Chapter 11 - Hermeneutics and the Medieval Horizon

Summary

In 1980, Paul Zumthor published Parler du moyen age, an elegant little book on the state of the discipline and the task of the medievalist, tracing a history of medieval studies from its pre-war romanticism and positivism up to Zumthor’s own view from the horizon of the late 1970s. Through this retrospective, Zumthor in part recounts the transformation of the field by medievalists like Auerbach, Curtius, and Spitzer, but also positions himself as a kind of bridge between that generation of medievalists whose most influential works came out in the years immediately following WWII and the work of medievalists today, with the rise of post-structuralism, for instance, breaking in between. One of the central concerns of the book is precisely this movement between eras, not only between postwar medievalism and its romantic heritage, but also between the present moment of a reader and the objects of the past being read. Such concerns with interpretation across historical distance have a long and crucial history in the field of hermeneutics, which reached its peak between the 1960s and 1980s. Following Zumthor’s lead, therefore, this chapter will look backwards, performing a genealogy of philosophical and literary hermeneutics that traces Zumthor’s engagement with this tradition – particularly his engagement with Hans Robert Jauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and his friend Roland Barthes – and attends to the place of the medieval in it.