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Encyclopedic Narration. Poetics of Knowledge in the Vernacular Novel of Late Medieval and Early Modern Period (14th to 16th Century)

Subject Area German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
Term from 2017 to 2023
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 329389881
 
Final Report Year 2022

Final Report Abstract

The project investigated forms and functions of encyclopedic narration in vernacular novels between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period investigating paradigmatic texts from the 14th to 16th centuries. Encyclopedic narration was defined as an adaptation and transformation of knowledge with epistemic validity into narrative contexts. The project investigated contents and structural principles that could be used to systematically describe the selection and segmentation (decontextualization) of knowledge and its narrative recontextualization. Furthermore, the project also inquired into narratological strategies and poetological concepts. The period under investigation was characterized which a striking change in epistemology and a media revolution ('knowledge explosion', humanism, the prose novel, and book printing). A total of seven individual studies as well as a systematic summary, including numerous comparative texts, show on the one hand results that are founded in previous research – encyclopedic narrating reflects fluctuating knowledge orders, for example the crisis of the Artes and a new humanistic concept of education, phenomena of hybridization and (re-) historizing of narrative fiction. On the other hand, significant new insights were offered, for example, on the relevance of the pragmatization and economic harnessing of knowledge in vernacular novels. In the investigation of structural dispositional patterns, narrative integration in episodic novels proved to be the most flexible; narrative macrostructures of the type 'biography', 'curriculum', and 'journey', partially also the special case 'war', proved to be particularly receptive. On a microstructural level, a surprisingly broad set of instruments of narrative integration could be unveiled: lists, catalogs, digressions, debates, and instructional dialogues up to metadiegetic dimensions form a comprehensive reservoir. Narratological strategies can be seen in an increasing shift of knowledge content and discourse. Poetological strategies of self-stylization of a 'poeta doctus' or 'poeta colligens' thus do not recede into the background; rather, narrator and character speech each provide for differently functionalized and distributed knowledge. One of the primary achievements of the project consists in the elaboration of the discursive inventories that can be observed over the 'macro-epochal' period. In most cases, it is not only a matter of affirmative knowledge transfer: knowledge criticism, panegyric, even parody or satire are often involved in varying densities and objectives. The overall result of the project is that encyclopedic narrative novels are specific cases within the genre. They do not form a (sub-)genre of their own. But they do provide a testing ground from whose reservoir of forms and functions later representatives of encyclopedic narration could draw. The results will be published in a final volume of the project.

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