Tierische Häute – Menschliche Träger : Mensch-Tier-Analogien über die materielle Sachkultur anhand ausgewählter Beispiele im Werk Wolframs von Eschenbach

Abstract

By covering the body with animal skin, the fundamental differences between human and animals can change. Wearing the fur of a wild animal, such as a bear, is generally seen as a sign of strength; can wearing luxurious pelts consequently be understood in the same way? The discrepancy between nature and culture is obvious. Pelt, on the one hand, is a sign of a fully established cultural process, but nevertheless it is the skin of a beast which the fictional protagonists of the courtly society wear. The central question of this article is how the motif of wearing animal skin, and especially pelt, is used in a literary text. Can the apparent difference between roughly tanned animal skin and costly pelts be more than a status symbol? The article discusses the oscillation between humans and animals by means of wearing fur or pelt in the late medieval tale Aristoteles und Phyllis. Also, to consider human-animal discourse more generally, the ambiguity of the Middle High German term vel will be discussed by the example of passages of pelt wearing figures in the work of Wolfram von Eschenbach.

Keywords

• material culture
• human animal studies
• Middle High German Literature
• Wolfram von Eschenbach
• Parzival
• pelt