A Courtier’s Mirror: Cultivating Elite Identity in Thomasin von Zerclaere’s ‘Welscher Gast’ by Kathryn Starkey (review)

Kathryn Starkey’s new book brings to light the Middle German Welscher Gast, an epic-length, didactic poem written in 1215 by the cleric Thomasin von Zerclaere. The text is not well known among German medievalists, and even less well known among English scholars, making Starkey’s fascinating and detailed analysis of this rich poem very satisfying. Besides being one of the first German vernacular didactic texts composed for a lay audience, the Welscher Gast is also the first extant vernacular German poem compiled with illustrations in mind from the start. It is the visual aspects – images and formatting – that Starkey uses to further her argument that the 1340 redaction (Gotha Memb. I 120) was illustrated with a burgeoning aristocratic identity in mind.

Given that only minor alterations were made to the text between the 1215 original and the Gotha redaction 125 years later, Starkey argues that the images reveal the manuscript patron’s interest in ‘constructing and affirming a particularly courtly identity’ (p. 118), reflective of the gender and status ideals of mid-fourteenth-century Germany. She argues that both the manner in which the images have been interpreted, and the way in which the text has been interpreted through the images, have changed, taking this as evidence of how social norms and social identity among the late medieval German elite also changed. The images of the Gotha manuscript are clearly aimed at an aristocratic audience: the figures are identifiable as courtiers by their dress, and the characters are depicted as being engaged in courtly activities within court settings.

To further the argument that the poem was meant for an aristocratic audience trying to invent itself, Starkey shows how the Gotha redaction was formatted with that reference in mind. The unknown mid-fourteenth-century redactor made it easier to search out information by adding a prose foreword (again a first in German vernacular, didactic poetry) that describes the ‘poem’s organization, its subdivisions, and the topics that it addresses’ (p. 20). It also includes an ‘indexing apparatus’ (p. 20) which allows the reader quickly to locate both specific topics or sections within the text. Upon comparing the two oldest complete manuscript redactions (Heidelberg Cpg 389, 1256 and Gotha Memb. I 120, 1340), the differences in formatting become evident: the 1340 redaction consists of two columns of text instead of one, and it is twice as large (Starkey notes that codex size was one aspect of showing status, lending credence to her argument). The Gotha manuscript’s prose foreword functions as a contents page which, along with its more explicit indexing system consisting of visually encoded ‘chapters’, allows for more engaged and active reading.

Starkey has divided the book into two sections, with the first consisting of a comprehensive Introduction and five chapters. The first chapter addresses the complex issue of readership and how the manner in which the manuscript was meant to be approached dictated not only the literary aspect, but also the visual. Starkey’s argument that the Gotha’s revised way of presenting the poem is indicative of a more active and self-aware audience is persuasive.

In the second chapter, Starkey explores the ways in which the Gotha manuscript’s illustrator deviated from the text. For example, she shows that there are more frequent discrepancies between the grammatical gender and the gender of the characters in the Gotha illustrations than in the other manuscripts, indicating that grammatical gender was less important than the gender of the characters.

The third chapter concerns itself with gender and stereotypes within the courtly motif. Starkey’s analysis shows how implicitly intertwined gender is in the images and how closely this relates to the formation of an elite identity. This theme follows on to the fourth chapter, which deals with what Starkey terms ‘elite self-fashioning...