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  • A Courtier’s Mirror: Cultivating Elite Identity in Thomasin von Zerclaere’s Welscher Gast by Kathryn Starkey
  • James A. Schultz
A Courtier’s Mirror: Cultivating Elite Identity in Thomasin von Zerclaere’s Welscher Gast. By Kathryn Starkey. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. xv + 455. Paper $55.00. ISBN 978-0268041444.

Thomasin von Zerclaere’s Welscher Gast, a long didactic poem written in 1215–1216, survives in 25 manuscripts, of which about half contain a relatively consistent cycle of images. In A Courtier’s Mirror Kathryn Starkey takes advantage of this rich material to examine how “the poem’s visual program … transformed over the course of the poem’s reception” (3). She directs her attention primarily to a 1340 manuscript now in Gotha, comparing it frequently to the earliest manuscript, from around 1256, as well as to a number of fifteenth-century manuscripts. Starkey finds that the illustrated poem was “first composed for contemplation and reflection in the pursuit of self-knowledge” and later “revised as reference book to be used … as resource and … as window into an aristocratic society that became increasingly archaic” (4).

In chapter one Starkey considers questions of format and organization: unlike the earlier manuscript, the Gotha manuscript contains an “explicit indexing system and … [a] prose foreword that functions like a table of contents” (35); these suggest it was being reformatted as a “reference work” (54) for “private readers rather than reciters” (50). Chapter two traces changes in the image cycle: Starkey finds a “process of emancipation” from the “clerical iconography” present in the earliest manuscript “to a secularly encoded visual language that focuses on contemporary fashion and storytelling” in the later ones (57). Investigating “models of gender” (85) in chapter three, Starkey concentrates on visual personifications: in the earliest manuscript the artists “personify the virtues and vices most consistently according to [the] grammatical gender” (99) of the virtue or vice in question, while the later manuscripts show “more frequent inconsistencies between grammatical gender and the personification’s gender” (103). Chapter four is devoted exclusively to the Gotha manuscript and the images it has added to the usual cycle: that several of them portray “courtly ritual” Starkey takes as support for her “argument that this redaction was conceived in the context of a process of elite and courtly self-fashioning” (121). Chapter five discusses the significance of mirrors in Welscher Gast manuscripts and why the illustrated poem might, as in Starkey’s title, be called one.

Appendices claim more than half the volume. The first lists the extant Welscher Gast manuscripts. The second offers a 42-page synopsis of Thomasin’s poem. Appendix 3 will prove a valuable resource: it reproduces every page of the Gotha manuscript that contains an image along with a description of each. Appendix 4 comprises illustrations from other manuscripts to which Starkey refers. [End Page 151]

Starkey’s study is marred by two sorts of imprecision. The first is conceptual. Narrative plays a central role in chapter two—for instance, when Starkey investigates the history of the illustration representing vices of the tongue. She finds that each version “tells a slightly different story” (75) and that the image in one of the later manuscripts “has been redesigned as a narrative scene” (76). But there are no stories here. Stories require a series of events in time. Here four figures say things that illustrate what they represent (boasting, lying, mockery), but their utterances stand in no temporal relation to each other and have no consequences. All that Starkey says about “the power of narrative” (71), including her conclusion that the “later manuscripts have foregrounded narrative structure” (76), is meaningless if there are no narratives to begin with. In chapter three Starkey is fixated on the unrewarding question of whether the gender of personifications matches that of the nouns they represent. She finds the “fluidity of gender in the illustrations … surprising” (85) given the conventional roles Thomasin advocates in his text. It is not. Everywhere in the Middle Ages one finds an insistence on conventional gender roles in everyday life alongside a freedom to use gender expressively in figurative language and art (Jesus as mother). It cannot...

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