Name und Maere; Eigennamen als narrative Zentren mittelalterlicher Epik. Mit exemplarischen Einzeluntersuchungen zum Meleranz des Pleier, Göttweiger Trojanerkrieg und Wolfdietrich D. by Björn Reich (review)

This study is a systematic meditation on the use and meaning of proper character names (Eigennamen; here henceforth simply “names”) in late thirteenth-century medieval German vernacular narrative. It begins (Introduction and Part I) with a survey of the role of names and naming within fundamental constituents of premodern thought, rhetoric, and narrativity (etymology, topics/ecphrasis, imagination, memory). With this “theoretical foundation” in place, the author proceeds to several case studies. These are three in number (Parts II–IV), one for each—and each considered exemplary—of the three main extended vernacular narrative genres of the middle ages: Arthurian romance, romance of antiquity, and heroic epic. The conclusion (Part V) briefly draws the main arguments together and opens up further vistas onto unexplored onomastic terrain.

In the Introduction, Reich distances himself from the works of classification that have dominated modern onomastic literary scholarship. Such approaches either neglect the stories as a whole in their pursuit of typological schemes or focus too narrowly on the relationship between specific names and specific texts (pp. 17–19). Reich’s own goal is staked out both very ambitiously (“to explicate the fundamental position of proper names in the system of medieval thought and poetics,” p. 22), and then more modesty (as “prologomena” to a “comprehensive explication,” p. 23). Names are to be addressed on four distinct textual levels: generic, intratextual, intertextual, and authorial. Each level brings its own set of questions (p. 22). Meleranz of Der Pleier, for example, is beholden to conventions of Arthurian romance (generic level) but also the work of an individual poet availing himself of creative possibilities within the particular logic of the text (intratextual level). As a late thirteenth-century work, Meleranz is in dialogue with its prestigious predecessors, especially the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach (intertextual level). The other two poets Reich deals with actually identify themselves as “Wolfram von Eschenbach,” so it is also important to treat naming conventions in terms of the literary traditions ascribed to an originary poet (authorial level).

Part I seeks to develop a premodern narrative theory of names. Most of the material here is drawn from the philosophical-scientific, rhetorical, and (Latin) poetological literature of late antiquity and the Middle Ages (p. 19). Beginning in a likely spot, with the “omnipresent phenomenon” of etymology and etymologization, Reich goes deep into the discarded looking glass of premodern scientific discourse in search of a critical terminology: ecphrasis, energeia and vis verbi, imaginatio and memoria, and so forth. Two key terms here are ecphrasis and vis verbi. The former term Reich wishes to use not in its latter-day meaning, restricted to descriptions of visual phenomena within texts, but rather in its broader original sense (in antique and medieval poetics) of a passage—not necessarily even descriptive in nature—that powerfully conjures up an image before the eyes of a reader (p. 34; see also pp. 62–63). For Reich, names and ecphrasis are intimately linked: extended ecphrasis is not conceivable without the evocative power of proper names, and because of their evocative power, names in fact represent ecphrasis in its most concentrated form (p. 68). Terms like vis verbi and energeia describe this evocative power, the effects of which Reich also traces in great detail in terms of premodern visual theories.

The case studies are well done, and the reader is inclined to accept Reich’s view that the texts are more deserving of critical attention. In the case of Meleranz, Reich takes earlier critics to task for judging Der Pleier to be “epigonal” and “derivative” and sees this judgment to be wrong. Der Pleier succeeds in a “independent treatment of problematics” within the genre of Arthurian romance (p. 108) by playing with and subverting genre conventions and audience expectations (pp...