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

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Mathias Herweg
• Subject Area: German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
• Term: from 2017 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 329389881

Drawing on a series of paradigmatic texts from the 14th to 16th centuries, this research project examines the forms and functions of encyclopedic narration in the vernacular novel between the late medieval and the early modern period as well as their poetological aspects. We conceptualize encyclopedic narration in general as a literary style of writing that integrates encyclopedic knowledge into narrative, while at the same time adapting and transforming the interpretative models and schemes of the encyclopedic knowledge of the time. Subsequently, encyclopedic narration is understood as a heuristic concept that defines aspects of content as well as principles of narrative structure in literary texts. To the extent that encyclopedic writing adapts encyclopedic practices and models as literary patterns, it differs from narratives that represent knowledge more generally.Its extensive form predisposes the vernacular novel to encompass various discourses and a variety of interdisciplinary knowledge between the Late Middle Ages and the early modern period. Therefore, the focus of the project is on the question of implicit poetics of encyclopedic narration, and how it shapes the vernacular novel. Our hypothesis is this: the vernacular novel, by way of literary adaptation and the transformation of encyclopedic contents and structures, that is, by way of de-contextualizing as well as re-contextualizing contemporary discourses of knowledge, emerges as a poetic vehicle and mediator of universal knowledge. In the process of literary narration, the vernacular novel claims to establish the precarious unity of this knowledge in new and different ways. Re-contextualizing encyclopedic knowledge thus goes hand in hand with re-configuring this very same knowledge in terms of form as well as content. Thus, the novel establishes itself as a literary genre that is able to critically reflect, question, and even parody encyclopedic knowledge.Our project adds to already existing research on the relation between literature and discourses of encyclopedic knowledge by introducing a hitherto neglected historical approach that focuses on the macro-period between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, taking the novel as exemplary genre. By investigating the connection between configurations of knowledge and narrative structures in the premodern novel as well as the ensuing processes of transformation (e.g., defictionalization of literary worldmaking), this project contributes to the shaping of a historical poetics of knowledge in premodern vernacular literature.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants