German Studies Lecture Series - Homeless and Lovesick: Loss in Tristan-Romances of the 12th and 13th Centuries by Monika Schausten (University of Cologne)

Please join the German Studies Lecture Series talk entitled, Homeless and Lovesick: Loss in Tristan-Romances of the 12th and 13th Centuries by Professor Monika Schausten (University of Cologne).

Abstract
Research has long explained the enduring fascination with the medieval Tristan romances by referring to their depictions of passionate love. Notably, Gottfried of Straßburg's Middle High German version from the beginning of the 13th century is renowned for its depiction of the illicit love affair between Tristan and Isolde, with the latter being the wife of Tristan’s uncle, King Marke of Cornwall. In particular, Richard Wagner's 19th-century adaptation of the plot for his famous musical drama Tristan und Isolde has shaped the modern perception of his medieval sources by removing nearly all of the story's socially significant elements. In Wagner's version, the protagonists' passionate love appears as a means of escaping societal constraints. However, research on the medieval Tristan stories has long emphasized the importance of the narratives with regard to the friction that passionate love entails for the social order of the imagined nobility. Nevertheless, the question of how the texts relate the love story to their negotiations of political topics remains. Against this backdrop, the lecture offers an interpretative reading of the romances, focusing on the ways in which they interweave discourses of love with discourses on the prerequisites of power claims, as defined by premodernconcepts of noble identity. It explores medieval notions of 'Heimat' (homeland) and belonging as they are negotiated in French and German Tristan romances of the 12th and 13th centuries. Drawing on the recent work of the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz, who identified loss as a defining feature of modernity, the lecture examines strategies for coping with loss as depicted in premodern romances by authors such as Eilhart of Oberg, Gottfried of Strassburg, and Thomas of Britain. Using episodes from these texts as examples, the talk illustrates how the romances depict the dynamics of loss and their personal and societal impacts. The focus will be on the connection that the texts reveal between the loss of a homeland and the loss of love. The historically specific manifestations and encodings of losses, as well as the imagined practices ofcompensating, substituting, and restituting losses, will be discussed. The analysis will demonstrate how literary representations of the losses of homeland and love reveal the preconditions for aristocratic claims to power.

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The German Studies Lecture Series is hosted by the Department of German Studies, Stanford University.