“What good man has opened me? If it be someone who can both read me and understand me, then he will do right by me…” So begins one of the most widely read – and least understood – of all the Middle High German Arthurian romances from the thirteenth century, Wirnt von Gravenberg’s Wigalois. In its first lines, the poem makes an explicit reference to a material object that is bound with the act of seeing; it is a self-reflexive reference to its own existence between the covers of a book.60 The book wishes not only to
58 Wirnt von Gravenberg. Wigalois. Der Ritter mit dem Rade. Ed. J.M.N. Kapteyn. Bonn: Fritz Klopp Verlag,
1926. v. 1-4. See also Wigalois. Ed. Ulrich and Sabine Seelbach. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005. Finally, see also Wigalois. Der Ritter mit dem Rade. Ed. Georg Friedrich Benecke. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1819.
59 Leo Lionni, Frederick. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967. 30.
60This passage does not, however, appear in all the extant Wigalois manuscripts. Manuscripts A (in Cologne)
and B (Leiden) contain the passage. The Leiden manuscript is from 1372, and is thus not the earliest example by any means, yet as far as all previous research has been able to determine, manuscript A dates from the first quarter to first half of the 13th century. This makes it one of the earliest pieces of manuscript evidence we have of the poem. Furthermore, manuscripts A and B are both exclusively devoted to Wigalois, i.e. no other works appear in the respective codices. The Benecke edition (1819) and Kapteyn (1926) both relied very heavily on A
be read, but also to be understood. But what does it mean to understand this book? An important part of the answer lies in this emphasis on materiality in the text. Seeing and
looking at material objects guides the audience through the process of reading and listening, and points the way to a deeper understanding of the story of Wigalois.
Wirnt von Gravenberg’s Wigalois is a work especially concerned with objects and surfaces and the visual processes involved in understanding material culture. Heraldic devices and emblems play a major role in directing the events of the story and also in the author’s framing of the tale. Clothing, shields, helmets, jewels, and architectural structures are all described in rich, evocative detail, and mark important transitions for the characters and the audience alike. Wirnt includes many wonderful objects in his story, pointing them out to the audience, describing their splendor and magnificence, their colors and shapes and wondrous properties, and holding them up for the audience to behold as one would admire the sparkling facets of a rare jewel. These highly visual descriptions of material objects are examples of the rhetorical device of ekphrasis, usually defined as the verbal representation of a visual representation.61 The use of ekphrasis is very common in medieval German Arthurian romance, yet in no other work of this genre is ekphrasis so pronounced as it is in
Wigalois.62 Ekphrastic descriptions mark the introductions of new characters into the story, indicate thematic changes in the narrative, show the audience and the characters alike that a new challenge awaits the hero, and point to the successful completion of adventures. Ekphrasis in fact permeates the poem from beginning to end, to the extent that it becomes
and B because, as Kapteyn writes, they are “the most complete” of all the manuscripts. The oldest known
Wigalois manuscript is, unfortunately, only a fragment (Fragment E), thus making it impossible to determine with absolute certainty whether it contained the prologue.
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Wirnt’s primary mode of presenting his ideas to his reading and listening audience. We shall see in later chapters, moreover, that ekphrasis provides important clues about how thirteenth- century audiences received and interpreted Wigalois.
Despite the crucial role that ekphrasis plays in Wigalois, contemporary scholarship has ignored the poem’s highly visual and material aspects, and has paid scant attention to the importance of seeing in Wirnt’s only known work. I assert that it is precisely the ekphrastic moments that contributed to the text’s tremendous popularity from the thirteenth century on. It is my goal in the present chapter to examine the function of ekphrasis in Wigalois. I argue that Wirnt uses ekphrasis in three distinct but complementary ways. First, he uses ekphrasis as a structuring device, with which he demarcates important transitions in the narrative, builds thematic bridges within different sections of the narrative, develops thematic and narrative tension, and creates a crescendo of increasingly vivid and detailed spectacle as the story runs its course. We might also describe this effect as one of ever increasing rhetorical amplification. For example, this crescendo or amplificatory effect becomes ever more apparent as a number of shorter ekphrastic passages are clustered around a longer and structurally significant passage; these increase in number and detail as the story progresses. Second, ekphrasis is an integrative device, with which Wirnt seeks to harmonize what contemporary clerical critics considered conflicting sets of ideas, for example the ideals of a moral Christian life versus the potentially dangerous fantasy world of the Arthurian knight. Finally, Wirnt uses ekphrasis as a means of courtly self-representation, a kind of mirror in which the members of the aristocracy find their own ideals and practices reflected.
The number of ekphrastic descriptions in Wigalois is so great that a thorough investigation of each of them is beyond the scope of this dissertation. Yet there are five
ekphrases that, in their combination of theme and form, serve both as paradigmatic and as unique examples of the three main functions I have just named. In the order in which they appear, they are descriptions of a magic belt (v. 321-342), an enchanted stone of virtue (v. 1477-1529), a golden wheel of fortune, which later becomes the hero Gwigalois’s heraldic device (v. 1823-1837; 1860-1869), a magnificent tomb built for the heathen queen Japhite (v. 8228-8324), and finally, a castle-like tent atop Queen Larie’s war elephant (v. 10,342- 10,408). These examples are paradigmatically ekphrastic because, like the numerous other ekphrases in Wigalois, they slow the pace of the narrative and require the (courtly) audience to reflect carefully not only on the physical properties of an object, but also on what the description of this object might mean for the rest of the story, and even for themselves as members of the aristocracy. They are also unique, however, because of the degree to which they perform these retarding and memorial functions, and because of their strategic placement at crucial junctures in the narrative.
I have chosen to focus on these five objects and ekphrases in Wigalois because they are important examples of how ekphrasis functions within the work: as a vehicle for structuring the poem, for integrating potentially conflicting sets of ideas, and for constructing courtly identity. In Wigalois, ekphrastic descriptions influence how the audience responds to the text. The descriptions provide listeners and readers with landmarks throughout the poem in the form of graphic verbal pictures that help them to visualize the work’s most important ideas and transitions in the mind’s eye. Evoking highly pictorial images in the mind’s eye of the audience in order to signal thematic and narrative transitions is a rhetorical strategy that dates back to ancient Greece, and as Mary Carruthers has shown, was also a common
rhetorical and educational practice in European monastic culture during the Middle Ages.63 Carruthers argues that such rhetorical images were placed “at the beginning of a work (or of a major division or change of subject within a long work)…because a reader can hold the picture in mind as a way of recognizing the major themes of what follows.”64 In this chapter, I argue that Wirnt’s use of ekphrasis serves this same function. Because Wigalois so frequently includes detailed, vivid descriptions of material objects, and because these descriptions repeatedly force the audience to imagine what these objects look like and how they relate to the events of the narrative, I assert that Wigalois relies as much on envisioning images as it does on reading the written word.