Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde ed. by Jutta Eming, Ann Marie Rasmussen, and Kathryn Starkey (review)

Nearly twenty years ago Michael Camille, writing about the St. Alban's Psalter, described the single-disciplinary approaches to this codex: art historians focused on the prefatory cycle, while literary historians concentrated on the oldest extant copy of the Vie de St. Alexis ("Philological Iconoclasm," in Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, 1996). Lamenting this methodological phenomenon, Camille advocated a more interdisciplinary approach. For a single scholar to exhaustively explore a medieval manuscript—or, more broadly, any medieval material—from all possible disciplinary perspectives may be impossible. However, as Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde admirably shows, it is possible "to open up a dialogue across disciplinary boundaries" (2).

The product of a 2007 conference held at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this essay collection brings together literary and art historical perspectives from European and North American scholars. An explicit goal of the volume, "to propose a new set of intellectual coordinates—the concepts of materiality and visuality," (2) offers fertile ground for interdisciplinary dialogue.

The editors' succinct introduction emphasizes the long-standing fascination with the story of Tristan and Isolde in a range of media, and addresses the plurality of meaning and the ultimate inseparability of the key terms: "Materiality is at once a philological concept . . . , a medial concept . . . , and a critical concept . . . . Visuality . . . is at once an art historical concept . . . , a psychological concept . . . , and a performative concept" (2). Providing brief synopses of the papers, the editors describe the tripartite structure of the volume: "Courtly Bodies, Seeing, and Emotions"; "Media, Representation, and Performance"; and "The Visual Culture of Tristan." This division foregrounds the interdisciplinary aspect of the collection. It also, however, causes papers sharing a focus on a specific narrative part of the Tristan material to be placed in different parts. For example, the paper by Jan-Dirk Müller on the role of visuality in leal amur and that by Elke Brüggen and Hans-Joachim Ziegeler on the relationship between the visual and the verbal in the three illustrated manuscripts of Gottfried's Tristan, both treat the story of Riwalin and Blanscheflur, yet the papers are located far from each other.

Haiko Wandhoff's essay, which follows Müller's, likewise offers a close reading of Gottfried's Tristan. Focusing on the Cave of Lovers and exploring the dialectic of hiding and discovering love in art and literature, Wandhoff offers a sophisticated interpretation of the grotto as an "internal representation of his [Gottfried's] Tristan" (42). The protagonists, Gottfried, and the text's audience engage in hiding and discovering love. James Schultz explores a different angle of love, articulated in his title, "Why Do Tristan and Isolde Make Love? The Love Potion as a Milestone in the History of Sexuality." Probing beyond the immediate answer—they are in love—Schultz poses a second question: why are they in love? By examining various lovers in both Gottfried's and Eilhart von Oberg's texts, Schultz shows that this question remains—deliberately and strategically—unanswered. Broadening the textual base even further, the final essay in Part One, by Ludger Lieb, analyzes the visualization of minne in Minnereden, in particular Das Kloster der Minne, as the realization of aspects of love found in Tristan. Crucial here is Lieb's focus on the community of edelen herzen, a community restricted to those who can see with the heart.

Part II opens with Michael Curschmann's "From Myth to Emblem to Panorama," a comparative exploration of the "historical dynamics" of the matière de Bretagne, which includes a consideration of how and why the tryst scene becomes the visual emblem of the Tristan material. Returning to German literature, Elke Koch's "Framing Tristan—Taming Tristan? The Materiality of Text and Body in Hans Sachs's Tragedia" explores how Sachs...