Increasing attention is being paid to the “non-human” in the study of medieval literature, be it through a focus on animals, the natural world or--as is the case here--material things. There is frequently (whether explicit or not) a political motivation behind this sort of work, a desire driven by the contemporary concerns of climate change and technological development to decentre the human as exclusive acting subject. In her significant and engaging new book, Bettina Bildhauer is careful not to disengage medieval scholarship from politics; rather, her work explicitly situates itself in dialogue with contemporary, politically-informed posthumanist, new materialist and transnational approaches. Her aim is to rethink a number of medieval German works through the perspective of material things in order to demonstrate the productivity of a pragmacentric (“thing”-focused) reading as well as to destabilize the subject/object binary between “human” and “thing”. Things, she suggests, can have agency without becoming anthropomorphised “subjects” or fetishes, an agency best understood with Bruno Latour and Karen Barad in terms of process or “intra-action” that affects or alters the action of another agent.
Indeed, what Bildhauer sees as perhaps the main contribution of the book is the way in which a focus on medieval literary things can change and enrich our understanding of agency more broadly–--how it can (and should) be understood not in terms of the no longer tenable Cartesian separation of subject from object, but rathermore freely in terms of trajectory, causality, and efficacy. A recapitulation of this understanding of agency, through the lens of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, is the subject of her brief conclusion. And yet, although an engagement with theories of agency situates Bildhauer’s work in a field of scholarship that extends well beyond medieval studies, I am not certain that it is the most significant or innovative outcome of a book that is full of virtues. It is in fact a remarkably wide-ranging piece of scholarship that touches on a range of diverse texts, unpicking the role and significance of material things and drawing its reader down numerous paths of interest. The reader may not agree with every conclusion reached–--I’m not sure I did, but equally I’m not sure that this matters–--but her attention is never allowed to wane; this is a pacy book that challenges and entertains in equal measure.
The book is divided into five thematic chapters, each of which is designed to function as an independent unit as well as in the context of the work as a whole. The first, and perhaps most ambitious, draws on examples from visual art (primarily manuscript illumination) and literature to uncover the medieval love of the shiny and enthusiasm for surfacist aesthetics. Shine, Bildhauer argues, is “a directional phenomenon that needs a partner to work” (36) and--whether literal or depicted in words--forces intense interaction on the part of the recipient; such interactivity then dissolves or challenges the boundaries between human recipient and shiny thing. This first chapter is more associative than later ones, drawing quite briefly on a wide range of examples (including a tantalising connection to postcolonial photography), but at its heart is an insightful reading of the shiny Oriental city of Grippia in Duke Ernst (Herzog Ernst) as well as a related episode in the Arabic story collection 101 Nights. Events in the shiny, alluring city of Grippia, at first mysteriously empty but in fact inhabited by hybrid beings with the heads of cranes, draw attention to the fragility of the boundary between human and thing, undermining hierarchies of gender and race that can only be reinstated through extreme violence.
The second chapter is, intriguingly, about a thing that appears surprisingly frequently in medieval literature, often in a metaphorical context: the net. Nets, made of holes as well as stuff and often described as invisible, stand right at the limit of the material thing. They function too as fascinating metaphors for narrative, as Bildhauer shows through a complex and sophisticated close reading of the Severus and Adelger episode in the twelfth-century Emperors’ Chronicle (Kaiserchronik). The tension between the material and the immaterial in the net correlates with the tension between the literal and metaphorical in narrative; nets trap, much like the dangerous allure of fiction; they are also “gappy”, pointing towards a “net-like model of interpretation” (87), a gappy poetics that evades interpretation.
The final three chapters are more theoretically straightforward and more tightly focused on textual analysis. Chapter 3 explores “thing biographies”, narratives of material things that bestow these things with the energy of agency; again, agency is not to be understood here as determined by intentionality, but rather as a force that makes a difference to other agents. The majority of the chapter is concerned with two primary examples, Hans Sachs’ it-narrative The Lost Talking Gulden (Von dem verlornen redenten gülden, 1553) and the “tale of wandering thing” Orendel or the Grey Robe (dating uncertain)--both, as Bildhauer convincingly demonstrates, unjustly neglected in scholarship. The comparatively brief chapter four focuses on only one work, the bizarrely grotesque, labyrinthine epic Salman and Morolf. Here Bildhauer is at her best, offering a detailed and engaging pragmacentric reading that shows how things (here mainly rings) can have more agency than the underprivileged (here the “heathen” woman Salome, the object of desire of numerous men). She draws parallels between Salome and the magic rings used to seduce her; both have little free will or agency to consent, but are not entirely passive in that they have the power to make others fall in love. The final chapter is the only to tackle truly “famous” works, the Nibelungenlied and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. Bildhauer offers a corrective to more conventional anthropocentric readings of these texts, which often struggle in the face of their contradictions or interpretative openness. Pragmacentric readings, she argues, do not “solve” these problems (and nor should they, for they are not problems to be solved). Rather, her readings of the treasure in the Nibelungenlied and the grail in Parzival offer new ways of looking at these canonical works by illuminating the things at their heart; each has a clear trajectory (i.e., a sense of past and future enabled through narrative) and is described frequently contradictory, ungraspable terms.
At times, and particularly in the earlier chapters, some of the textual analysis could be expanded really to make the interpretations sing. Some readers might wish for more specificity or nuance to some of the framing arguments or for a more detailed treatment of context, dating or transmission of individual works. Yet apart from the slightly slapdash oversimplification of the dating and place of composition of the Emperors’ Chronicle on p. 78, this fails to detract from the force of the book, which is written with an intellectual confidence rare in academic writing. This is an author who knows how to frame her arguments and their wider significance, sometimes even to the point of overstatement. But there is no doubt that she has written a book that will encourage a wider audience for a range of thrilling medieval German works that, apart from the Nibelungenlied and Parzival, fail to gain the scholarly attention they deserve in any language.
Primarily, though, this beautifully-produced new book is a pleasure and a challenge. It challenges not only conceptually and intellectually, but also (perhaps more implicitly) poses a challenge to its reader to think differently and more widely about texts and to escape the scholarly conventions that have hampered the study of medieval German literature in particular. Medieval Things deserves a place on the reading list of all students and scholars of medieval literature.