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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Imagining Iberia in Medieval German literature Zerka, Doriane Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 Imagining Iberia in Medieval German Literature Doriane Zerka King’s College London This thesis is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. May 2019 Abstract Medieval Iberia, through its complex history intertwining Islam, Christianity and Judaism in a dialectic between Reconquista and convivencia, has been appropriated by writers and scholars as a figure of thought that throws into relief the inherent intricacy of social forms and their construction. At once a barrier and a gateway between Europe, Africa and Asia, medieval Iberia presents a geographical and ideological challenge to post-medieval notions of “East,” “West,” “nationhood” and “Europe”. This study analyses depictions of Iberia in medieval German literature, examining the ideological implications of real and fictional travels to the Peninsula for the construction of individual and collective identities, religious, cultural and political. I consider Iberia as a Foucauldian heterotopia, an imaginative space that stages a host of ideological problems and sheds light on the contingency of identities. Following recent trends in using network theory throws into relief the “Europeanization of Europe” as defined by Robert Bartlett, from a literary perspective. A network approach sheds light on the ongoing processes through which any cultural entity characterised as “European” is constantly renegotiated, rather than defined in a fixed form. Chapter one considers two German adaptations of the Roland story: the twelfth- century Rolandslied and Der Stricker’s Karl der Große from the thirteenth-century. The Songs of Roland project a homogeneous Frankish identity embodied by Charlemagne on the Iberian space, that is challenged and asserted by the heterogeneity of a Muslim enemy that involves all part of the known world. Chapter two looks at the fifteenth-century prose epic Herzog Herpin, in which the city of Toledo forms intra- and extra-textual connections. In the narrative, Toledo reconnects characters that had been separated and allows the resolution of the initial conflict. Yet to the audience Toledo triggers a multilingual “European” cultural memory through references to multilingual traditions. Chapter three analyses the construction of a poetic identity by Oswald von Wolkenstein (1376–1445) in four songs dealing with his journey to Iberia. Oswald makes use of Iberia as a plural space, between familiarity and estrangement, which becomes a stage upon which Oswald plays with innovation and conventions, to perform a plural poetic identity. Finally, chapter four investigates the travelogue Reisen nach der Ritterschaft by Georg von Ehingen (1428–1508), in which Georg defines his knightly identity and mediates his depiction of the Peninsula through crusading motifs inherited from literary discourses that do not conform to Iberian historical accounts. The transmission of the text by Georg’s descendants, in turn, places the Peninsula at the heart of a family myth of origin. Finally, my conclusion briefly surveys the role of Iberia in post-medieval examples, to shed light on the ongoing use of the Peninsula as an ideologically loaded space on which to think through identities. 2 Throughout the thesis, all translations are my own unless otherwise stated. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... 5 Introduction: Imagining Iberia’s Alterity in the European Cultural Network ........................ 6 1. Why Iberia? Iberia as Heterotopia ..................................................................................... 11 2. Why Postcolonialism? Iberia as “Other” ............................................................................ 20 3. Why German(y)? Challenging National Paradigms ............................................................ 26 4. Why Europe? Culture as Network ...................................................................................... 31 1. Songs of Roland and the Construction of Frankish Identity ........................................... 39 1.1. Iberian Space(s) and Muslim Heterogeneity ................................................................... 52 1.2. The Christian/Heathen Binary ......................................................................................... 57 1.3. Symbolic Bodies .............................................................................................................. 66 1.3.a. Embodying Frankish Homogeneity .......................................................................... 66 1.3.b. Female Bodies as Sites of Negotiation ..................................................................... 80 2. Herzog Herpin, Toledo and the European Cultural Network .......................................... 87 2.1. “Inter-traditional” References and Cultural Memory ..................................................... 95 2.2. Transgressing Boundaries in Toledo ............................................................................. 109 2.3. Networks as Narrative Patterns .................................................................................... 115 2.3.a. The Family as Network ........................................................................................... 115 2.3.b. The Mediterranean Network ........................................................................... 119 2.3.c. Mediterranean Places as Narrative Nodes ............................................................. 124 3. Constructing Poetic Identity in Oswald von Wolkenstein’s Songs ................................. 130 3.1. Iberia between Autobiographical Truth, Poetic Fiction, Familiarity, and Estrangement ............................................................................................................................................. 137 3.2. Oswald, Self-Fashioning, and the Ideal Courtier-Poet .................................................. 146 3.3. Oswald’s Performances and their Spatial Context........................................................ 151 4. Knighthood as Family Narrative: Georg von Ehingen’s Reisen nach der Ritterschaft ...... 160 4.1. Iberia in the Travelogue: A Narratological Perspective ................................................ 166 4.2. “Literarisation” of the Relations Between Castile and Granada ................................... 178 4.3. The Manuscripts: Family Book or Founding Story for Southern German Nobility? ..... 189 5. Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 212 Abbreviations ................................................................................................................ 226 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 227 4 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my supervisors, Sarah Bowden and Julian Weiss for their criticism, patience, advice and insightful comments. Without them, this thesis simply would not exist. I have very much enjoyed working with them both and I am grateful for all their help and support, for the confidence they helped me gain and for the cups of tea and the glasses of wine we shared. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all staff members in the German and Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies departments at King’s, especially Rachel Scott for her friendly advice and Ben Schofield and Catherine Smale for all their help with teaching and their continuous support. I’d like to thank the Modern Languages office team for all their work (and Steph Mannion for the homemade treats). I was lucky to spend a semester in Berlin and to present my research to the Doktorand*innenkolloquium of Andreas Kraß’s Lehrstuhl für ältere deutsche Literatur during that time. I am grateful to Christina Ostermann, Andreas Kraß and Lea Braun for their questions and feedback on that occasion. I am also grateful to the Graduate School at King’s College London, who funded a research trip to Stuttgart and Innsbruck