Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses of the Muslim Other in Medieval Germany by Jerold C. Frakes (review)

With Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses of the Muslim Other in Medieval Germany, Jerold Frakes presents a short but dense volume on the topic of “representation of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations” in German literature of the tenth through thirteenth centuries based on analysis of a handful of representative texts (Hrotsvit von Gandersheim’s “Pelagius,” the Ludus de Antichristo, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Willehalm, and a small number of poems by Walther von der Vogelweide). Frakes rightly points out that the German contribution to these medieval discourses has been neglected by scholars and that, indeed, to date no comprehensive study on the topic exists. He suggests that an examination of sources from the German-speaking realms constitutes an important contribution to the understanding of the pan-European literary dynamics of representing the Muslim Other. Rather than reading this volume as a comprehensive introduction to the “German” tradition of representing the Muslim Other in relationship to a dominant Christian culture – how, indeed, could any single monograph provide that? – one should approach this book as a contribution to the discussion of several key medieval German literary texts and authors with an eye toward their representation of the topic.

Chapter 1 sets the tone for the entire study through a reading of Brian de Palma’s Redacted (2006), a film focusing on the theme of representation as a creative rather than purely representational process. The foundational assumption in Frakes’s work is that the various writers he examines should not be judged on whether they got their representations of the Muslim Other right; “It is not, after all, a matter of Wolfram ‘getting it wrong’ in making his Muslim characters black and idolatrous,” writes Frakes. “His representation of Muslims is not an inaccurate misrepresentation of ‘actual’ Muslims, but rather ultimately a representation, image, and invention that had a life of its own beyond any corroborative value of ‘actual’ Muslims as guarantors of accuracy” (xiii).

Chapter 2 presents a few of the relevant theoretical discourses, most notably Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism as well as critiques of Said’s approach. Here Frakes also traces the “opposition to the use of postcolonial theory in premodern studies” (18). While this is a worthwhile enterprise, many readers new to thinking about alterity and Muslim Others would probably appreciate an overview of the most prominent voices in postcolonial theory prior to the more subsidiary discussion of whether postcolonial theory should or should not inform the study of premodern cultures. Frakes mentions Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak in passing but a more solid engagement would have been helpful here.

Frakes’s Chapter 3 on Hrotsvit von Gandersheim’s tenth-century “Pelagius” and the anonymous twelfth-century Ludus de Antichristo examines the “modes of assumption underlying the two texts with respect to the representation of Muslims” (47, author’s emphasis). Though the representation of Muslim characters may appear rather similar in both texts, Frakes unveils the differences between the two and explains them in light of their very dissimilar production and reception contexts. About Hrotsvit’s text, Frakes concludes that “the defining point of view is nonetheless neither ours nor any tenth-century Iberian one, but rather Hrotsvit’s, who shares none of the tolerance of multiethnic tenth-century Iberia or of twenty-first century liberalism” (52). Composed in the twelfth century (and in the wake of the Second Crusade), the Ludus de Antichristo presents as an option for dealing with the presence of Muslim characters “cultural extinction via conversion [. . .] and total annihilation via extermination” (57). This – the “controlling motif of metamorphosis as a mandatory operation performed on Muslims who appear in such texts” (59) – also becomes the model, Frakes argues, for Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm and Parzival, though in both cases this pattern has been repeatedly misread as Christian tolerance.

Chapters 4 and 5 on Wolfram von Eschenbach provide...