The Medieval Risk-Reward Society: Courts, Adventure, and Love in the European Middle Ages by Will Hasty (review)

Predicating his new monograph on the notion that all cultural history is a form of game, or rather action, Will Hasty proposes to read some of the hallmarks of medieval German—but also Anglo-Norman and Old French—literature in light of a global transformation we today are the heirs of. Action implies individualism, a purposeful approach to one’s life, driven no longer by elusive divine forces, but by personal initiative. Hasty recognizes that a so-called “risk-reward society” emerged already in the twelfth century and flowered throughout the following centuries. “Risk” here implies that social life is constantly negotiated, with common fights over limited resources, hence the need for the individual to struggle hard to achieve the highest possible position in human existence. Where and how did this approach develop, if it ever did in new ways? In contrast to antiquity or biblical times, as Hasty argues, the high Middle Ages represent the decisive watershed when the new individual came forward and made his/her voice heard. This goes along with many other critical examinations of the so-called “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century” (Charles Homer Haskins, 1927; most recently Susan Wise Bauer, 2013), though Hasty is not engaging with this strand of the historical discourse, and actually leaves out any reference to it, maybe because he is bent on highlighting the new notions of risk-taking and personal investment, bankrolling, poetic action, performance, adventure, and cultural wager.

In seven chapters Hasty takes us from an examination of ancient perspectives toward the individual vis-à-vis the gods, such as in Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, the New Testament, and Augustine’s City of God, to the high Middle Ages, focusing on Marie de France (“Lanval”), Chrétien de Troyes (Erec et Enide), Hartmann von Aue (Erec), Wolfram von Eschenbach (Parzival), and Gottfried von Straßburg (Tristan). From there he looks into the world of the Protestant Reformation and even of the Enlightenment (Leibniz), ending with reflections on twentieth-century perspectives on totalitarianism and the loss of the individual once again (Hannah Arendt).

While Augustine’s City of God still set the divine rules as the crucial parameters of all human actions, the courtly heroes (Parzival and Tristan, amongst many others) “bankroll” (Hasty’s term) their own lives and free themselves from a predetermined, predestined concept. Of course, one could counter this by emphasizing how much the experience of love and the quest for the Grail undermine this bankrolling in turn, especially because the heroes are not really free in pursuing their lives’ goals, as illustrated, for example, by the ominous love potion and the highly elusive Grail itself. Nevertheless, Hasty also draws from chronicle accounts and identifies significant historical references to political actions by princes and emperors who “actively perform courtly culture in representational events” (61). Moreover, there would not be any denial that, indeed, courtly protagonists began to operate much more freely and on their own than their predecessors. On the contemporary political stage a massive war was waged pitting the German emperors against the popes (Investiture Controversy), and famous poets such as Walther von der Vogelweide were heavily involved in that conflict, as Hasty points out through a careful reading of some of his best-known gnomic verses.

In courtly fiction, this effort to achieve personal status and to liberate oneself from the social constraints of earlier times perhaps finds its best expression in tournaments, which Hasty discusses at greater length, but he also points us to Marie de France’s “Lanval,” where the young protagonist faces serious problems at King Arthur’s court and is finally rescued only because his fairy mistress arrives at the last minute and redeems him against the queen’s accusations. But Lanval then jumps on her horse and disappears to Avalon. I wonder whether Lanval is really an active, risktaking knight...