The Knight without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptations by Annegret Oehme (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Knight without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptations by Annegret Oehme
• Jonathan Seelye Martin

annegret oehme, The Knight without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptations. Explorations in Medieval Culture Vol. 17. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2022. Pp. viii, 189. isbn: 978–90–04–42547–7. $149.

Annegret Oehme’s The Knight without Boundaries is an exploration of an understudied and unique Yiddish-German Arthurian adaptation tradition that begins with Wirnt van Grafenberg’s Middle High German fair-unknown romance Wigalois (c. 1210/20) and continues all the way to the present day in the form of a 2011 comic book. What makes this tradition so fascinating and unique is its adaptation into Yiddish as Viduvilt (sixteenth century), a wildly successful text in its own right, which spawned further adaptations, including, via a 1699 Yiddish textbook, adaptations from Yiddish into German. Oehme’s monograph sets out to study this tradition through the lens of adaptation studies, a theoretical framework until now mostly applied to film but which Oehme convincingly shows is also highly useful for understanding the medieval process of artistic creation and inspiration. An important aspect of this theory is that it does not valorize the ‘original,’ either as an ideal from which all subsequent works depart or as a starting point for recipients. Instead, all works within the tradition inform the audience’s reception of the others, and a recipient might first enter the tradition through a chronologically later work. Oehme is particularly insistent that Wigalois-Viduvilt represent a single transcultural adaptation tradition rather than separate Yiddish-Jewish and German traditions. Instead, the Wigalois-Viduvilt tradition shows Jewish interest in and engagement with the literature of the majority culture and, far more rare, German gentile interest in Jewish stories and literature, a fact which Oehme connects to the inherent adaptability of both the German Wigalois and the Yiddish Viduvilt.

True to her deemphasis on the original, Oehme’s first chapter uses an eighteenth-century adaptation, Ferdinand Roth’s German fairy tale Ammenmährchen, to expand on her integration of adaptation studies into medievalist frameworks such as ‘retelling’ [End Page 104] (Wiedererzählen). Her overview successfully shows the usefulness of this approach to discussion of medieval adaptation processes. In the next chapter, Oehme discusses Wigalois and demonstrates how it represents a generic experiment combining elements of the matters of Britain, France, and Rome. The various irritations caused by this experiment are, in Oehme’s reading, part of why it inspired so many adaptations, many of which return to a more classical Arthurian structure. Chapter Three turns to the first Yiddish adaptation, Viduvilt: Oehme convincingly demonstrates that the work should not be read simply as a ‘Jewish’ adaptation, but rather a playful, almost parodying reaction to Wigalois. Chapter Four discusses Johann Christoph Wagenseil’s adaptation of an adaptation of Viduvilt, Artis hof (1671), as part of a 1699 Yiddish textbook—this work enabled a new wave of adaptations, this time from Yiddish into German. Lastly, Oehme discusses the strange case of Gabein (1788/9), a (semi-) Yiddish Arthurian romance that does its best to marginalize King Arthur and the Arthurian court and replace them with realistic geography. Throughout all these chapters, Oehme points to adaptive trends and departures, and how these relate to the individual works.

Oehme’s work offers a significant contribution to the study of medieval adaptations, an important category in Arthurian and medieval literature more broadly. Oehme’s desire to present Wigalois-Viduvilt as an adaptation tradition rather than a series of deviations from the original results in a number of interesting connections across the various works that might otherwise have been missed. Moreover, her partial focus on Yiddish literature opens this fascinating tradition to scholars who do not know German or Yiddish. At times, however, the organization of especially the earlier chapters seems slightly haphazard, as discussions of other works sometimes swallow sections of a chapter without it always being immediately obvious why. Additionally, the printing of the Yiddish text in Hebrew characters limits the ability of non-Yiddish speakers to examine the original quotations, especially unfortunate for the Yiddish-German linguo-textual comparisons Oehme makes on page 127. Despite these issues, Oehme...