Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Von Chronik zum Weltbuch: Sinn und Anspruch sudwestdeutscher Hauschroniken am Ausgang des Mittelalters

2003; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

1756-1183

Gerhild Scholz Williams,

Medieval European History and Architecture

Wolf, Gerhard. Von Chronik zum Weltbuch: Sinn und Anspruch sudwestdeutscher Hauschroniken am Ausgang des Mittelalters. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002.417 pp. Historians and literary scholars have traditionally kept their distance from historiographical texts of the Middle Ages. However, when, in the seventies and eighties, the new historicism began to show interest in the literariness of histories, and literary texts were reviewed for their socio-historical coordinates, medieval (chronicle) literature began to attract the attention of a new kind of investigator. Employing the analytical methods of the eighties and early nineties, and influenced as much by Foucault as Hayden White, Gerhard Wolf stud-ied several late medieval dynastic chronicles. He investigates the construction of genealogical myths that bestow meaning and transcendence, without which chronicle writing cannot accomplish its goal of conveying familial immortality. In spite of the by now somewhat retrograde methodology (Wolf's Habilitation, that provided the basis for this book, was completed in 1991/92), the reader finds that, as soon as Wolf turns to his texts, he is in full control of his project. For his study, he chose four chronicles, the Truchsessenchronik, Sebastian Kung's Chronik der Grafen und Herzoge von Wurttemberg, and the Zollernchronik. However, by far the most detailed analysis is devoted to the star of the book and thus the center of Wolf s attention, the Zimmersche Chronik to which he devotes 300 of the book's 455 pages. Wolf goes about his study methodically, carefully, and with profound knowledge of the sources. This reviewer found the interminably fractured chapter divisions that remain the hallmark of some German scholarly writing somewhat distracting. But this editorial weakness (including a few grammar, spelling, and sentence structure mistakes) notwithstanding, the patient reader is rewarded by a fresh look at texts that often remain at the margins of our reading lists. On the rare occasion that the reader does turn to them, h/she usually searches for a passage in support of some specific and selective point and ignores the impact and accomplishment of the whole. Early on, the deliberate attention the author pays to the narrative and historical details of his texts, especially the Zimmernchronik, proves impressive and enlightening. The actors and locales, the grand historical narratives, as well as their minute details, colorfully pass review. In the end, they come together in a tapestry of constructed and real history that reached the desired state of coherence and logic based on what the writer had identified as the goal of the dynastic story. The Zimmersche Chronik, the monolith among southwest German genealogies, was, almost certainly, written by Graf Frohen von Zimmern (1519-1566? …