Reading That Transforms

Nearly ninety years ago, in an intriguing study entitled Das Kultur-problem des Minnesangs, Eduard Wechssler hypothesized a connection between literacy and the subjective and lyrical expression of courtly literature. ¹ He noted similarities between the mystical, “genetic psychology of individualism” and the new, emotional vernacular experiments probing, not the typical, but the individual life of the soul. As Wechssler saw it, the introspective method (along with the topos on the necessity of the knowledge of letters) leads to psychological analysis and a search for meaning within the inner life of the soul (1.110-12). Much of the German philologist’s thesis was corroborated by penetrating studies published in the 1970s and 1980s: Chenu, Morris, Clanchy, Ong, Bumke, Illich, and Sanders illustrated and reinforced these and related essential arguments. ² More recently, the research of Rigg, Meale, Bartlett, Bell, Riddy, Lerer, and Justice on the subject of medieval literacy and reading practices, particularly in the vernacular, have amplified greatly our understanding of the problems and issues. ³ The notion that introspection is a concomitant of literacy perhaps represents just knotty speculation awaiting demonstration and proof vi a experiment. But the presumed connection between reading and interiorization both points to our modern world of democracy and individual freedom, and harmonizes quite well with what certain key episodes in twelfth-century romance reveal.