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

This collection of twelve essays is both traditional and innovative in the ground it covers and the approaches taken by its editors and authors. Eming, Rasmussen, and Starkey offer a useful guide to the book and its aims in their joint introduction (pp. 1–5). The four chapters of Part 1 (“Courtly Bodies, Seeing, and Emotions”) take a visual approach to some classic topics of German Tristan scholarship. Jan-Dirk Müller (pp. 19–40) shows how the order and disorder of Gottfried’s courtly society, and the position of those within it, depend quite literally on how it is seen; central to the contribution of Haiko Wandhoff (pp. 41–64) is the notion of the cave of lovers, again in Gottfried, as a text to be decoded visually; James A. Schultz (pp. 65–82) looks at both Gottfried and Eilhart in his study of the potion as an obstacle to religious interpretations of the two versions, authorizing the movement toward its secular independence; through their reception of Gottfried’s Minne, the late medieval Minnerede constitute a kind of visual tour of lovers for the edele herzen, as argued convincingly by Ludger Lieb (pp. 83–104). In the four chapters of Part 2 (“Media, Representation, and Performance”), the purview of the collection is extended beyond the purely textual into the fields of visual art and drama. Michael Curschmann’s wide-ranging chapter (pp. 107–29) traces an arc of reception from the foundational myth through the establishment of emblematic images (as seen, for example, on ivory caskets and in manuscript miniatures) to Swinburne’s Victorian reponse to the problematic Tristan section of Malory’s Arthuriad; Elke Koch (pp. 130–47) argues that Hans Sachs, anticipating Norbert Elias’s view of emotions, attempts to contain the urge or drive of love within his text of the Tragedia and the confines of the stage on which it is performed; the mid-fourteenth century Tristan wall-paintings in the castle of Saint-Floret (Auvergne), based on Rusticiano’s Mediadus, are shown by Amanda Luyster (pp. 148–77) to transfer aspects of the Avignon style from a religious to a secular context; in the final chapter of Part 2, Klaus Krüger (pp. 178–200) examines another kind of transfer, namely from aristocratic to bourgeois elite and from public to private in some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian frescoes, although his examples do not come from the Tristan story. The four chapters of Part 3 (“The Visual Culture of Tristan”) examine different aspects of the materiality of the Tristan texts, principally manuscripts. Martin Baisch (pp. 203–22) considers how the nature of the manuscript and its contents not only determine the way the text of Gottfried is presented but how they may even hinder its reception; Elke Brüggen and Hans-Joachim Ziegeler (pp. 223–68) look at the Riwalin-Blanscheflur story in the three illustrated manuscripts of Gottfried (Munich, Cologne, and Brussels) and argue that the very nature and format of the individual manuscripts play a large role in determining the choice of subject and nature of the illuminations; alternation between generic and text-specific scenes in the iconography of the Tristan story is seen by Stephanie Can Van D’Elden (pp. 269–98) as a means for the planners of manuscripts and other artistic media to suggest a particular reading of the text; in the final, substantial, chapter, Alison Stones (pp. 299–336) surveys the corpus of northern French illuminated manuscripts of Tristan romances (mainly the Prose Tristan), situating them in sometimes quite specific artistic, historical, and social contexts. There are short biographical sketches of the contributors (pp. 337–41), and the book closes with an index (pp. 342–55). The book is admirably documented with full notes to each chapter, and is consequently also a...