performers, and material embodiments of the courtly environments their stories describe. In the “media environment” of the decorated hall, fiction and reality collided.
Scholarship on the visual tradition of romance is robust, but the methodological priorities of philology and iconography have often foregrounded issues of word and image while forestalling deeper inquiry into the phenomenological dynamics between image, performance, and social experience. This dissertation addresses the “media environment” of the decorated hall and its relationship to oral cultures of secular entertainment in the German-speaking milieu ca. 1200-1400. Organized around four key performative mediums for “storytelling objects”–bodies, painted and woven wall surfaces, and books– it considers how their visual and material characteristics placed demands on the viewer for engagement and understanding. This project pursues an understanding of literary performance as a physical and consequently visual art, and explores the decorated environment as a stage where image and body, the representational and the real, coincided and collaborated for sophisticated audiences competent in the conventions of multi-sensory and multimedia storytelling.
[Caption: Iwein encountering the wild man and drawing from the magic fountain, from the Iwein cycle, Schloss Rodenegg, Autonomous province of Südtirol, Fresco, ca. first quarter of 13th century, Image: Grace Walsh.]