Stockholmer Germanistische Forschungen 77

ACTA UNIVERSITATIS STOCKHOLMIENSIS Stockholmer Germanistische Forschungen 77 (Re-)Contextualizing Literary and Cultural History The Representation of the Past in Literary and Material Culture Edited by Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre, Beate Schirrmacher, and Claudia Egerer © The authors and Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Stockholm 2013 The publication is avaible for free on www.sub.su.se Cover photographs: The Cloisters museum and gardens, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre ISSN 0491-0893 ISBN 978-91-87235-21-4 (e-copy) ISBN 978-91-87235-22-1 Printed in Sweden by US-AB, Stockholm 2013 Distributor: Stockholm University Library, Sweden Contents Preface and Acknowledgements .................................................................. vii I Theorizing Literary and Cultural History ................................................ 11 No Contextualization without Literary Theory and Concepts: Problems, Kinds and Criteria of Contextualizing Literary History Ansgar Nünning ........................................................................................ 13 Context—Intertext: A Prerequisite of Cultural Relevance and Value Maik Bierwirth ........................................................................................... 49 II Ordering Thoughts—Making Sense of the World ................................. 63 Early Modern Dramaturgy of “Horror” Cora Dietl .................................................................................................. 65 Landscaping Literature in Early Modern England: Praxis, Gnosis and the Shifting Knowledge of Literature Angela Locatelli ........................................................................................ 81 The Legacy of Courtly Love and the Feminine Position Carin Franzén ........................................................................................... 93 Framing the Fire: Poetological Notes on Robert Walser’s Early Short Prose Mário Gomes .......................................................................................... 115 A Prohibitive Presence by Language: Never the Father, Always the Son Maria Granic-White ................................................................................ 125 th The Dawn of Latvian Poetics (1697) and its Resonance in 19 -Century Literature Māra Grudule ......................................................................................... 149 Serving the Mighty: Schemes of Social Distinction in Catechetical and th Penitential Literature for Lay People in the 15 century Cordelia Heß .......................................................................................... 169 Praising a Queen and a New Era? Gender and Rhetoric in One German- Language Panegyrical Text Written in Connection With the Coronation of Ulrika Eleonora the Younger of Sweden Nina Karlström ........................................................................................ 189 The Impact of Education on Early Modern Political Culture Erland Sellberg ....................................................................................... 207 III Communicating Things and Thoughts ............................................... 221 Traditions of Reading, Writing and Collecting: Books in the Lives of Dynastic Women in Early Modern Germany Jill Bepler ............................................................................................... 223 “The Great Minerva of the Goths” and Other Manifestations of Baroque Internationalism Peter Davidson ....................................................................................... 253 A Material Turn? The Contexts of Early Modern Material Scientific Heritage Inga Elmqvist Söderlund......................................................................... 269 th The Information State: War and Communication in Sweden during the 17 Century Anna Maria Forssberg………………………………………………………285 Piety and Propaganda: The Use of the Printing Press in Malmoe during the Early Reformation Process Sinikka Neuhaus……………………………………………………………301 Preface and Acknowledgements On the front cover of this book the observant reader gets a glimpse of the entrance of a medieval church. The back depicts a window of that same church, or does it? The reader metaphorically enters the book through the front portal of the church and exits it by looking through a stained-glass window, seeing eternal greyish-blue skies. When reading texts from the past we react like the viewers of these images. We spontaneously identify the familiar and look closer when we hesitate or even fail in decoding what we think we read or see. If we maintain a curiosity for that which has been and that which is yet to come, then we will not only ask questions but also search for new answers. The reading and rereading, writing and rewriting of literature and history become crucial pieces for the understanding of ourselves and the world. If we thus looked closely at the church entrance on the front cover and if we had the knowledge necessary in art history, architecture, theology, or photography, then we would identify the “church” as the representation of a medieval church and as a part of a museum for medieval history in northern Manhattan, New York. If we were simply able to look out through the windows of the pictures we would see the Hudson River and the New Jersey shoreline and quickly conclude that what we see is not quite what we think. The pictures are taken in The Cloisters, part of the Metropoli- tan museum, situated in Fort Tyron Park. The museum with its medieval collections was initiated by George Grey Barnard (1863–1938) and made permanent by great donations of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874–1960). Theth building was assembledth from architectural elements that date from the 12 through the 15 century and incorporates elements from five medieval cloisters in southern Europe, predominantly France. Within the walls of the museum the visitor finds European art from the ninth to the sixteenth century, some pieces—like the tapestry of the white unicorn in captivity—more fa- mous than the museum that exhibits them. A visit to The Cloisters is very much a tangible experience of the European past put into a new context, continuously recontextualized as new items are added, old ones moved, and temporary exhibits invite the frequent visitor to discover the building anew. The Cloisters can thus be seen as the embodiment of this volume, suggesting new ways of looking at sources from the past. vii This volume holds a number of contributions from a conference held at Stockholm University 2–4 September, 2010. It was a joint event held by the Department of Baltic Studies, Finnish and German in Stockholm and the European PhDnet Literary and Cultural Studies, initiated by Professor Ansgar Nünning, Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen,1 and supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The aim of the conference was to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines, not only to investigate material or literary history and culture but also to bring theoretical aspects from different fields of research into play. For the last thirty years or so there have been lively theoretical discussions about the correlation be- tween literature and history, as well as literature and culture. The “cultural turn,” “new historicism,” the “linguistic turn,” as well as other theoretical approaches and aspects have contributed to a growing interest in investigat- ing early modern literature and culture anew. The conference brought together scholars to (re-)examine the importance of historical perspectives in literary studies, as well as to scrutinize the impact of “cultural studies” on early modern scholarship. The participants engaged in many lively discussions in connection with the paper presentations, and we want to express our deepest gratitude to all of those who made the conference a success and who contributed with thought-provoking remarks that in the end were worked into the papers in this volume. A selection of revised papers was submitted to the editorial board for peer review and the reworked articles appear here. We have chosen to divide the volume into three parts, all of them first presenting articles by the keynote speakers of the conference—Jill Bepler, Peter Davidson, and Ansgar Nünning—and the representatives of the PhDnet Literary and Cultural Studies—Cora Dietl and Angela Locatelli— then the other contributions follow in alphabetical order. The first part con- sists of two articles and focuses on theoretical aspects of the writing of literary history as well as on the problems immediately arising when trying to identify text corpora, methods, and approaches. The second part includes nine contributions that investigate the desire among many authors (no matter of their choice of genre) to make sense of the world by putting thoughts and ideas into order—to sort and to categorize. Inspiration from Michel Fou- cault’s Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines from 1966 cannot be overlooked, of course, but the theoretical influences from other philosophers, literary scholars, or historians become clear in the indi- vidual contributions. The third and last part of the volume contains five articles. It is dedicated to different ways of communication and to material heritage and culture. The articles in this part clearly show the interconnected- 1 The organizing committee also included Peter Gillgren, professor of art history at Stockholm University and Mats Malm, professor

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