Walker Horsfall
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Medieval German Arthurian literature is certainly not short on references to science and natural philosophy: Book XIV of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival for instance devotes 30 lines to delineating a list of important precious stones. However, the inclusion of contemporary science in this body of literature has predominantly been studied at the level of content, as information provided at an intra- or extradiegetic level. This paper will suggest that science and natural philosophy can also inform the formal structure of these narratives. It argues that the episodic structure of Wirnt von Gravenberg’s Wigalois parallels observational astronomy; the order and nature of the events in the romance appears to mirror the movement of the sun through the heavens, with the hero encountering monsters and obstacles that resemble major constellations, asterisms, or celestial phenomena. Moreover, Wigalois does not seem to be the only text in the Middle High German corpus to feature this type of relationship between astronomy and episodic adventures, with select examples explored from Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein and Heinrich von dem Türlin’s Diu Crône. With such detailed astronomical material so deeply imbedded into the narratives, important questions arise about the high level of education and scientific literacy present in a courtly audience, about medieval authors’ expectation of such, and about the possibility of multiple intended “audiences” within a given courtly context.