Spiel der Liebe im Minnesang by Beate Kellner (review)

An attempt to develop a historically and generically sound, systematic, and integrated lyric theory of Minnesang, Beate Kellner’s sprawling, comprehensive study of the medieval German lyric beholds its object syntactically and semantically as “Kunst im Spannungsfeld von Wiederholung und Variation” (65). At times challenging trends in recent decades of research and at others developing syntheses, such as an application of formalist and structuralist approaches alongside narratological and other advances, the volume seeks to fill a longstanding theoretical lacuna in this branch of germanistische Mediävistik, where a multiplicity of approaches and applications more often than not supplant systematic efforts to synthesize. That the latter often also run up against generic or typological anachronisms and misapprehensions of the primary texts does not escape the author’s careful reading of the vast literature on Minnesang. The claim on the back cover—namely that “[b]is heute finden wir oft ein zu eindimensionales Verständnis von Minnesang”—is likewise found in the introduction; this is self-confirming given the paucity of recent scholarship in the bibliography, where publications after the year 2010 are surprisingly thin (from hundreds of citations the present reviewer counts only 36 in total, 32 excluding works by the author) for a theoretical work that challenges the status quo. Another minor quibble is the seemingly arbitrary decision to place the color figures at the beginning of the volume. Overall, despite these and a few other small objections, Spiel der Liebe succeeds in its aim, contributing a developing framework for future research and a breath of fresh air among many narrowly-focused recastings of old interpretations.

In the introduction, an overview of Minnesang scholarship with a theoretical bent ranges from humanism through romanticism to recent decades of narratological and cognitive psychological approaches, covering topics such as edition-historical missteps, the reception history of the lyric, debates on orality and literacy, performance and performativity, text-internal and -external dichotomies and other aspects of communicative/discursive approaches, and referential multimediality. Analytically impressive and succinctly presented given its breadth, the first section gives way to the beginnings of a theoretical position, namely that comprehending Variationskunst in its various semantic and syntactic dimensions is the core interpretive task of a theory of Minnesang. After narratological and drama-theoretical approaches expanded to include epic and older lyrical genres, several semantic categories have dominated studies of the medieval German lyric, among them strategies and forms of courtly communication, from studies of deixis to dyadic/triadic forms; social organization, from the problematic feudal imaginary to legal, ritual, and other contexts; and religious analogies, from misguided identifications of secularization processes to Rainer Warning’s concept of “konnotative Ausbeutung” (39), whereby the religious domain is semantically recoded for other purposes without falling into false dichotomies.

The preoccupations of modern theoretical approaches to the lyric have had an enormous influence on the contours of generations of research on the genre, including concepts of subjectivity, fictionality, and coherence, as well as definitional criteria and models. Particularly the latter section of the introduction offers an excellent and comprehensive outline of the literature from minimalistic programs to prototype theories in cognitive psychology, showing how the broad spectrum of definitions often fail their ontological task. In this section Kellner notes that the narratological turn has ignored formalism and structuralism, which she takes up, not uncritically, in Jakobsonian and other forms, likewise turning to the Deleuzian concept of hidden repetition as a source of coherence where one may otherwise find little: “[d]em Mangel an syntagmatischer Kohärenz steht hier ein Maximum an paradigmatischer Kohärenz gegenüber” (64). Throughout the studies in this book, novel ways of defining and contrasting generic boundaries demonstrate the need for more radical reassessments of the corpus.

The subsequent studies that form the bulk of the volume behold common themes in Minnesang research both through the lenses suggested by Kellner in the introduction and as a means of probing their boundaries: first, the projection of idealized femininity (Kapitel 2), second, lyrical interiority (Kapitel...