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Go to press.prinston.edu and use the code spring50. That's sp-r-i-n-g-50 at press.prinston.edu. This sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books. Hello and welcome back to New Books and German Studies, a podcast channel of the New Books Network.
I'm your host, Leah Greenberg. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Annika Uma about her book, The Night Without Boundaries, Yiddish and German Arthurian Legal Waste Adaptations, coming out this month with Brill. Welcome to the podcast and thank you so much for joining us, Annika. Thank you so much for having me.
So before we get started a little bit about our guest today, Annika Uma is currently an assistant professor in the German Studies Department at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her PhD in 2016 in German from Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill through the Carolina Duke graduate program in German studies. So we're both fellow graduates of this program. I'm very excited to say her research interests include medieval and early modern German and Yiddish literature and pre-modern cultural transfers within a German Jewish context.
Her publications on old Yiddish literature, early modern marriage treatises, and graphic novel have appeared in publications such as the German Quarterly, Ashkenas, Daphneus, and Arthurianna among other journals. Her short form monograph, he should have listened to his wife from DeGroiter in 2020, explores a female agency in Middle High German and Yiddish Arthurian romance. He has two books coming up, not just one. Medieval Jewish romance, a volume she's co-edited with Caroline Grünbaum and her monograph The Night Without Boundaries, Yiddish and German Arthurian Legal Adaptations, which as I mentioned is scheduled to come out this month.
So before we get into the meat of our discussion about today's book on it, I'd first like to ask you a bit about yourself. Could you tell us a little bit about what brought you to German studies, what brought you to medieval and early modern literature, what brought you to old Yiddish, what brought you to Seattle and to North Carolina as well? Thank you. Thank you for the kind introduction.
Yeah, I think getting to this point in my research was sort of a series of incidents really. I started my bachelor's at the Freight University in Berlin in journalism actually and Jewish studies as a minor, Bitcoin becoming a journalist later and I hated journalism. I hated the classes. It was just terrible.
And somebody told me, well, I mean, you could just do a bachelor's in German studies, right? That's the classic gateway for Germans to become journalists and work in media and I was like, okay, that sounds good. And I took an Arthurian class, an Arthurian literature that was just actually fascinating. The professor, I met again, right?
I was so excited about that literature. So real nerd, loving what he was teaching, he was like, these medieval texts are really fascinating. So I took more classes. One thing that the other in Jewish studies, I took Yiddish also out of interest, really no specific reason.
I was just like, yeah, Yiddish, I know some of your songs. I would love to take a Yiddish class. And then I was really at some point I decided to do my masters in medieval German literature. And I had this strange incident.
I remember, you know, where I was sitting. So the revelation at the library at the Freight University of Berlin working on a paper for actually a very traditional, like German text was, passivac, but somehow one of the articles I was a footnote on all the Yiddish literature. And I was like, what's all the Yiddish literature? When is all Yiddish literature?
Is this pre-19th century, even? And it just happened that at this point somebody was selling one of my colleagues or like fellow students was selling a book introduction to all the Yiddish literature. And I was like, yes, I need that book. So I read this book from cover to cover and it was really this revelation.
It was like this incident when you have the map and this is white spots, the undiscovered country, right on the map. I'm sorry if these are sort of almost colonialist metaphors. But for me, it's really, it's suddenly filled in a gap. We had no idea about, well, of course they are texts, sort of non-religious texts in the 1516, 17th century among Jews.
Why wouldn't there be? And just reading about them was a big revelation. And I started actually my path towards a dissertation with another text, the so-called love and adventure novel. It's a contested genre by the Gossback antiquity about two lovers falling in love, losing each other and at the end finding each other again.
It turned into a great, into an article that I'm so grateful for. But then I came across, well, Mira Wilt and he, yeah, we just had to spend several years together to get to know each other better and dislay to them too. Several articles and as I always say, one and a half books of short form monograph, right? Yeah.
So you've talked a little bit about what brought you then to this book project, but I wanted to go back to what you mentioned. You already knew some Yiddish songs. So how does a young Annemarie in Spicke will come to learn Yiddish songs? So I actually went after my abitua to Israel for a year.
I wanted to hear there in a house for Shawaza Vivers. And a lot of those people would still know some Yiddish. There were a lot of, for me, sort of European Jews. And they, of course, the Yiddish because just thought, well, you know German, right?
So you know Yiddish, but just honey because, well, there's a big gap between understanding Yiddish and understanding German. Not so much for the earlier stages, but perhaps we'll get into that later. But for modern Yiddish, there's a big difference. But so I knew some Yiddish music.
I was at some point also the choir leader for this house. We had Friday evening, so Shawaza togetherings and I played the guitar and conducted the choir in a very quirky, low-key way. But I mean, the T-Personic, the Yiddish song. So yeah, I liked the music and I like the sound of the language of Yiddish.
So that's why when I saw the Yiddish classes of, I thought, yeah, of course, let's take a Yiddish class. The Yiddish classes, however, were really interestingly conceptualized. I, we're probably going to talk about this later, but a part of my book is also a 1699 Yiddish teaching book by UN Klustaf Wehrnstein, the Protestant philosopher and orientalist at University of Numburg back in the days and, or at the South University of the University of Numburg. And he wrote a book that was mostly learning by doing, by translating Yiddish texts into German or the other way around.
People would learn. And that's why very much what's going on in early 2000s, Yiddish classes in Berlin, that we would just read the Yiddish for work or things like this and just make our way along those texts. So I, when I started learning Yiddish, I completely was missing some grammatical structures in this because it was just like German. So let's just together read it and figure out if a dictionary attend what the words mean.
So yeah, you do mention some of the important entanglements between German and Yiddish. And then you go further back looking at old Yiddish, which is also a very different arena than looking at more modern Yiddish texts. So could you maybe then lay out for us then and you mentioned how you came to your book project. What is the sort of thesis of your book?
What are the key stories and texts that you're working with and why are you talking about them together? Yeah, in order to explain the large pieces of the book, I should add one more thing. And that is that the Yiddish video world is actually based on a middle high German text. From around 1210 to 20, it's called Vigaloys, a high German authorian romance.
And the Yiddish text is an adaptation of that text. And from there, we have many adaptations. We have a really rich tradition of German Yiddish texts that go back and forth. At some point, the tradition gets mediated through this Yiddish textbook that I mentioned from the end of the 17th century, and creates this rich tradition of texts that inspire each other across a lot of boundaries, linguistic, temporal, religious cultural boundaries.
And the aim of the book is to show that we can't really understand these texts separately. We have to see them in the larger context without emphasizing a Jewish, a Christian, German tradition. Because first of all, those terms don't apply throughout the whole time. And they're just incredibly restrictive.
And I think that that's also what led me to this project, a little bit of frustration that the Yiddish text would be explored by some Jewish studies scholars barely by German studies and the other way around, of course. So I think in order to really understand this tradition, the fascination of Vigaloys or Vidugil, how he's called the Yiddish through, you know, more than 800 years, we need to see this as a shared story, as a shared narrative tradition in which people contribute at different times with very different intentions, consciously, unconsciously knowing about all adaptations, not knowing about more than one adaptation to this tradition, and then creating sort of a whole thing that goes back and forth. And that really shows that this quirky night co-feeder build is overcoming all these boundaries and restrictions and restrictions that we would expect, for example, from an author in night, if you're considering Arthur, also as a Christian figure, a Cianic figure. Yeah.
And so just to give some some temporal boundaries or put it in place exactly what time period we're talking about when we talk about the emergence of the Vigaloys story, can you give us a sense of when and where we first find these texts? So Vigaloys itself is debated. It uses some old French material, potentially, some people consider it actually an adaptation of it, some people say, oh, it's just using some elements from a null story, Lebelin Koonu. And basically early 13th century, we have this middle-high German author in Romans.
In general, early 13th century is a great time of 12th century for Arthurian stories in a German context. We have first old French stories and they make it quickly into middle-high German adaptations. So they have very popular at the court, you know, narrating Arthurian stories at this time. So Vigaloys, and we'll probably talk about Vigaloys a little bit more later, but Vigaloys itself is sort of classic in the sense of three entail.
But then there's already a big question and something that medievalists are used to early modernists. Then at some point, we have those 16th century menu scripts. We have three Yiddish menu scripts. So yeah, we're skipping 300 views here that clearly shown engagement is a Vigaloys adaptation.
There's no doubt about this. The question is what's in between? Is there anything in between? Did the adapter actually know Vigaloys?
Did the adapter know some of the prose adaptations of Vigaloys or other between texts? I think the question is that sometimes a little bit is not necessarily always fruitful to try to reconstruct what's in between. I think at this point, we have to accept Vigaloys adaptation and see, well, how do they interact and have Vigaloys as a reference? So we kind of course study line by line.
We can't study this as a line by line comparison, but we can look at sort of like general tendencies that are different and there's a lot of differences between Vigaloys. It's just left open. What happens and at what point does it happen? Is it really the, yeah, who creates the Vigaloys?
And as I said, we already have three menu scripts, which shows, okay, at some point, we have the story in Yiddish. We have the menu scripts that are likely from northern Italy, which is actually not a common for Yiddish at this point. But it's unclear how old the story of V2Wilt than really is. This adaptation, is it 100 years old?
Is it 200 years older? I think that's the most, that's the most, that's the most, it's sort of 200 years. Yeah, and then we have even in that sort of Vigaloys V2W tradition, a print from the late 17th century that actually gets adapted then into the CEDISH teaching book. And so the print itself is then already fascinating, almost more than the menu scripts.
Often enough, they are just folded into a Yiddish V2Wilt. Sometimes they're just referenced as such in scholarship of out differentiating but there's also quite some difference between the menu script and the print, the late 17th century print. So in all of this adaptation is a very key term and you also work with the framework of adaptation studies. So I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more also how you look critically at the terms adaptation, retelling, translation.
Yeah, that was I think one of the biggest issues I had been working on, this is what do I call those things? I can see there's a relationship between those texts but how do we call them? So at some point, I went down the rabbit hole reading a lot on translation, even Ben Yami, the translator, historic approaches to medieval Latin translations and in medieval German contexts, of course the words for retelling Vitacian or Vida Azzian are also central concepts, several scholars have worked on this. And eventually I realized that the word adaptation also German adaptation is something that just keeps popping up, even in the very strongly argued papers on no, translation is not the word to use for medieval studies, we cannot, we should use retelling or text it to the opposite.
It's interesting that people often go back to call those texts adaptations and not quite a lot of retelling or things like this. In the context of translations, it's of course slightly different. But then I realized that there's actually a whole adaptation theory. Fortunately, unfortunately it's a modern theory that came about through studying the relationship of books and movies.
So how do movies relate to books? And scholars develop the theory often considering one of the classic definitions, what the considering adaptation and extended deliberate re-visitation of a work of art, of a specific work of art. And that became sort of a working term that I found very useful. What I really like about the adaptation studies field is that, despite the mostly English studies people who do film book relations, it allows for reflections on a democratization of the field.
So without reconstructing, oh, what's the real? That's the book is of course the real deal, right? And then we have to movies and they are just, well, they are just movies, they're not as good. So it goes away from putting a value, a validation also on sort of the first part of an adaptation tradition.
And it also stresses that there can be different entry points. And we're probably talking later about the comic, there's a comic, a Vigaloy's comic. And the Vigaloy's comic really plays with the idea that people might have never heard about Vigaloy's entry to comic first and potentially then go and read the book. Or that they are scholars and nerds like me who are like, oh, there's a comic about Vigaloy's, that's so great.
I should read that and get to the comic, however, from, for example, the Vigaloy's from the 13th century. So we have different approaches and then we read the adaptations differently. So for a person who started with the comic and then reads the middle-high German text in translation, of course the reference point is a comic. For me, the reference point, even though I tried to work against this, but still the inherent reference point would then be the Vigaloy's text from the 13th century.
And adaptations and studies really stresses that, that there are different entry points into adaptation traditions that really form how an audience receives one text or the other. And in the field of young legal German studies and really German studies in its early forms, there was this urge for an original reconstructing through different manuscripts, the original of a text. And people have hence gone away from this for various reasons, often it's just futile. We just have to little information, but also because there are deliberate changes in manuscripts often enough that are not just mistakes.
We have mistakes, like a tired monk, a slate, it's dark, it's just on kind of well, you're making the same. But we also have deliberate changes, most famously in the Nibelung tradition, we have two different manuscripts that sort of play in different people for what a downfall of the Nibelung. And so when I saw adaptation studies and they approached it, I thought, oh, a lot of those things are actually fairly medieval or common in medieval studies. It's not stressing of that's the original, that's the first iteration, that's really the core iteration of a story.
And that's how I found adaptation studies fairly liberating. And also useful in just looking at those different texts, especially enough, I don't 100% know what is the exact reference. Sometimes I know, sometimes an author and an adapter tells us, it's like, oh, this is what I read. Sometimes we don't know, and then it's also hard to reconstruct the exact relationship.
And then going to one of the texts that serve as a jumping off point, then for later iterations is the Vianc, the Vianc, the story that you talk about in one of your early chapters. So I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about how this story deals with boundaries and the crossing of boundaries, the representation of Christian and non-Christian figures, for example. Yeah, Viga-Lois is a fascinating text that was first dismissed among early scholars for just being too strange, too weird. It has a lot of apocalyptic imagery.
So, well, I should say first, it's a classic author in the sense that we have one of King Arthur Snites of the table-round Viga-Lois who writes out on a quest on adventure, in this case he frees an enchanted kingdom and returns home now with a bright, convenient, and is later reinstated as king, or instead as king of his own kingdom. However, there's a whole second part, and I'll come to this in a second, that makes it a very strange text, but already some of early scholarships that this is so full, the vibe of not even religious imagery, but sort of magical, mystical images. This is just weird. Let's read another text.
And so that's one thing that clearly Viga-Lois does. He brings together strictly Christian religious and not strictly Christian religious imagery. I think when we have issues of seeing this in the text, we also have to ask ourselves, what sort of Christian concept do we have? And by this point, a lot of studies on also questioning, what's the medieval, quarterly god?
What's the medieval Christianity? It's not our sort of Protestant-ticed form of religion anymore. And I want to say, a struggle of the text with the boundaries between Christian imagery and general supernatural images initially, but then I went to Peru for the first time. And it was so interesting seeing religion in Peru.
That's so different for somebody who grew up in sort of, again, a Protestant-ticed universe in Germany. I was like, oh well, there are a lot of magical things that they're doing. I had our host, was very kind, and offered me sort of a blessing. I wanted to do something nice for me.
And so I got to, at a marketplace, hold a horse shoe, put my hand on the horse shoe. I was supposed to make a wish on this horse shoe. There were images of Mary. And the person who was giving the blessing basically took my hand with the horse shoe over incense and after the prayer to the Virgin Mary.
And I was like, oh wow, just wow, this was a mix of things that I don't know, my upbringing would have considered clearly not religious, and I think that are inherently Christian. So that helped me also approach this text differently and think like, well, maybe we put on those categories, this is supernatural, non-Christian, this is Christian, that just won the problem for the audience then, or maybe for the 19th century readers. So this is a big boundary that the text crosses further. As I said, it has a whole second part after the Gagiloy's happily is united with his sweetheart, formerly Damsel in distress, he has to be enchanted country.
Because another Lord, well, he's approached to help another Lord who is currently besieged as a whole battle. And the second half, or the last third of the text, is just epic battles that a lot of people don't consider authoritarian, not being part of third romances, medieval and other romances. That discussion was it added later, was it not? What can we do with that?
And interestingly, it's not just scholars who were confused by that, the early adapters were already in the video, where this whole battle epic battle section is completely cut in the early New High German Brins and adaptations, this is cut. So beyond sort of Vigaloys, beyond the end of cut, nobody really knew what to do with that. But I actually argued in the book that it's a fascinating section of the book in which there aren't actually experiments with the boundaries of other in romance and brings in different traditions. So already the ages had sort of ideas of different story traditions.
Or in the 12th century, we have an old French poet talking about basically one story box, stories pertaining to antiquity, one starts pertaining to King Arthur and his knights, and one pertaining to Charlemagne and Charlemagne fights against the heathens. And so what the Daz is actually used the Arthurian story and bring in these antiquity stories and the stories concerning Charlemagne and Charlemagne and the heathens. And so I considered a huge literary experiment that weren't constructed, again didn't go down well apparently with audiences. I mean the text was very popular Vigaloys itself, I've played audiences already sort of 1560 century, that said, no, let's just make it a straightforward authoritarian, this is strange, let's just cut it.
But so he also plays with literary expectations, with literary traditions, by bringing in an anasones, for example, classic antiquity features or heathons, very quarterly heathons. This is something that we often associate with, what's from the Echene Vass, Wilhelm, the heathens that are mirrored according to the quarterly sort of Christian knights. And so we have all of this, however, in an Arthurian romance here. So he's also crossing boundaries from sort of a neurological way and just bringing in different story traditions.
So also when you talk about the Yiddish version of this text, the beautiful story, you also talk about how it sometimes subverts our expectations of a text that engages with religious topics. So I was wondering if you could tell us also a bit more about how the beautiful story goes beyond an engagement with Jewish topics and why it's important to think about it beyond Christian Jewish divide. Yeah, thank you. This is a great question.
This is actually how I got started on this whole topic of it interested because a lot of scholarship focuses and rightly so on the question that you just asked, how are Christian elements dealt with in this text? This is presumably for Jewish audience, although we can also debate this a little bit because they're all the so close to German that if it's read out, people would understand it without issues of German speaker. So there's also a little bit of debate here. But if you assume for moments a Jewish audience, as a target audience, then that's a good question to ask.
How do you get away from this immense Christian imagery and we have that we have even got acting on behalf of legaloids within the events of the legaloids. And he's praying as Christian, really inherited Christian imagery. So something needs to happen on the way to the Jewish audience. And these were the questions that were first asked in scholarship.
And one of the things that we certainly see is this so-called de-christianization. And we have a huge, huge elements. But what I found really interesting when I read scholarship and read text, I thought, hmm, but things like Pentecost, for example, remain in the text. Pentecost is of course the Feast of the Holy Spirit.
One of the, especially in the latest, core Christian events on the calendar. Why is this in a Jewish text? Why would this remain in a behind the text with a Jewish audience in mind? And one of the reasons that I think is that Pentecost is just a huge quarterly feast.
So it's just been synonymous for, okay, there's a party at the court going on. And it's a big one. And it's a long one. You might have people being knighted in the context of Pentecost celebrations.
But certainly it's a big court date. It's a big court feasting date. So when we see this, we assume that the Jewish audience was able to decipher that and said, oh Pentecost, yeah, of course that means at King Arthur's Court, there was a huge party going on. Or this is the season of the stability of choifleness of quarterly joy.
So this is one of the things that is interesting then to look at me and think, oh, why are there some Christian elements left in that? Because it assumes some sort of familiarity if we take this further with the material or with the expectations of the material. And otherwise the text is just not really concerned with the religious elements that the Galois is concerned with. It turns out more into a actually funny text.
Sometimes I get actually frustrated by the concept of looking for Jewish and Christian elements in the text. Because when I started working on this project and read vidovial, I thought, hey, the big change here is that suddenly women are put in important positions of power. And that's what my first, oh, my first small book was about the women in vidovial. And it's just so in your face how the generals are inverted and changed.
But at the same time, it was almost completely ignored in scholarship. And I mean, I'm able also to do what I'm doing because that has been scholarship, right? So I'm deeply indebted to the people who've worked on vidovial to make it more popular and already talking about the whole Christian Jewish discussions. But I was frustrated that somehow this whole clear change in the storytelling was lost in discussions because we were so focused on sort of throwing those Christian Jewish German boundaries, which is one thing that I really tried to work against by deciding to put in my book different texts from different religious culture, different linguistic, different language backgrounds.
So I'm sorry that I almost criticized the point of question. So I just want to make a point that it is a good and it's an important question as long as it doesn't get or as long as it doesn't vary the actual text and the actual text tradition and seeing like, oh, well, let's just look at the text. And here's where adaptation studies comes in in sort of like freeing us to look at an artwork also as the artwork itself as the adaptation. So this is three part-time concept of adaptation as sort of a reiteration of a text as an artwork itself and as sort of like a future entrance point in adaptation studies.
And I really like especially in the world also stressing this stepping back for a moment and really seeing the text as the text itself. What happens here in the story line? How are women constructed? How is the night constructed before just speaking?
Okay, in order to say adaptation for a Yiddish speaking audience, how is it different then the text before it? And you bring up the issue of not just adaptations of stories but also of reception and different contexts of retelling. And so in your fourth chapter when you talk about Johann Christoph Rangzell, that's another example of a new context in the late 17th century of retelling Yiddish material. So I was wondering if you could tell us more about what that context is in terms of the discourses on language and nationalism in this time and why was this author even engaging with Yiddish material?
Yeah, that's a great question. Vamshal actually does not think that Yiddish is a great language. He doesn't even consider it a language. So great motivation to write a Yiddish teaching book.
He considers it better man. There's some very harsh quotes in the text in Vamshal. Well, the Jews have done to good German in order sort of to get to Yiddish. And so it's a very strange place to find Yiddish author in a romance.
Also it's a very long text. But basically what Vamshal does, as I mentioned earlier, he has a textbook in which he gives a very brief introduction to the structure of Yiddish. An extremely long introduction considering or concerning his thoughts about Yiddish, about German, his ideas of language. And then has a long list of exercises, really translation exercises.
They also tell moody stories, legal texts. It's incredibly strange mix of texts and that Yiddish, that the middle of this India is fascinating and strange. Vamshal also offers us an introduction and that goes a little bit in your direction of national traditions because in his introduction to Vito build, he explains to his audience who likely did not know Arthur at this point. So I should have said King Arthur's stories were not really popular in 16th, 17th century, early 18th century Germany.
And so he explains, so there's this King Arthur bear with me for a second, the English belief in them. They also think he comes back at some point. How crazy is that? But that's their story tradition.
And with Germans, we have heroic epics, we have Dichry von Bärne, we have the big heroes around Charlemagne and everybody. This is our story tradition. Now, coming to choose. And the choose had this funny idea of mixing them together and created this Arthur story.
And he explains actually the existence of some fantastic literature that, well, we know were part of the medieval and middle-life German tradition with the existence of the English authoring story. So he doesn't want to know about authoring stories, has no idea about bums, I have to say, big alloys. But he explains whether choose, talk to those authoring stories and mixed in our heroic epics. And this is what we get, a really quirky story, interesting, fascinating.
He doesn't really come fascinating. But he says, yeah, so here we are. I think he also just had some fun reading the text because part of his argument in the book is that, yeah, the text can also be quite interesting. They're not, even though he doesn't like the language itself, but he says, you know, some of them are just really entertaining to read.
And I think that's where the Bible falls in. But as I said, it's not just a favorite language, again, not even a language for him, and not considered a language for a long time. But he proves great. He proves Vamsa.
I love he proves. He comes out of the tradition of the humanist movement, the Christian humanist movement with their goal, advances to the sources, let's learn he proves. And Yiddish, basically for Vamsa, it's just a gateway to he proves. There's some other reasons, also, sort of one of his secondary audiences I actually choose because he said, well, they should learn good German, but nobody's taking care of that.
So here's my book. So if you're, you're speaking to you might as well just read my book to learn proper German, but his main audience were German-speaking Christians interested ultimately in learning Hebrew. And that brings me to your fifth chapter where you talk about another text, which is the Gavain story. And I believe you've published on this in Arthur Jana.
And I want you to maybe tell me a bit as someone who doesn't work with medieval and early modern materials, what are some of the challenges and perhaps also the rewards of working with medieval source materials when you don't have perhaps a complete text, for example? Thank you. Yeah, the Gavain is really something that I'm proud of because it's a fairly forgotten text. It's in the appendix to an early 20th century collection of vidogild stories.
And it's just such a strange and fascinating author in text that I was very happy that I got the chance to translate it into English. This is an art in an author, Yana, with some introduction to it, I know, some advertisement. But I'm really, I feel like here I was actually doing a service to this tradition and to also our discipline. I mean, yeah, for class, we did a very strange author in text, going to find this article teach Gavain.
More people need to know Gavain and work on this very strange text with limitations, they're working on it as you hinted, because we actually do not have the Yiddish text. Some people would say Yiddish question mark because it's a strange text. The language is completely strange. We know it was printed in Hebrew letters, but it's preserved only in transliteration.
We have, yeah, we can trace a little bit the text in the text history, but we're incredibly limited in accessing the text. There's the front page, and I think the last page of the text actually also preserved as a copy in the journal, but mostly we have this transliterated text of something that doesn't even look like Yiddish, or that just looks strange. It's also not German. Yeah, so it's hard to deal with a text when you can't even identify its language, let alone actually have the source attend.
So there are always limitations in how to interpret it, what context is it from? There are some theories aligning it with a piattist movement that also impacted the Jews of the 18th century, but it leaves us with more questions to text really that we have answers. At the same time, it is actually fascinatingly dedicated to Depression King Frederick Wilhen II, and it's a really Prussian text somehow, so it includes chords, ceremonial that you would find in Prussia. It follows up on the fascination with China after time.
Yeah, I should have said, so Gabbine is actually the Gabbine, so it's a beautiful story, but it focuses a little bit more on the story, like concerning Peter Wilt's father, Gabbine, the most famous of all night. The recent Green Knight movie with Dave Patel, that's Gabbine for you. So Gabbine, most famous of Arthur Knites, is probably in a competition with Lancelot, but famous. He's a father, and here we have a text where Gabbine travels through many countries, Russia, he visits Sardinia, and ends up in China, and ultimately actually becomes the new emperor of China.
When I read it the first time, I was like, what just happened? And I was also very excited for having found such a spectacular text. So we have an Arthur Knites in a giddish question mark text, who becomes the emperor of China. So many amazing things basically that haven't already.
But it's really hard to reconstruct the actual context, are there other sources for this text? So in my field we work with a lot of question marks, right? And one way to work with that is just having reference texts. And we say like, okay, I don't know how they really relate it, but this is sort of my big reference, because at some point they're related or somehow they're related.
I cannot tell you exactly how, but we do this clearly related to Gabbine. I cannot give you all the stages, the steps in between. But sometimes this is also freeing, because it really allows you to focus on the text as that without considering all the time, you know, how is the model in this section, or how does the model text approach this question? So it's also sometimes really freeing.
Sometimes when I hear colleagues who are really dealing with contemporary authors who then publish new things and these texts or these new publications basically destroy early scholarly articles that were written about living contemporaneous authors or contemporary authors. I think like, okay, yeah, I usually I don't even have a name for authorship. So it's nice to not have that problem. You mentioned also how you encourage the teaching of this text that's a bit less known.
And I was wondering if you could also tell us a bit about how you bring your work from this book into your teaching and bringing both medieval and early modern German literature with old-teacher literature and showing their entanglements. Yeah, I have to do another advertisement. I'm sorry, there's actually an MLA book coming out, one of the great MLA teaching series on teaching the Arthurian tradition. And I wrote an article for that collection on how to teach self-de-Jewish tradition and with some ideas how to teach the Giddish to keep your text.
I think Gabbine is just great because it's different, it's strange. It's actually a unique text that it's okay if students don't know everything surrounding the Arthurian tradition or something like this because well, we are long way from the medieval author and romances by this point also in the way that text is constructed. And I like it as a short text, it's I think it's 12 pages in the appendix to this 20th century collection. So it's a very short text.
You can quickly read the whole text and it ties into ideas of colonialism, this sort of idea, expansion, exorcism, sort of there's a big fascination and sort of exorcising of China as a now new basically fantastic realm for this audience, for 18th century audience. And so the text lends itself very well to bring Arthur into contemporary discussions of what two stories don't mean to us, how do stories create otherness, identity represent outside of other groups, how can we also bring in discussions about post colonialism, diversity into our reading of texts that are older that are not from our times. And yeah, so I like particularly teaching this short text, but I also try of course in my King Arthur class to bring in for example BidoVille or there's a he protects sometimes called an anti-author in romance, a medieval Hebrew author of recommend that he has more of the downfall of author in realm. But things like this just to show my students an alternative narrative to maturity culture, storytelling and to show well somehow the story was so fascinating that a lot of different groups interacted with it and made it their own and thought it's worth continuing to tell it and and listen to it.
Fascinating and I imagine you're able to do this at different levels of language and undergraduate and graduate students. Yeah, exactly. And sometimes in English translation, I mean almost exclusively English translation, but yeah, it's of course a very different tradition in the graduate's I mean on King Arthur and in other credits I mean although I mean most of my graduate students are not medievalists right or don't take that many medieval classes so it's also nice that regard that they don't bring too much expectation or understanding to the table and have sort of like a very free approach to material. Wonderful.
Well, I would want to take one of your classes. So one of my final questions then is what are you working on next now that you've finished this big project? What's speaking your curiosity, anything in the works right now? Thank you.
That's a great question. I was a little bit afraid, you know, letting go of VDovilt. There's so many VDovilt, VGALO adaptations, it's a whole universe and we spend so much time with each other that I was a little bit scared, you know, leaving this behind and thinking what's next. And just through rereading some all the British texts preparing about conference presentations and other events I got really interested in the construction of otherness.
A classic topic in early modern medieval German literature studies but yeah I noticed that of course we don't have so much the heath, well, so in the Christian texts we often have like the heathons as the others. The Jews as sort of like complicated others and there's a whole discourse around them. The Jewish texts or the other texts that I've been looking at don't really have that so much but they have often one fantastic creature that combines all sort of like otherness attributes. So I really got interested in that and I think this is going to shape up to sort of like a project of otherness in these texts.
In addition to that the for example the great Bovubu, which in itself is part of a long adaptation tradition deals a lot with race and otherness and if you know medieval studies maybe you know that there's currently or for the past few years a huge increase in discussing race and racism in medieval studies can be called a race, can be called a racism when we talk about medieval literature and there's a big push to use racism in the context of these medieval studies by consider of sort of like physical and physical othering also in the power discourse and I noticed that the audiotex are actually maybe not as inclusive as one might think or as we often falsely assume from well it's a minority culture right there tolerant. They are happy to include people from far away that look very different and here I found some texts now that are fairly dismissive of people they reference as plague that they also create as like others often in the context of Islam and this is in the context of medieval, not medieval, early modern ascanas. So I think we have different regions where this discourse would be quite different but so I've been starting to slowly get into more research on the construction of race and otherness in these audiotex and to see sort of like how is sort of the identity that of the hero of shape and created and what is it that it's created against and I think this will probably also turn into a huge project of probably more than a book but I'm very excited I'm so at the beginning of new research and I feel really the enthusiasm of going into completely new and very different area of all the literature and its interactions with the German literature. Fascinating well I can't wait to see the many articles and conference papers and eventually perhaps book that will come out of this so thank you so so much for sharing with us about your newest book and about your research today and also about your teaching and I wish you all the best luck in the future and look forward to talking to you soon.
Thank you so much.