- The Medieval Risk-Reward Society: Courts, Adventure, and Love in the European Middle Ages by Will Hasty
The subject matter of this book is the German and French poetry of the Middle Ages viewed against the background of Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, the Bible, and the writings of St. Augustine. Will Hasty calls this approach global, and the word global occurs multiple times in the text (including one subtitle: The Global as Individual, Chapter 7). Compare the following passage:
In making their global move for ascendancy by arguing for the contiguous alignment of spiritual-intellectual and physical-material cultural resources, with the former above the latter, these pages strengthen the tendency to assess cultural resources as universally integrated or articulated. As a consequence, potentially, the global play made for worldly resources by representatives of the spiritual ones (on the basis of the supposed superiority of the latter) might be reiterated, varied, and employed for different purposes.
(p. 78)
Those few lines give a fairly good idea of the author's style and, among other things, his penchant for italics. Emphasis turns up with great regularity throughout the book, sometimes when one does not expect it (because no juxtaposition is implied) on such words as paramilitary, real, truth, continues, finished, potential, already, not, and so forth. It is as though Hasty fears that the inattentive readers will miss the most important part of his reasoning.
As regards global, Hasty probably means two things: that he has cast his net widely and that his book is a study in comparative literature. But apparently, he also wanted his vocabulary and reasoning to come as close as possible to those of today's political discourse. His entire usage serves this aim. We read about Parzival's banking (italicized) on the value of love (p. 155), the love as cultural wager (the title of Chapter 6), the Pauline-Augustinian self that "invests itself completely in another mortal self" (p. 161), "the absolute investment of self" (p. 185), and that "[t]he new joyful standard of courtliness achieved by Tristan for Cornwall with his performances, along with the affection and generosity of King Marke that these performances earn him, are the first big payoff for the painful effort he previously invested in his studies" (p. 192). Invest is one of the key words in the book. Phrases like "European courts stay bullish on love" (p. 204), and "culturally bullish princes" (p. 206) make the picture complete (bearish, naturally, turns up too).
The central idea of the book—that medieval romances turn around "risk and reward"—will not strike the reader as novel. Equally noncontroversial is the role of the metaphor "life is a tournament." Finally, those great works are about love, which turns out to be a multifaceted concept. Hasty is at his best when he offers a close reading of Hartmann, Gottfried, Wolfram, Chretien de Troyes, and Marie de France. Nowadays, not all students of Middle High German literature feel comfortable in Old French, and the same holds for Romance scholars who more and more often read Hartmann and his contemporaries in translation. By [End Page 129] contrast, Hasty ranges freely over both fields. The scope of the book is great: from St. Augustine to Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court).
Below are a few subtitles from Chapter Three to Chapter Six: "Courtly Representation as Aristocratic Competition Investitures: A Diachronic View of the Political Action," "Benchmarks of Performance," "… The Place of Poetry at Court," "The Vernacular as Poetic Resource," "Dynamics of Adventure," and "Dynamics of Love." Pages. 245–53 are the bibliography, one third of which is devoted to primary sources.