On Being a Medievalist and More
This Colloquy originated in the "After 1967" conference of 2018 in which we celebrated the work of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. It is concerned with Gumbrecht's relation to medieval literature, his original field of interest.
MoreWhile medieval literature offers many models of solitary thinking, vernacular lyric confronts the problem of solitude in a unique mode. Comparing the event of lyric dispossession with Petrarch’s idea of solitude, this essay examines solitary presence as a musicopoetic art form across various vernacular traditions, from the Occitan works of Bernart de Ventadorn, William IX, and Arnaut Daniel to lyrics of the Iberian Peninsula.
On "the inspiring resistance that the [Middle Ages] imposes on us, and the hermeneutic difficulty—maybe even the impossibility—of accessing medieval culture."
One of the main challenges of understanding medieval literature is that it is not "literature" in the modern sense: in fact the challenge is precisely to get to its existence or actuality. Medieval "literature" is strange and distant in terms of its forms and transmission. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's work on medieval literature serves as a model of what he would call "riskful thinking."
I remember vividly how exciting it was when I first heard Sepp [Gumbrecht] talk through his notion of an oscillation between presence effects and meaning effects in early lyric poems. What I’d like to offer now is a small tracing of some ways in which his thought on presence, atmosphere, and mood is reverberating in Italian medieval studies of late.