2 - Redefining the exemplum: narrative, ideology, and subjectivity

Summary

In his excellent study of Handlyng Synne, Fritz Kemmler astutely diagnoses a problem that has hampered all modern attempts to define the exemplum. Medieval discussions of the exemplum were much more interested in its function than its form. This often neglected fact demonstrates two things: medieval culture was keenly interested in using narrative, but it was less interested in discussing it. While it recognized narrative form had ideological functions, such recognitions remained largely implicit. It clearly valued the ideological utility of the exemplum, but it gives us little explicit guidance as to what it considered that utility to be.

Kemmler's solution to this problem is to set the formal aside, and to concentrate on the empirical totality of an exemplum's functions from its immediate rhetorical function in the particular text in which it appears, to the text's immediate social uses, to its broader Sitz im Leben, “the communicative situation in a social and cultural context.” That solution will not work for this study, which is concerned with the exemplum's transmission from Latin to the vernacular, and indeed, with its power to produce the very Sitz im Leben in which it functions. Without some notion of its formal specificity, there will be no basis on which to assess the obvious changes in its social and cultural functions. Nevertheless, Kemmler's diagnosis remains useful, for it reminds us how historically specific the opposition between the formal and the functional actually is.