Knight without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptations

Annegret Oehme, Ph.D. (2016), is an Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Washington. She has published articles on pre-modern German and Yiddish literature in The German Quarterly, Ashkenaz, Daphnis, and Arthuriana, and a short monograph (“He Should Have Listened to His Wife.” The Construction of Women’s Roles in German and Yiddish Pre-modern Wigalois Adaptations [De Gruyter, 2020]).

• AcknowledgmentsList of FiguresIntroduction1 Adapting Wigalois2 The Return of Wigalois: Disentangling a Shared Tradition3 A Tradition Revisited: Contemporary Research4 The Knight without Boundaries: Reconnecting the Disentangled1 From Arthurian Romance to Fairy Tale: Concepts of Adaptation in Ammenmährchen and Beyond1 Retelling, Transforming, and Transferring Medieval Literature2 Ammenmährchen as Adaptation3 Storytelling within the Wigalois/Viduvilt Tradition4 Conclusion2 Wigalois: The Heterogeneous Hero and His Narrative World1 God and Fortuna’s Chosen One2 Between Heathendom and Sorcery3 Intertextual Hero(in)es4 Conclusion3 Viduvilt: The Arthurian Knight Who Speaks Yiddish1 Viduvilt’s Origins, Humor, and Alterations2 Viduvilt as a “Jewish Text”3 May God Send the Messiah: Religion and Religious Forces in Viduvilt4 Knighthood and the Jewish Imagination5 Knighthood in a Nutshell: The Sketch in Cod. Hebr. 2556 Arthurian and Anti-Arthurian Adaptations7 Conclusion4 Language Matters: Crossing Linguistic and Ethnocultural Borders in a Seventeenth-Century Yiddish Textbook1 Wagenseil’s Textbook: Mission, Audience, and Language Philosophy2 Wagenseil’s Artis hof Adaptation as Transcultural Narrative3 Wagenseil’s Artis hof as Translational Union4 Adaptation and Power5 Conclusion5 An Arthurian Knight on the Chinese Imperial Throne: Navigating Divine Providence and Cosmopolitan Identity in Gabein (1788/1789)1 Is That Yiddish?! Text and Edition of Gabein2 Nowhere in Camelot: Abandoning the Arthurian Realm3 Eastwards: Familiarity and Otherness in the Depiction of China4 The Pious Hero5 Gabein’s Prayers and Christian Theology6 The Chinese Rites Controversy7 A Jewish Cosmopolite?8 ConclusionEpilogueBibliographyIndex

"The strength of the book lies in its application of newer directions in narratology across the centuries. In this regard it is a welcome contribution to the fields of German and Yiddish literature, medieval studies, and transmedial theory." - Adam Oberlin, Princeton University, in: The Medieval Review, 23.10.19