Nouveau Medieval

As the older generation of medievalists is stepping off into retirement, the middle-aged pack of scholars behind them are daring to wander back into that supposedly dark period. We are not suddenly becoming medievalists, and we certainly are not engaging in philological work but suddenly we see the delightful possibility to ride rough-shod over the period with our out-of-context pomo theories. The vacuum is just too tempting. If the Nibelungenlied is no longer drawing together graduate seminars, perhaps we more modern scholars should and could take a look at those older texts, a naïve, out of context with no real language training glance, one that says, “Hey Hartmann von Aue is pretty complex, a little like Kafka.”