Conclusion

Summary

This study began by addressing the problem most frequently posed about Wigalois, namely, why should a text often understood in the modern era as one on the face of it deriving its substance from the same style, conventional machinery and range of motifs as the romances of Wolfram von Eschenbach, Hartmann von Aue and other ‘classical’ writers have held such a great appeal for medieval audiences. In analysing this issue I concluded that the question was in part misconceived. The method of collecting verbal or motif correspondences as proof of later poets’ dependence on their predecessors (as practised by an earlier, yet influential group of scholars) had, I noted, already been disputed (most trenchantly by Wolfgang Mitgau). For the Middle High German Dichtersprache was the common resource of the majority of poets using rhyming couplets (just as Biblical tags were often used unconsciously by Goethe and Schiller as it served their turn). No individual medieval poet owned the ‘copyright’ of this common stock of expressions. Furthermore, in all the major medieval genres, lyric, heroic and romance, examples were provided of later authors’ challenging their predecessors’ ‘ownership’ of particular themes, this adversarial modus operandi revealing itself to have been one particularly characteristic of Wirnt himself.

The phenomenon of the ‘literary feud’ is well enough known in the lyric genre where Walther von der Vogelweide contested notions of chaste adoration (‘Hohe Minne’) common in the poetic traditions of his predecessors. However, by drawing attention to a large volume of further evidence in heroic and romance forms (where later poets were likewise observed to be ‘entering the lists’ with poetic predecessors), I myself sought to contest the rise and fall school of medieval literary historiography (according to which later, ‘epigonal’ writers are held to have represented the lamentable fall from high to low of a once productive literary tradition). My own readings suggest, on the contrary, that the phenomenon of later writers’ criticising the terms of their predecessors’ compositions (and offering creative rewrites of them) was as least as common a phenomenon as mere poetic imitation.

This finding in turn suggests the possibility that the ‘squire’ invoked by Wirnt as his source did not correspond to one, historical person but was rather invoked as a means of disarming any possible criticisms of a narrative which coheres so little either with the matter or the sense of the Fair Unknown/Perceval traditions.