![]() ![]() However, as far as analysis and argument are concerned, the book is actually in three parts following Starkey's tri-fold focus on the three layers of plot and characters, narrative frame, and the manuscript format which encompasses both the specific text and illustrations in the Munich-Nuremberg manuscript. Part two analyzes the interpretative program of the images. Part one lays out a close reading of the text itself revealing in detail Wolfram's thematization of communication and media. Her thesis then, is that the manuscript "deals explicitly with the transition between orality and writing, demonstrating as it does the innovative development of a consistent hybrid language in which word and image maintain a symbiotic relationship" (13). Her great contribution is to find reproduced in pictorial representations those images conjured up by the text. This sensory language she then compares with the illuminations to discover the programmatic parallels in text and image. Pointing out that both image and text need to be "read," Starkey more than anyone else has looked at the sensory language of Wolfram's text that enabled audiences to create their own mental images of scenes and of topics the characters talk about. Starkey examines the reception of Wolfram's Willehalm in a multimedia format or, as she puts it, in a hybrid medium. Starkey has packed a great deal into this book: the new subjectivity of the narrator, the relationship of text and image, and most importantly, extensive deliberations on the impact of writing on aural reception that allowed audiences to shift away from performance to reading reception. Extremely well researched, the book reflects the author's broad knowledge of medieval literary and pictorial conventions in both religious and secular manuscripts. Now Willehalm may not be at the top of everyone's reading list, but this study tells us why it should be: it offers important lessons in the production and reception of manuscripts, and a historical approach to the way medieval artists and readers created meaning via artistic forms. This thirteenth century Munich-Nuremberg manuscript dates from a period when "listening" and "reading" implied a variety of concepts and practices. Kathryn Starkey has given medievalists a fascinating and multi-disciplinary investigation into the dynamic process of artistic production and literary reception by examining a uniquely illuminated manuscript fragment of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Willehalm.
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