Michael Curschmann, Wort – Bild – Text. Studien zur Medialität des Literarischen in Hochmittelalter und früher Neuzeit

• Jeffrey Hamburger

Perhaps the most arresting programmatic statement of method – one of many – in this collection of Michael Curschmann’s remarkable studies on the place of the image and, more generally, the visual in the process of vernacularization in medieval German culture of the High and later Middle Ages comes at the very end of an essay, “Imagined Exegesis”, first published in 1990: “The dynamics of the medieval book – that is what we should study.” By dynamics, Curschmann means an emphasis on function and on what he elsewhere (p. 261) calls an “audiovisual poetic”: “how”, in his words, “irrespective of their own stylistic, iconographic, or intellectual traditions, texts and pictures work together in given instances to produce something larger than the sum of its parts.” “The most common mistake”, Curschmann adds, “is to define and interprete such relationships in terms of content – as though one medium were supposed to translate from the other.” What we have here is not quite the same as the emphasis on the medium-specific aspects of representation and communication which is so much the rage in current German scholarship, but in some ways something more interesting, namely, the study of a set or constellation of historically defined relationships in which no single term remains constant.

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