Das Fremde Schöne, Dimensionen des Ästhetischen in der Literatur des Mittelalters (review)

In the course of only seven years, Trends in Medieval Philology has become a series already distinguished by a number of seminal contributions to our field. Volume 12, Das Fremde Schöne, Dimensionen des Ästhetischen in der Literatur des Mittelalters, promises to become one of them. The subject alone has proved daunting for theologians, philosophers, and philologists alike. Although the concept of aesthetics acquired philosophical contour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, contemporary medievalists, literary historians in particular, are obligated to define "the beautiful" in terms appropriate to the period. Defining aesthetics via religion and rhetoric in regard to literary texts, especially courtly epic and lyric, is the task of this compendium of twelve insightful essays, all of high quality. Each author contributes literary analysis that collectively comprises an "Ästhetik der Alterität," an approach uniquely suited to apprehending medieval texts in accord with medieval criteria.

Referring to Gottfried von Straßburg's praise of Hartmann and not so flattering comparison with Wolfram as a provisional definition and point of departure, Manuel Braun prefaces the twelve essays by providing the reader with an extensive, thematically well-conceived introduction: "Kristallworte, Würfelworte—Probleme und Perspektiven eines Projekts 'Ästhetik mittelalterlicher Literatur.'" As a conceptual roadmap of medieval aesthetics, Braun examines works of Latin poetics that deal with the ideal of beauty. He also explores possibilities of applying modern theory to medieval works in a clarifying, nondistorting fashion. The final question that his introduction poses, namely, how prepared are modern scholars of medieval studies to pass aesthetic judgments on literary texts, underscores both the immediacy of this study and its relevance for contemporary medieval studies: "Auf welcher Basis man auch immer zu Werturteilen gelangt: Diese können mit dem Kanon abgeglichen werden, den man zwar einerseits als Sediment ästhetischer Qualitätsurteile auffassen kann, anderseits aber auch als Aufruf verstehen sollte, diese immer wieder neu zu prüfen. Ziel einer solchen Prüfung könnte es auch sein, das Verhältnis ästhetischer zu anderen Kriterien—religiösen, ethischen, politischen—neu zu reflektieren" (p. 40).

The editors aptly divide the essays into four sections, the first of which is entitled: "Sinnlich lesen, emphatisch reden: zur Bibelhermeneutik und zur Mystik." Writing on the use of sensual, practical experience in the contemplation of "beauty," Niklaus Largier argues convincingly for a consideration of medieval aesthetics as a phenomenology of rhetorical effects. By analyzing the hagiographic account of the life of Anthony as an "exemplarisches Skript," Largier demonstrates the process that heightens the aesthetic contemplation of the text through the dynamics of "alterity," be it as the "ugly," "monstrous," or simply an "Ästhetik des Schreckens." A key to understanding medieval aesthetics is, then, not modern psychology, but rather the "Applikation der Sinne," i.e., a "technique of producing sensual experience" within "a phenomenology of sensual/aesthetic possibilities of experience"—possibilities that remain endless precisely because they are never fully realizable in a dynamic process of "Figuration" and "Disfiguration" (p. 60). In the next essay in this section, Susanne Köbele examines the topic: "'Ausdruck' im Mittelalter? Zur Geschichte eines übersehenden Begriffs. Mit Überlegungen zu einer 'emphatischen Ästhetik' der Mystik." Although the term "expression/Ausdruck" is a major tenet of contemporary aesthetics, there has been a disconnect between its modern significance and its evolution from medieval mysticism. Köbele begins by tracing the historical semantics of ûztruc to reveal its underlying polarity. Burkhard Hasebrink completes section 1 with his reflections on the aesthetics of lament: "'Ich kann nicht ruhen, ich brenne.' Überlegungen zur Ästhetik der Klage im Fließenden Licht der Gottheit." Hasebrink situates the dynamic of lament in the tension arising between the beloved's distance and the evocation of his presence. Accordingly, the lament generates textual, linguistic, and sensual energy grounded in the desire to touch what is holy even though it cannot be apprehended in its totality. Hasebrink determines the result...